Unions need to aggregate workers and build worker power and leverage it by the strength of numbers, while what we do is more like a a work of networking, curation, education, communication because unions are very bad at speaking to tech workers. The tech sector, when the CEO is crying because he has to let go 30% of the workforce, everybody's like, poor poor guy. He had to make a tough decision and you need me to do that. So that needs to be corrected. Anti corporate sentiment is definitely not enough. You can be anti corporate and still kind of like a shitbag. The biggest problem with the free software movement for many years was that they wanted to liberate software for the sake of it. You know, like free software is intrinsically better than proprietary software and good things are gonna come out of it. Like,

like, socially structure your organization? In an absence of structure, in an absence of authoritarian power, if you just create a void, that void is gonna be filled by stuff you probably don't like. Right? It's like fermentation, like, if you just put a carrot on the table and wait, mold is gonna grow in it. Not good stuff.

I am currently based in Berlin. I'm originally Italian, and, I've been a software developer for many years. Couple three years ago, I decided to quit the for profit startup environment here in Berlin because I never developed software that was useful for anything, or even used, like, most of it. You know? The the startup goes bankrupt. It's over. That's it. I've been the researcher on the social harm of AI recommender systems in a group called AI Forensics. In between, I also tried to start my cooperative. Didn't work out for personal reasons, so we didn't really start before getting to a bad point. Then I decided to start my new career. Let's say, career maybe is a big big word, but, like, turn my ability the abilities and skills that I gained through political organizing into something more professional. So I give I support basically political organizations or associations, collectives, micro businesses, cooperatives eventually. For now, I don't have any cooperative client, but that's my ambition to work better in short, but that means many things. I do facilitation. I do leadership training. I do process design. So I I take care of everything they need to be more effective at what they do. I also do no code software development. I'm also open to do proper software development. But more more often than not, we don't need new software. That's another thing why I left the industry. I'm like, there's enough software for most things that's not the bottleneck in most cases. That's why I started this new job that is now my current profession. Yeah.

is an international organization that does support the organization labor organization within the tech sector and political activities within the tech sector. So within the tech industry, mostly, but also from the outside in the sense of, like, cooperative spaces or, like, political initiatives that are related to technology at large. The main core focus has been over the years raising the amount of tech workers that are part of a union. This means different things in different context. So each local chapter, we have many spread over the world, has different strategies to to achieve this, but that's the, let's say, the the main goal usually. And we have started in 2014, in The USA. I wasn't there. I'm I've been for two weeks in The USA. That was enough. And since then, we had arguably, a lot of success. Obviously, we cannot claim that the whole tech workers movement is our creation, but a lot of people involved in TWC went on to build very meaningful, unions or projects, initiatives, sometimes their own strand of like, some became researchers, some became more, let's say, you proper union organizers within unions or full time employees of unions. And a lot of the TWC people if you know the names and you read the news of union efforts, especially in The US, you read the names. It's like all people that, attended TWC events. More likely, they were organizers of local chapters or heavily involved in local chapters. Yeah. This is the main idea, let's say.

