Jay Hoffmann

Mike Brock argues that it's our humanity that defines our political ideologies. To win, we must appeal to both rationality and emotion. Together, they inform our core belief system, and guide our decisions in the political sphere.

This reality exposes a critical weakness in much of contemporary liberal and progressive thought. In our eagerness to appear rational, to base our arguments on facts and logic, we’ve often neglected the emotional core of human experience. We present statistics, craft policies, and construct logical arguments, all while forgetting that it’s emotion that spurs people to take to the streets, to cast their votes, to stand up against tyranny.

I need to remember the words of Judith Butler when I talk with people that I know willing to let the actions and policies of Trump slip right by.

The more people who say that they can “live with” racism and misogyny in a candidate, even if they’re not enthusiastic racists, the more the enthusiastic racists and the fascists become stronger.

Miriam Suzanne is fed up with big tech, fed up with the hype. We all should be. It feels absurd to even try to counter this point.

There's an important message in here. We do not need to abadon the web in order to abandon its eugenics focused billionaires. We need to excise them from it, then reclaim and rewild it.

When eugenics-obsessed billionaires try to sell me a new toy, I don’t ask how many keystrokes it will save me at work. It’s impossible for me to discuss the utility of a thing when I fundamentally disagree with the purpose of it.

I don’t care how well their ‘AI’ works – or if you found a fancy fun use-case. It fucks me up watching peers treat this tech from people who want to eradicate me as a future worth considering. I don’t want any of this.

I don’t need an agent, I want to maintain my own agency.

While Rome burns, they’re busy drafting strongly worded letters to the arsonists, pausing only to scold the citizens who dare suggest using the fire extinguishers. Their position would be merely comedic if it weren’t so catastrophically dangerous—like watching someone respond to a home invasion by suggesting the burglar fill out a visitor’s form.

“What leverage do we have?” Jeffries asks—apparently unaware that he’s providing his own epitaph. The leverage of moral clarity. The leverage of democratic legitimacy. The leverage of millions of citizens demanding their representatives actually represent them. But perhaps that’s too much to expect from leaders who’ve grown so comfortable in their donor-funded cages that they mistake their chains for jewelry.

I can't imagine a more healthy outlook on the importance of complaints, and what they really tell you. Feels like this applies to a bit more than just product development too.

The worst thing to do, when you receive such complaints, is take them to heart and try to fix them. This is because by definition you wanted these complaints. They are a sign that the thing you built is built as you wanted to build it. The people complaining want something different, they don't want your thing. It's just that your thing is so good that it's the thing they're compelled towards even though it doesn't prioritize the things they care about most.