yeah, we know that the conditions on which these practices developed don’t exist anymore, the context keep shifting and anything that is conceptually stable for more than a decade probably is unfit to create the change we need.

the decision of what’s possible or impossible shoudln’t be done through ideological discourse but through empirical practice. Ideologies are not tools for strategic development and they should stop being treated as such.

It’s an artifact of political debate done within the bubble of people who read too much theory or engage in discussions only with other political people. People who do politics and organizing in the real world are not so concerned about all these ideological nuances or asserting the value of one model over another.

If you don’t have the power to change things, all these abstracts models are useless and uninteresting. Discussing how to build power in the real world is a much better way to spend your political energy.

start.coop

Fondazione PICO

Enspiral

platformcoops.de is not an incubator per se, but it has a similar function

startup cooperatives incubators are a thing.

Data Centers in mainstream media means hyperscalers. It’s true some of this hate is incidentally redirected towards small data centers but it’s a negligible problem at the moment.

that means also potentially stop selling their product in the country. Most big tech companies operate in open violation of GDPR and they are not held accountable only for political reasons. If the government has enough pressure to act, they might force Microsoft to bargain with a lot of leverage on the table. 1300 specialized jobs in Czech are no little business.

it’s not the USA. You can’t just do that. There are workers’ protections against stuff like this.

but also in the USA there’s a very strong tech worker movement. A book just came out to recount the story of the new wave. Look up Against The Oligarch

lol, what are you even talking about? The tech sector is seeing a surge of organizing throughout the world and has plenty of unions, some even decades old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionization_in_the_tech_sector#Romania

it’s a bit different: usually founders are in as much bullshit constraint as the workers. The power is all in the investors and the founders are just the boss clowns. The vast majority of them will fail, by design, leaving them burned out. They are not in the same position of workers materially, but psychologically they are not that far from a worker that wholeheartedly embraces the company mission and burns out because of the circus.

what’s your country?

It’s a tech company not recognizing a union of tech workers, a dynamic which will impact the development of several pieces of critical software. I would say it belongs.

they got their headlines, so it works

they probably don’t want to be accountable for serious damage claims. They do it for people’s attention. To materially disrupt data center construction you need a lot more than a single action

yep, it’s one of the new chapters and it’s pretty active and growing fast. You should join.

you can volunteer in some alt-albor organization that supports unions externally, like Tech Workers Coalition: https://techworkerscoalition.org/

you can unionize with the rest of the workers. They are called “wall to wall unions” when you do not organize by department/profession but by company. In some countries they are the norm.

that’s why you do union organizing with organizers and not with edgy teenagers.

both coops and unionized companies operate within a capitalist structure and on the market (usually). Neither model can emancipate itself from its context. So I’m not sure about what aspect you expect to be different. And coops can be run with good governance where power structures are explicit, managed and democratically altered to reflect the values of the members. The case where you have few people controlling everything is a dysfunction, it’s not part of the model (and also can happen with unions).