It's It is something else. Yes. We use the term alt labor that is not something we invented. It's the idea that traditional unions are not necessarily fit to the challenges of a faster labor market of a you know, the the current conditions. So they need to be integrated with different kind of activities. And this when we talk about unions, we are talking about it in the Anglo Saxons sense of any collective of workers. So bureaucratic big unions with legally recognized and everything, but also more anarchistic grassroots unions are models that were born in a different time and were perfectly fit. They actually they won a lot, but now they need to be integrated with something more, especially in the tech sector that didn't exist when these models were born. So alt labor is the umbrella term for anybody trying to fit into this into this situation. And so we see ourselves as complementary to unions in the sense that we work with them, in in local context more often than not. But our role, our function within the ecosystem is different. Like, the unions need to aggregate workers and build worker power and leverage it by the strength of numbers, while what we do is more like a a work of networking, curation, education, communication because unions are very bad at speaking to tech workers, like, especially in Europe. In The US, it's getting better. But in Europe, they clearly speak different languages, so we try to bridge this with giving training to union organizers that maybe factory workers until the other day, and now they need to speak about quality assurance, testers, tech support, or the difference between a and a software developer. This kind of stuff. It's critical if you're speaking to a tech worker, but it's not obvious if you are not the with that background. So we do this kind of stuff. We do also like, most of what we do is not target towards unions, target toward the workers. So we educate workers on how to form a union in their legal framework or also, like, in practice, how to speak to your coworkers because this is not something you learn by experience if you are in the tech sector. Like, I always say, like, if you are a dockworker, you're a team. It's your first job. You you you go, you see all these bulky men that when the manager comes and says, I have to do this. I'm sorry, but the superior, they're like, okay. We go on strike. Fuck you. They start burning shit. You know? It's this attitude. Then when you are 18, you just imitate that, and you don't need to do much. In the tech sector, when, the CEO is crying because it has to, like, go 30% of the workforce, everybody's like, poor poor guy. He had to make a tough decision, and you imitate that. So that needs to be corrected. Right. Practical, emotional, psychological, and cultural, and political education to overcome these distorted, work culture. Yeah.

legal terms, stuff you have to do, and you don't like, you have taxes and you have unions, and they are at least for me, they were the beginning when I was younger, they were kinda in the same universe of adult stuff I don't understand because I didn't have any example of, you know, my parents, for example, or any coworker or colleague in a university going through a unionization process that is not just legal stuff. It means eating and drinking with your friends when you win a majority vote in, in The USA, for example. It means, you know, a lot of social interaction. It means, you know, one passionate speech from the introverted guy that found, you know, the strength to speak out under the abuse of the manager, whatever. Like, these kind of experiences are not part of your path exactly if you go through university. But even it's something that is lost, but it's becoming common again to I I see new generations, especially outside of tech universities, becoming more open to this kind of narrative. It's not erased anymore the idea of collective action within the workplace. It's something that in mainstream media is more present in the last five to eight years, I would say, especially American media.

So it depend like, it's hard to make general, you know, reasoning about this because each legal context is very different, and this also translates with very different practices on the ground on how to start unionization. Like, in the The US, it's completely different than than in Yeah. In Italy, for example. But I would say that any spark of collective action needs to start with looking your colleagues in the face, take the risk of expressing this content or collecting this content from them, and build from there. Like, no union starts without that. If you have a bureaucratic union coming in, but there there's no, you know, sense of commonality or, like, shared problems, it doesn't or shared solidarity doesn't go anywhere. And solidarity is especially the Americans use it a lot in this very I don't know. For me, it's very unrelatable, but at the same time, it's, you know, it's the substance on which all all of this is built and needs to start being experienced directly. And you start this with conversations with your coworkers. Everything starts there, especially conversations about the fact that things are going a certain way because there's a vertical structure of command, and they can go in a different way if we start an initiative of some kind. That's for me that that's the the root of any of any change anywhere, but especially in the workplace. The tech sector is not that different in this regard. The difference is that it's very alien to most people, as we just said, that often don't work in the same physical space. That's another major problem. Like, remote work, I'm not against it, obviously, even though there are some union organizers that are like, we should fight remote work because it makes you that you're a fucking idiot. Like, no worker will come behind such a lot. Right? Let's embrace it. It's not making things easier, but we need to embrace remote work. Otherwise, we sound the same as managers. But it does pose us challenges. So you need to learn how to bring them for example, these these are new practices. You need to understand how to smoothly bring them outside the digital platform not controlled by the company. Because if you discuss this stuff on Slack, you're fucked immediately. They're gonna find out because most of the chat are surveilled, especially if they think that there's there are unionization efforts ongoing. So you need to invite them to maybe Telegram group or a signal group with an excuse that makes sense or without exposing. This is like a kind of very detailed practice that it's developing these years because fifteen years ago, this was the case for a very small portion of the workforce.

