Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/technology@beehaw.org/t/4224376
TL;DR: In the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has fired several union organizers, including those that worked on the Community Tech team - a team dedicated to building features for the volunteer community that edits Wikipedia.
As the Wiki Workers Union tries to get the Wikimedia Foundation to recognize their union, it is worth remembering that this is not the first time that the Foundation has worked against the community.
Wikimedia Enterprise is a betrayal of the volunteer movement community of Wikipedia editors, as the Wikimedia Foundation is providing privileged access to big tech AI companies to the Wikipedia corpus - a body of work that the Foundation does not own.
Movement volunteer communities contributed to Wikipedia under copyleft licenses - licenses that work to ensure that the work remains free (as in speech). The big tech AI companies do not license derivative works under copyleft licenses and often do not even attribute where the works came from.
This means that volunteers are working for big tech for free, and the Wikimedia Foundation is selling privileged access to that free labor.
It is against that backdrop that the current unionization struggle unfolds.
Why does everything, and I mean everything, have to be terrible now
Capitalism ran out of easy exploitable profits, and now it is coming for whatever is left.
Also technological innovation kinda halted in the recent years. That’s why you see everything being filled with unnecessary AI in the name of technological advancement. If there’s no innovation for growth, all that remains is to extract more value from existing platforms, hence the current enshittification of everything.
The world ended in 2012 and we’re just hanging around in the endlessly awful entropic aftermath.
We are a species that seeks unexploited niches for resource optimization. In the past those resources were things that made us directly happy like food and shelter but now we’ve moved on to more abstract concepts like “wealth”. That drive and ability to abstract and outthink our competitors is how we got to the top of the food chain on this planet.
There is no off switch.