Less rice for your labor-value - The Wobbly World of Miftah's Words

...and more exploitation for your location!

Motherfucking Website

You probably build websites and think your shit is special. You think your 13 megabyte parallax-ative home page is going to get you some fucking Awwward banner you can glue to the top corner of your site. You think your 40-pound jQuery file and 83 polyfills give IE7 a boner because it finally has box-shadow. Wrong, motherfucker. Let me describe your perfect-ass website:

This is a modern motherfucking website.

Zero of the bullshit.

Origin Stories: Plantations, Computers, and Industrial Control

The proto-Taylorist methods of worker control Charles Babbage encoded into his calculating engines have origins in plantation management.

What is Low-tech Magazine?

Low-tech Magazine underscores the potential of past and often forgotten technologies and how they can inform sustainable energy practices.

Digital Topology & Economic Power

The autonomous file, once the basic unit of user agency in personal computing, was first hollowed out through proprietary formats and data internalization, then abolished entirely by cloud platforms, relocating control toward incumbents at each stage. Enclosure succeeds not by offering users less, but by bundling genuine capability gains with topological restructuring, so that the user cannot accept the improvement without accepting the new relationship of power.

Cyber-Marx

In this highly readable and thought-provoking work, Nick Dyer-Witheford assesses the relevance of Marxism in our time and demonstrates how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter. Dyer-Witheford maps the dynamics of modern capitalism, showing how capital depends for its operations not just on exploitation in the immediate workplace, but on the continuous integration of a whole series of social sites and activities, from public health and maternity to natural resource allocation and the geographical reorganization of labor power. He also shows how these sites and activities may become focal points of subversion and insurgency, as new means of communication vital for the smooth flow of capital also permit otherwise isolated and dispersed points of resistance to connect and combine with one another. Cutting through the smokescreen of high-tech propaganda, Dyer-Witheford predicts the advent of a reinvented, "autonomist" Marxism that will rediscover the possibility of a collective, communist transformation of society. Refuting the utopian promises of the information revolution, he discloses the real potentialities for a new social order in the form of a twenty-first-century communism based on the common sharing of wealth.

Inside Facebook's African Sweatshop

Workers in the Nairobi office are among the lowest-paid workers for the platform anywhere in the world

Exclusive: The $2 Per Hour Workers Who Made ChatGPT Safer

A TIME investigation reveals the difficult conditions faced by the workers who made ChatGPT possible

Dispute over fate of Kenyan workers who saw Meta AI glasses films

Meta and its subcontractor disagree over why over 1000 Kenya-based workers were made redundant.

‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley

The industry’s liberal reputation is misleading. Its reactionary tendencies – celebrating wealth, power and traditional masculinity – have been clear since the dotcom mania of the 1990s

Confronting Data Centers, Deep-Sea Cables, and Colonial Legacies in the South Pacific - Data & Society

Tropical paradise. Smiling faces. This is the fantasy Fiji has successfully sold to the world. And as I drive along the West Coast of Viti Levu, the archipelago’s largest island, the scenery does indeed resemble a tourist advertisement: crystal-blue ocean water, white sandy beaches, and lush tropical forests hugging the shoreline. But Fiji is more than  breathtaking landscapes. While most people are aware of the rapid rise of data centers in the US and Europe, the creeping influence of tech giants like Google and Starklink can be seen and felt here, too.