in The USA, I would say most of the chapters did huge efforts of networking ongoing struggles. That was the main thing, especially before COVID. After COVID, the in presence activities lost a bit of traction. Now we are organizing a conference nationwide in The USA, in San Francisco in October. There are I think they closed the sale of tickets. Maybe it's just the last few days. Might not be open when the episode comes out, but it's gonna be about organizing labor organizing the tech sector more on the spicy side because there are already some conferences like these. Well, the major one is from labor notes, but that's more like institutional not bureaucratic, but it's a mix. While our is called circuit breakers, if you want to Google it, and it already gives the idea that it's a bit more on the on the spicy side. Here in Germany, we also organize major conference of members of work councils of startups in Berlin that attracted, like, 200 people, something like that. I don't remember the exact I wasn't involved in that. But so in here in Germany, you have this concept of work council that is basically some elected workers that have legal protection to represent the rest of the company in front of the management. And these are not necessarily part of a union. It's a weird term, but it's it has a lot of traction. Like, there are a lot of start ups doing this because it's easier than a union in the in The USA or in Italy, for example, to form. You are more legally protected. But so there's a lot of people doing this. We have training events for these people because once you get elected, you want to push, you know, work your right stuff. It it's not enough to be compliant with management, so we teach them how to be more effective what they do. We network them with other with similar experiences, so we do skills exchange stuff. But the community aspect is another thing. Like, in Germany, there's or in Berlin, the the chapter is at Berlin level. There's a chat with, like, 500 people involved in organizing to some degree. In Italy, there's a bigger chat, more public with a 500 people that are not little numbers for my country. The USA, there's a big Slack where everybody can involve like, all the names that you see in the newspaper forming a union, you then Google it. You then search it in the Slack, and they're they're there. So they exchange opinions. They exchange practices. We do courses. That's another thing. We did a long list of, workshops and courses on how to form a union or, like, I give more stuff like how to facilitate a meeting. Like, I don't believe anything meaningful can be achieved if you don't if you cannot hold the meeting properly. Like, that's not like, you're wasting just your time. Or, like, leadership in a democratic organizations, that's another thing similar to how you are not taught how to form a union in a university. Also not taught how to behave or lead in a organization that is not your archica because you you go to work and you have, you know, a dictatorship. Like, there's the god king on top, the priest below, and the man until you get to the managers. And if you have none of these, you often don't know how to behave. So we also teach this kind of stuff. Nice. Then a lot of stuff that our people were beyond were now under the name of TWC. So the banner sometimes is a bit fuzzy, like a lot of, alphabet workers union or, like, collective actions in tech or not tech for apartheid that are other identities, then it's TWC people that decide to wear a different hat and mix with other groups to achieve their goals.

So, yeah, this is something that evolved over time. In the beginning I mean, Tech Workers Coalition was born with a clear idea that whoever works in a tech company is a tech worker. That's the functional definition we use, and we still use it because it makes sense. You want to organize together people that are subject to the same employer power. Like, you want to concentrate power to create change in a single place, and there's no point separating engineers from, you know, tech support because it doesn't lead to anything. Actually, history tells us that every time that, companies manage to drive a wedge between office workers and factory workers, these made the demands of the factory workers weaker. So Mhmm. We try we keep this as a fixed point. Like, we should strive to organize them together. Beats or something. Very yes. They are working for the company, for the platform, and they're sure they should be unionized together with the office workers. In theory, this is nice. In practice, it's very hard for several reasons. First of all, because they physically don't meet each other. Especially if you're talking about food delivery workers, the programmers are either in Berlin or San Francisco or New York, and the riders are all over the place. So you have local collectives that, maybe are unionized in some form, but the programmers are in a very different legal context. This is one issue. The second is more if you ask, I don't know, an Amazon warehouse worker, if they're at the quark, and they're gonna be like, no, bro. This is no. Like, I have a I I move stuff with my hands. So this is like, obviously, they understand once you explain the concept that they it's not that complicated, but they don't if they're in the word, they don't feel this is the case. So if you write tech worker on a on a flyer, you're gonna get programmers. Already designers kinda start being like, my creative worker, not a tech worker. Okay. So Right. On a communication level, this is a very bad tool. We acknowledge that. The name is tech workers' condition, so we're gonna keep it. But we always try to, let's say, complement the usage of this word with different visuals, different aesthetics. Like, this is an actual rule. Not not technical discussions of general meetings in TLC Berlin because, yeah, you know, people start you know, we need to discuss the website, changes to the website, and then it's, but we need to go through Git and blah blah blah and a poor request, and you lost most of the room. So we have to do this kind of work because otherwise like, we need to actively fight towards this engineering bias. In some chapters, this is easier than in others. Especially in the American chapters, you have more diversity. That's what I've seen. I those of it's also something that reproduces it, itself. Like, if if the room is full of women of color working in, I don't know, like, creative, positions versus a room full of white dudes talking about Git. Obviously, this is gonna somehow be a feedback loop. So we try also, I I take care of starting new chapters. This is something I try to address from the get go. Like, try to get a mix. Like, you start with five people, they cannot all be programmers. Otherwise, they are never gonna leave this situation of just attracting more programmers.

