Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

one day, shortly before I was fired, the 2008 crisis had hit full force, the Phoenix office that managed us closed, and while cost-cutting Google fired 70% of the Latinoamerican precariat, in one fell swoop. then, during one of my last TGIFs, I accidentally listened to two high-level managers talk about it, two male gringos in expensive business-casual, and they commented on how the company was still doing perfectly fine without all that weight.

and that's not what stuck with me, the arguments, no. I understood the incentives to do layoffs, and the human need to rationalise them. what stuck with me was their happy smiling faces. their *laugh*.

yes they laughed about it. out loud.

I had a full understanding of what it meant for Third World people to be fired under the crisis, what it was about to be like for the Argentinians, for our families, but *so did they*, they were down here, they knew the reality. they talked to us every day, they were eating the food that the contractors prepared. and here were these people, in tailored clothes that cost more than a cafeteria lady's monthly wage, partying without even bothering to pretend to be sad. not caring enough about us to even bullshit. any sympathies I might have had over the simplistic logic of free-market liberalism evaporated under that laugh.

as a kid I used to despise the devilish villains of cartoons like Captain Planet, who destroyed the world with manic laughs for nothing but the thrill of power, polluting for the sake of polluting. I thought that was unrealistic. I cherished nuanced villains like Lady Eboshi from Mononoke-hime, the leader of Irontown who was destroying the ancient forest, but with the goal of liberating women from violent patriarchy and poverty; Irontown was a refuge of outcasts, and Lady Eboshi would give her own life for her girls. complexity! humanity!

it was at Google that I learned that no, capitalists are actually literally the same as in Captain Planet. we are not blessed enough to live in Ghibli reality, capital owners built us a USA cartoon reality. what is crypto mining if not a Captain Planet villain scheme—to kill and raze and destroy for nothing but imaginary tokens proving that you did it? what is GenAI if not stealing power and water and even art itself to feed into a grinder, producing no benefit but hoarding more money away from the poors—when you already have more money than a human being could possibly ever spend? what is this addiction to "number go up" if not Sly Sludge going "Aloha suckers! I'll miss this profit paradise but I have a souvenir to remember it by", picking a briefcase of cash while the island explodes?

this drove me to want to understand capitalism, and I would eventually find in Malatesta the answer as to why capital owners cannot help but be cruel, revel in cruelty, performatively broadcast cruelty. why the cruelty is indeed almost an aside, a corollary to what it means to *do* capitalism: every action you take has consequences not just for the world but for your psyche; you cannot make people work for you and hoard all the profits while they are stuck with fixed salaries, without in the process developing strong feelings on why you're entitled to do that and they deserve it actually.

but before I got into political theory, it was Google who *showed* me what capitalism is, firsthand up close. I wouldn't say that was worth working there, but I benefited from the lived experience; from that part of it, and nothing else.

Maybe you’ve heard: every font is free! Since fonts aren’t subject to copyright, you can legally ‘pirate’ them if you use a specific loophole!

...except that’s not really true. I’ve seen this claim repeated quite a lot recently, and it’s missing some pretty important nuance.

A thread 🧵

North Americans should romanticize our squirrels more. They're at least as cool as a kookaburra if you pay them enough attention. Why don't we use their calls in our media?

HOT AUTISTIC ADULTS IN YOUR AREA ARE UNSURE IF YOU WANT TO TALK TO THEM

CLICK HERE TO ESTABLISH CLEAR INTENT

How the billionaire hoarders prevent everyone else from having nice things.

Post World War II, a single income of a factory worker could support a family, own a house, drive two cars, and afforded vacations. Today most families with two parents working full time can barely make ends meet.

