Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
I’ve written about how the tech industry serves and reinforces negative trends in the job market. Specifically, it encourages coworking spaces for white-collar precariat workers, and it promotes a culture of endless talk and meetings. In this post, I want to move on to something a bit more everyday and immediate: the open office.
So, let’s talk about the open office.
I was reading Nathan J. Robinson’s short article about Age of Empires the other day with more than a bit of nostalgia. Robinson enjoyed revisiting Age of Empires after 20 years. But he took us to task as a society for our obsession with conquest games over cooperative ones.
Robinson draws all the obvious connections between Age of Empires (or Risk, or a million other games) and mindless war. No, players don’t really do anything constructive in these games. They even do destructive things.
Nevertheless, I’ll admit once again that I don’t really need my cultural consumption or choices to line up with my politics. For the most part, I think it doesn’t matter. Sometimes, I think it’s fine to just enjoy something.
Perhaps this is a long-winded way of pointing out that I remember many years of enjoying Age of Empires with my friends. And, more recently, I started playing a game called O A.D. While it’s superficially different enough to have a different title, it’s basically an AoE knockoff. And you can play it for free.
For anyone not (yet) in the know, the tech industry invented and popularized the business approach of Agile. It started in web consulting and then found its more permanent home in software development. Scrum is by far the most common way to implement Agile.
I’ll write a bit about what Agile and Scrum are. But I also want to hear about the experiences of readers.
Welcome to the March edition of our reading list series! For this round, I’ve focused mostly on non-fiction (with one alt-history exception). I’ve included everything from Roman history to contemporary politics. Enjoy!
The COVID-19 pandemic dates to late 2019. But it became a huge problem in the U.S. almost exactly one year ago. And then the world developed a vaccine (actually several) in record-breaking time. As for myself, I got my first dose of the Moderna vaccine a few days ago.
Side effects? They haven’t been too bad for me. My arm hurt for a couple of days, and I felt tired. Slightly less than a day after the vaccine, I started feeling really run down, nauseous, and a bit dizzy. I recovered the next day.
Overall, I’m just feeling…optimistic. Yes, I could still get COVID-19. Yes, that’s a concern. And yes, the world still has many cases (though far less than a couple months ago). Nevertheless, I can see the end of the pandemic. Maybe I’ll start seeing more people in person soon. Maybe I’ll even enjoy some baseball in person this summer.
It seems like something worth celebrating.
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