Yeah. There there are many. I also wrote in the past about this. The main issue I have like, there are two two issues big issues. The first one is how agriculture conceives change as a sum of individual struggles and also how it considers us, like, this kind of rapture. Like, it's very Christian. Like, you have the savior that touches the right point and unleash the day of judgment. That's mister Robert is like that. Like, you there there's a before the apocalypse. Story. And after the apocalypse, like, it's a day of judgement. Yeah. That's not how societal change happens. And even when you have some, let's say, viral exponential phenomena, like, it will be the collapse of the digital infrastructure that we the conditions that created that potential for virality were the change, not the active self of, like, pressing the right button. So the ACR sees, like, depressing the button as the change while anybody with the materialist background or even not even materialist, but, like, more systemic understanding of society does understand that there are preconditions to any any change and every change is incremental to some degree even if it presents with exponential symptoms. But that's just a symptom. It's not the cause. The tech worker is focused on collective action that can impact the the totality of the tech industry. Like, we want to bring change off, like, obviously, on an international level because it's impossible to to avoid that, but more like on the core relationship between workers and employers and take control of, how technology is made. The second prior with Azure identity is aesthetic, if you want, where you have these first of all, again, individualistic, but also it's the hero journey. It it's like or mark your dom sometimes. It's not the vibe we cultivate. Like, we want to this to be a sustained effort and and collaborative, obviously. So beyond the actual theory of how to bring change in the workplace, it's also how emotionally you should relate to it relate to it. Like, this is something that needs to be done together because alone, you don't hold enough power regardless of how many things you know. Knowing things and changing big things with your code might feel good, but it just gets you. At some point, you might have to let go and acknowledge that your technical expertise is not enough to change the world. And so any aesthetic or, like, narrative that reinforces this idea is kinda a bit of a problem. That said, in, in some context, we try to cultivate some level of intermingling with the most progressive parts of the movement. Speaking about the movement or scene in 2024 is a bit weird because a lot of it has been co opted by corporate like, you have within start you have growth hackers in company. Right? Right. Right. You're you're just making money. Like, you're not different from, you know, a finance bro in New York. Like, you're just but you call yourself hacker. So, obviously, this is not what, you know, hacker clubs were recognized as an hacker, but still the and especially, I would imagine San Francisco never been there, but I would imagine there. The line is very fuzzy. Like, you have Elon Musk that used to go to these hacker spaces while you already had a lot of money or, like, it was the it was already Elon Musk at the time. So Yeah. And this is not by chance. Like, the Aker Ethos is the same of the startup Ethos in California. Like, it's they have Sabre Road in the seventies and, '6 and seventies counterculture. Don't want to go on any historical rant here, but it's not by chance. And yeah. So did we try but at the same time, this whole logic is losing traction on younger generations, at least from my perspective. I remember university, it was much more cool to contribute to free software. There was a lot more optimism on the potential of all of this even though it I'm not I'm not that old. It was kinda already showing plenty of cracks, but now I feel like lot of young people are disillusioned with the political potential of this. And if they do it, it's more similar to what you were describing of, like, going on a prescribed path. Now any respectable developer needs to contribute to open source projects, but the political element is lost. You're just contributing free labor that eventually is gonna, you know, fuel some startup or some military device somewhere. But the freedom of people, thanks to the freedom of software, is not part of the equation anymore. So, yeah, that's my my perception.

