#knowledge-work #programming #pedagogy #code-as-pedagogy #cohost-repost #left #thinking-about
2023-08-06
and how we probably should as a way of working approach things differently knowing that.

I came here from a thought on how knowledge work is kind of frowned upon within the left movement as it stands because it's not work with visible measureable results, but 'political education' programs as they stand aren't the way to go about much. people learn things, people write them down, people teach from that by talking about it.

but there's no framework for it or structure, and the people with the most experience there tend to be seen as managerial class instead of workers (even though they're an industry with the largest impact of a strike, especially among SRE/devops types or infra companies. People just, well, they don't know yet. see previous mention of lack of conscious knowledge-work on the left I guess).

idk. it's clear the current ways aren't working but people keep going 'but it will this time, if we just try harder', as I see the morale drained out of most of my comrades' faces from throwing themselves again and again at both systems and people on the left who think that their priorities are the right ones, but while the polling on things like medicare for all and better rents and stuff is favorable, the realities are less so. Converting platitutdes into action isn't easy and it's gonna take a lot of unlearning and learning, and the way to do that is... not what we've been doing just More Hard this time, I feel.

And when I say "knowledge work" I don't mean "tech workers", I mean tech workers sure, but also librarians and actual teachers who get it, and that person who just really likes transit enough that they have detailed notes, and that person who knows how to run the finances of a small group in ways that won't get them burned, and etc.

people who go and learn a thing and then tell everyone else how to do it -- specializing generalist autodidacts, and the mechanisms to actually let them disseminate that.

And it makes sense -- most generally successful movements were from people self-teaching and then teaching each other. You just don't see most of that because, well, the internet means people often don't have to be taught in the org/formation anymore to bring them up to speed, since it's self-selecting for most of it, people already need a baseline before joining or social pressures will sort them out. Such is the way of people, unfortunately.

but the trick is that people get defensive when you bring them past their "curie temperature of understanding" -- they see themselves as being judged, or being told things that they haven't processed yet or unlearned, go into defensive mode, and blackhole most of it instead of internalizing it. You want to flatten the first third of your curve and steepen the last third. I have nothing to back that up but watching lots of places fall to those problems, thinking that their members had learned things and then realizing that they just were adopting the aesthetics so people wouldn't give them flak for not following it.

that works, sometimes, for volunteers, but very rarely, and movements need more than people who actively step up to sign up.