201 million Americans (almost 60%) live in poverty where a minimal quality of life is out of reach. Compare this to 5% in Italy and 11% in Japan.

https://newrepublic.com/article/195862/billionaire-hoarders-wealthy-biggest-threat

#oligarchs

yesterday I was talking about my brief stint at Google back in 2008 and how dystopic that was—basically a real-life version of the Alpha Complex from the dark comedy RPG "Paranoia", where being unhappy or being born a mutant or having a task that's impossible to fulfil are considered to be a criticism of the dictatorial Computer, and criticising the computer is a crime of treason. ("Happiness is mandatory. Are you happy, citizen?")

and I was talking of how Google was my first taste of the surveillance society that's the new normal now. see, all of us at Google Brazil dreamed of the job as a way of getting a ticket to the Global North—it didn't help that Google severely underpaid Latinoamerican employees, even for local standards (with the assurance that if you "excel" you'll be given "shares" eventually and partake of some crumbs of capitalism; even get a visa to the First World).

now I was always a weeb and back then I was already like, intermediate to advanced in Japanese. so of course my dream was to move to Japan. but when I talked to it with my boss about it—a disembodied face from Phoenix I would talk to on a giant monitor; this too felt very new, high-tech, and dystopic back then—he dismissed it out of hand, saying my Japanese wasn't fluent and that would make me a poor fit.

I talked to my colleagues about it and someone said wtf no, most international engineers brought to Shibuya cannot even say konnichiwa, if anything your level of Japanese and cultural experience in the diaspora makes you perfect for it. we had a Brazilian friend in Google Sweden and my mates said I should talk to her about contacting Shibuya directly regarding relocation.

readers from before notice that this was already *after* the "backstabbing" episode, when I became persona non grata to my boss because I voiced my concerns over recruiter promises not being real. I wrote that in the internal Blogspot system, and afterwards I got a number of emails from employees thanking me for talking about it, and praising me my bravery.

now my actions back then will feel very natural for people who only ever met me post-transition, as this badass nazi-punching anarchist with no filter, but you have to understand: back then I was a shy little nerd terrified of everything. I wasn't brave, I was incredibly, magnificently naïve. I was the only person in the world who believed the corporate kool-aid of Google, that it was some sort of new, dynamic academia where we didn't work in offices we worked in "campi", we were there to improve the world, at least I thought I was (interviewer: "what attracts you to Google?" me: "I agree with the Ten Principles of the company" interviewer: "the what now?" me: "the Ten Principles? Google's Principles? in the 'about us' page?" interviewer: "uuh, sure..."). It did not even *occur* to me that it was all a scam, that everyone else knew it was all a scam and the point was to get rich. in retrospect I should have read the undertones in early Paul Graham essays; I was a literary girl I'm good at undertones; but I read what I wanted to be true.

anyway so I got my scolding and marked myself as a troublemaker. and I was about to directly contradict my boss and look for a way into Japan behind his back. my colleagues *strongly* advised me to *never* mention any of this by email, and also not call from my desk. international calls were very expensive those days so I ended up calling Sweden from a phone in a little locker, between brooms and bottles of disinfectant, in the dark, after everyone was gone.

my friend from Sweden told me she had contacts in Tōkyō and she was sure they would want to relocate me there. a couple weeks after that, I was fired. (mid-economic crisis, in the 3rd world, with one 2-year-old kid and another about to be born.)

and it was *so* weird and surreal to be in that little locker room, afraid of every whisper, aware that every communication was being spied on. and when I tell this story to my now adult children, I struggle to convey how weird it was. I realise they never *experienced* existing with technology without it being the default that it's hostile to you and it's spying on you all the time. for them this has been the case *all of their lives*.

today, the concept of "spyware" has been obsoleted because every software is spyware. Google's "improving the world through search" was revealed to be about searching Gaza families to bomb, children and all; and "investing in progress" means bankrolling literal fascism. today, for us Latinx to even briefly step in the USA, not having spyware "social media" on always-on handheld devices is considered to be a mark of criminals. and my kids will never know a world that's not like this, but for me I saw this world being forged right there, deep in Mordor where the shadows lie.

Fabulousness from Rose Ann Prevec. ;)