I mean, that's the the startup discourse in many ways. It's like we are Yeah. You know, we are disrupting the the corporate. IBM is boring and old. We are Yahoo. And then Google. You have Facebook, and then you have Meta. Yeah. And then you have Peter Thiel. Like, that's not, I mean, Peter Thiel maybe now is corporate, but you get the point.

in my spare time, so I'm guilty of it. But, also, I'm kinda making an extra musician, a caricature of the. In practice, there are very few people. I mean, there are still a lot that kinda matches this, but most hackers I need to identify as an are slowly departing from this logic and trying to integrate. You know, there are plenty of Yeah. Hackers here in Berlin. I talked to them, and I'm like, yeah. I'm writing Tony Nagar. And I'm like, okay. That's, you know, the total opposite of of what you, you know, of. So there is a transition happening to some degree. And it's not against developing technology. It's, like, the core for me, the core problem is believing that technology is enough, but it doesn't mean you don't need technology to create societal change. Actually, I think we need better technology. We need to focus on that. I criticize the optimism of the early free software movement that was like, if you liberate the software, any kind of software, whatever it is for, then society is gonna be better. Also, this was lacking any concept of power relations. Yet the free software movement lost because Microsoft and Apple were making more money with desktop computers and free software couldn't be placed on any desktop computer for a decade. Like, the new Linux or whatever then changes, but, yeah, it was like an academic thing for a few people until it was too late. And because there was no power analysis that told them, like, you're kinda operating in conditions that will never allow this to be a demonic. But yeah.

Hacker is kind of like the the digital cowboy in some ways. Yeah. There are books about this, but I'm not gonna talk about but, yeah, do we want to get into the discussion on how the ethos of the frontier of the Wild West is still alive? Like, you know, mask going to Mars is exactly the same. It's the same logic of the early days of the Internet. Internet was the new digital frontier. The blockchain space to some degree, is prey to this narrative. The new digital frontier. Yes. But, like, for me, as somebody not participating into it, I have zero visibility of what's happening there as much as a European in Britain would understand what's happening in The United States in the late eighteenth century. You know? Like, I hear stories about it. You know, while stuff is happening there, there's a lot of money to be made. It's exactly the same narrative. And I don't know from within, but from the outside, it's kinda the same. And Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But, There's no easy answer, but there is a complex answer that I can try to give. The the first point, yes, it is true that the Quarkus collision in general or, like, whoever identifies us at the Quercus keeps this as secondary. When I have to explain this thing, I always say that the conflict with big tech, hinges on three different spaces or three different fronts, let's say. The internal front so what tech work escalation does, like, from within the companies create change within the company and change the harm that is done from the inside. Then you have the second front that is people addressing this from the outside. So regulators, civil society, researchers, so so what I was doing until a few months ago. Any kind of advocacy or education on how to use technology in a more mindful way. So this is happening outside the the companies often against them, sometimes in association with them, but, it's like this. And then you have a third front that is independently from big tech. So you have hackers or free software developers. Not not all of them like to be called hackers. So let's say software developers in general that want to build a different system of technology Yeah. At different levels. So from operative systems or firmware to web applications, like, it doesn't matter where, but you provide tools that operate by different logic. And, also, I will incorporate into this, like, cooperatives. Like, there are, obviously, some cooperatives that participate in the same system. They give consultancy on Microsoft tools. They are more democratic inside, but they don't bring meaningful change to to to the ecosystem. But then you have cooperatives that offer, for example, cloud services on a small scale to other cooperatives at a discounted price, and they are competing. On the market, they are competing against Amazon. Obviously, their offer is different. They bundle together different applications, whatever. But if you look from, high level perspective, they are competing with Amazon or with the AWS, with Het Snare, with Google Cloud, and so on. And so this is like a separate system that tries to thrive under different logic, but, ultimately, you know, money is money. In the same system, you have to eat you'd have to buy stuff at the supermarket. So at some point, they kinda, interact. And technology, like, technological development in this third sense can be like, it is important, but it need to be predicated on on what you were saying. Like, you need to do it for a purpose. And I think, like, the the the biggest problem with the free software movement for many years was that they wanted to liberate software for the sake of it. You know? Like, free software is intrinsically better than proprietary software, and good things are gonna come out of it. Like, no. Not necessarily. Right? Maybe, but not necessarily. So now I see in the last, let's say, five years, more or less, a a lot of free software. So or open source software. So under this kind of licenses that is still is is playing a different game. Like, they are trying to build tools for specific people, for specific context that are somehow liberating. And, again, the cooperative ecosystem of technology is growing. If today you want to start a cooperative and offer cloud services, you install co op cloud, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You don't have to start from scratch or adopt proprietary software for to do this. And there's a lot of new tools that allow you to do stuff that before could could have been done only with proprietary software. This is good, the fact that you can have a whole stack independent from profit logic. Let's be ambitious. Today, can you run a computer built on software only divide us for profit? Kinda. Linux might be ambiguous in this, but beyond that, you can kinda do it. The problem is that the the development is relatively cheap compared to the adoption. So when you were saying we should push for Linux to be adopted, this gives meaningful autonomy and liberation of people if a if a lot of people are using it. Otherwise, it's tactical autonomy. If I am organizing something very spicy, I don't have Microsoft spyware in my computer by default, but they need to put a lot more effort into spying on me, let's say. Yeah. This is tactical. This is not liberation per se. And the incentives to adopt Linux are not yet there. And that's the same limit of the free software movement. They expected you know, it comes with better privacy. It comes with better license. It comes with less implication. No. You need to offer a better product no matter what. That's how the vast majority of people operate. And if you leverage your adoption of self sacrifice on availability of time, people don't have the material time to learn new things. Even if they are on the same level of complexity of Windows, they come out of middle school. They can use Windows. And to change those acquired patterns is gonna take them time. And this is not gonna be addressed by technology. No way. You need to give different incentives. You need to introduce for example, I really appreciate those collectives that help you set up your Linux computer that does something. Like, here in Berlin, there is a collective that recuperates all computers. They install Linux on it, and they hand them out to refugees or, like, old people and whatever, but they come with tech support. Like, if you cannot open your email, they help you with that. And this is social. This is not technological. And it's also the relationships you have. It's not just the information you get. You can make a video on YouTube explaining this, but it's not gonna go anywhere. You have social relationships with the people that teaches you a new way to employ technology. That needs to grow. The Yeah. Otherwise, we don't go anywhere. So when you move to from tactical, like, I want technological autonomy in my organization because I don't want, I you know, Facebook to ban me and lose all my followers, and I cannot promote my products anymore. Too strategic, free software is liberating people. The the gap is very big. And, I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but it cannot be done naively.

principles in mind. Yeah. I also wouldn't say it's just principles. It's also complex. It's like horizontal like, democracy is harder. Like Yeah. It's a earlier investment of coordination energy, and horizontal structures are informationally more complex. Like, the circulation of information from a, you know, system theory or cybernetic point of view is more and more complex. And it's like, even if you design by the right principles, it has a cost on the organization. It's more. But it enables certain, you know, traits and values that otherwise are lost. So democratic organization tend to be more resilient because exactly because you have more circulation of information, you can react to the external environment maybe in a more swift way. But if this investment ends up killing the organization in the early stages, you know, your activity doesn't matter. Like, you need to get stuff done. And if it's poorly structured, it doesn't work. So my work mostly consists on reducing these costs and these frictions by employing either established models. Like, I'm not inventing much here. Like, we sociocracy for coordination when there is, you know, it's a full time work environment or otherwise more lightweight models because one hard learned lesson of my last five years is that sociocracy doesn't work if, you contribute two, four hours a week to a voluntary organization. It has a minimum threshold. I I'm assuming your listeners are familiar with sociocracy, but maybe not. Sociocracy is a relatively common organizational model in, cooperatives or horizontal structures that is different from a DAO in principle. Like, you have a clear idea, relational coordination between units. So you have these circles that need to have explicit relationships within each other, and it's not really contractual. So, it's more like an ongoing process of information exchange and responsibility adjustments to adapt to different challenges. I'm not gonna go in detail, but if you want to look it up, it's there's a lot of documentation. There's a a famous book, many voices, one song explaining the model, and it's very commonplace. The other thing I do is to design organizations and software together. Like, in many spaces, especially traditional bureaucratic spaces, you try to build the software for the organization that already exists, and so you reproduce the problems you had when information traveled by horse. And a lot of organizations, big organizations, but even tech companies sometimes still operate with that kind of information structure, information flow. On the contrary, you have techno chauvinist that, like, this is the perfect tool. They don't have the company. Like, we're gonna use Notion. We're gonna use, I don't know, Monday. We're gonna use, I don't know, a chatbot to coordinate a number. Like like, that's not how it works. And so the organization grows around one, two, three softwares, and people start hating technology because it just doesn't fit what they have to do on a database. So I try to do the two things together. I transform the organizational structures and the software they're using at the same time because I can work on both sides. That's my pitch. Elevator pitch. I get involved. Solved. That said, you were saying, like, most people get into these organizations without clear maybe with like, what I see usually is, like, a naive optimism of, like, if we do stuff decentralized, they're gonna be democratic, and I'm gonna have my space. No. In an absence of structure, in an absence of, you know, authoritarian power, what like, if you just create a void, that void is gonna be filled by stuff you probably don't like. Right? It's like fermentation. Like, if you just put a carrot on the table and wait, mold is gonna grow in it. Not good stuff. If you put it in the right, you know, brine, then lacto fermentation is gonna happen, and it's gonna taste good. And it's not like industrial processing where you sanitize everything, you kill everything that exists. This is like the corporate pyramid in organizational terms. It's something more negotiated with the bacteria, but then the good stuff grows. So democratic organization is the same. You need to create the right conditions for people to thrive. It doesn't happen by itself. The other comparison I usually do is, like, teenage sex. If there is love, then the sex is gonna be no. That's not no. Like, that's not how it happens. And the same as, like, if there is assemblies, then everything's gonna be good. Or if there are dolls, everything's gonna be good. The change needs to happen in many levels, organizational, cultural, spiritual, emotional. Like, if you are always angry and you let let it out in, your work democratic workplace, you're just gonna make the space toxic, and you need to solve your issues. It's not like, the organization needs to limit this, but it's com like, in a structured corporate environment, what you do, you cannot express those emotions at at work. You go in the bathroom and cry. In a democratic space, we try to avoid that, but that is very complicated and expensive. And so if you don't do it properly, that kind of energy that normally goes into crying to the bathroom goes into the assembly, and it creates problems for us. So I try to teach a new way of leadership that is also emotional to some degree. Like, if the members of your organization are upset or unhappy or whatever, they have the power to turn this into a problem for everybody. And so you want to address that too, for example.

I work alone and I cry.

If you like, emotional care is part of the deal. Like, you cannot do it.

secret web dream tier of change that I never actually wrote down, but it it relates to a lot of the topics we touched, so maybe I I will talk about it. That if we were saying, like, how democratic organizations are harder to do and they have certain frictions and, that might kill them, my effort is to reduce this. Software is part of the equation, and software the software that is produced nowadays doesn't necessarily work in that way. Like, there's encoded in Slack does nothing to facilitate distraction, for example. But there is one incidental exception in my view that is not designed for this, but kinda mimics what we need, let's say. And, so I became a big fan of no code software development that if you don't like, maybe the this work is going around a bit, maybe not in all bubbles, but let's frame it. Like, no code software is software that allows you to produce other software without producing code. And there's a huge range of what you can do with this from mobile apps with drag and drop to other new ways of producing software. So, the point is that a lot of these tools erase the necessity for skilled programmers. That doesn't mean programmers are gonna be unemployed because there is this stuff. They cover very different use cases, and they cover exactly those use cases where you want the developer to be also the user. So we did at least some of these tools. I I'm thinking, for example, about Notion or Airtable or Zapier or, like, these relatively simple tools compared, for example, bubble.io that takes weeks to make a drag and drop. Now maybe I'm just bad, but, still, it's much more complicated. These tools, if you adopt them in a democratic setting, it means that who is subject to the tool because they have to use it is also enabled to change it. Obviously, with some supervision, it's not like everybody can change every single button you're using or every single database because that becomes a nightmare. But in theory, you don't need to involve an external person to make this change. And this reduction of friction will empower small organizations because big organizations can't change their software. They have the money to do it. Small organizations, decentralized organizations that tend to be a aggregation of actual independent organizational units can do this more easily with little research, little study. So I'm thinking of a scenario where, for example, use Notion extensively, to alter the way you keep your contacts CRM of your all your contacts in your organization. If you have to do it with an established tool, you need to even if it's open source. So this is not a matter of of code control. It's open source. You need to write a Python module that does change this or do a pull request or do a fork. You get crazy. You just end up not gonna you're just not gonna do it. If it's a two Notion and you want to add the column, I don't know, second email. For now, you just have one email, but some contacts have two emails. You want to add the second email field, it takes three minutes, two minutes. And that's it. And this friction enables the software to mold itself around the organization much better. And it's not gonna happen with programmers in the loop because even just even if you have a programmer within your organization, you have to ask, you know, make a ticket, say, I want to to add this email thing. Then he's like, no. In the future, this might create problems I need to discuss. Let's have a meme, bro. And he doesn't. So the I caught like, these micro frictions are a huge source of frustration for users because the software is not specific. It's not tailor made for their use case. Because it's reasonable, for example, to have one email contact, but some people need two. And this those few people are fucked by the existing CRMs. So it's an example. I don't know. But the this is my theory of change. Introduce these tools within organizations and empower people to do the changes themselves so they can do without me. This is not a great business strategy. I'm making myself done. But it doesn't matter because nobody else is doing this, so I hope I can go for a while. But this is the whole point, and this is empowering. This is democratic because you are more in control of your software. The idea that that that's not a problem with agriculture. The idea that if the code is open, then you're in control of it. It's bullshit. Most people don't have the time or knowledge to do it. A lot of software that I can't touch because I have the skills, I'm not gonna spend one week to change one feature unless it's really critical to my job. I'm just gonna do it if it's very important. While with this new paradigm, somehow this friction is gonna disappear or at least be reduced to the point where software is gonna be more usable. And the big problem is that the free software movement is lagging behind on this kind of tools. So there is, some software that does this, but, for example, AppSmith or Nocco DB. But, for example, there's no alternative to Notion that is free software. That at least that is comparable in in features. So, yeah,

Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's I don't know. I'm a after all these discussions about proprietary software, big tech with that, and the notion of fanboy, and And I have to reconcile the fact that they developed something very new and very good in every regard, but then they are a big corporate Sure. That. So the the you know, I have even when I go to meetups, everybody is a fanboy of the product, but they end up being a fanboy of the company. And it's also a bit cultish, I would say, but I'm part of the cult, so whatever. But it's hard to reconcile this because I I also like, should they bring people on Notion or not? Because I'm going against what we see today. But until the free software provides, we we have to stick with it. Yeah. I think it's a matter of, yeah, appreciating the product

is doing that. It's, at the moment, the main time in promotion, it's not free software, source available, but, they are kinda getting there. So it's doable. At least they showed it's doable. I'm also trying to gaslight the main developer of Bonfire to do a federated Notion, basically. The effort is not going great because it's some years of his life, so Notion is not that real software, but I'm working on it.

So Yep. The I have some blogs that are not really active these days, because I started publishing on Notion. That's another thing I publish a bit everywhere. If you want to for I have a website, roboti.me. You can also write me, an email if you want to stay in touch at Simone@Robuti.me. You'll find me on Instagram. I post mostly my political stuff there on and off. And I'm Simone Robuti on Instagram. So it's same. And, yeah, otherwise, if you are in Berlin, hit me up. We can go out for a beer. That's how I met Josh the first time I did.

Thanks so much. Thanks to you. Have a nice day, everybody.