Esme Povirk @madewokherd@computerfairi.es

Hello friends! I am excited to (re)share the #mentalhealth project I started two years ago: https://littlebetterzine.com

Little Better Zines are free guides to evidence based coping skills – now expanded and redesigned with new info and improved accessibility.

These are techniques I often share with therapy patients, but I know not everyone has access to therapy. I hope you find these zines helpful, and I’d be grateful if you repost/share the link with anyone who might need them!

Alpha males

There are some serious reasons why you still need to be on Meta platforms: it's your last link to family members, or your support system, or you live in a small town.

I wrote about how to stay on while limiting Meta's ability to surveil you or use your information against you.

tl;dr Boring users, who don't generate clicks or behavioral data, are unprofitable users.

https://buttondown.com/practicaltips/archive/how-to-grey-rock-meta/

.....oh.

Since the old metrics of "being visibly performing work" that were the oldschool way to demonstrate corporate value don't work in remote-work situations,

volume of code commits - the old KLOC style - replaced those as a social signal for performative effort to gain managerial approval.

And that's why llm-based codegen took off so fast - manager-class demanding performance of work instead of actual results, using the only metric they could measure: kloc committed.

So once again, "the thing you measure becomes the thing you do" comes to call.

**All symptoms are solutions.**

That's a mantra I've come to live by.

A fever is your immune system making your body inhospitable to bacteria.

Procrastination and addiction can be us giving ourselves comfort and relief we don't think we deserve.

Workers or community members who seemed checked out are often protecting themselves from a situation they feel helpless to fix.

When you see a symptom you dislike, don't suppress it. Understand the problem it's solving and find a better solution.

Software folks

Wired is running a short survey asking about whether you ever use AI in your coding

if you're interested, give 'em your feedback: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScxqxzbjQvfD9xIcrub3d2n1yDWreJJL5PxGYpfjaw9fgnDuA/viewform

One of the most important things I've learned in therapy is that talking to yourself (verbally or silently) in the ways that you would talk to a scared child that you would offer reassurance, support, and encouragement to basically *works*

And it's a skill you can develop to have enough awareness to know when to do that: when you're feeling powerless, when you're feeling overwhelmed, when you're lost in all-or-nothing rigid thinking

I just recently discovered that it's especially useful when I wake up in the middle of the night, wanting to think about things, to be able to remind myself that each of those things are things I'll think of again the next day, and which can be dealt with during daytime

It's kind of fucked up that so many of us are taught from a young age that "talking to yourself is crazy", so we ignore an entire tool. Or at least, I did

this thing happens really often, but the latest one that happened to me this week was with desktop icons. after an update, the selection rectangle around them looks weird and different, and the icons are the wrong size, they're clipped so you can't see the icon fully or read the label. haven't attempted to fix it, will probably take at least an hour. it makes me feel like the computer isn't really mine. it belongs to a bunch of nerds who keep making weird mistakes. a kind of clumsy nerd cabal

Hello, little PSA and maybe wisdom from someone who works in the social justice mines:

1. Just knowing about something isn't the same as activism. Knowing about bad stuff happening without having a plan to tackle it results in feelings of overwhelm, helplessness and cynicism, which are often barriers to actually taking action. Anger and outrage burn brightly and can jumpstart you but they are usually short-lived emotions that are hard to sustain over a long period of time (and even if so, are extremely exhausting). I'm not saying you need to stick your head in the sand, but there is some stuff where the broad idea is enough and you absolutely do not need to read the details or daily updates about it.

2. You do not and will not have the energy to take action on every single thing, it is not possible. Therefore be really strategic about where you spend your energy - where will your voice/action have the most impact because of your influence, power, privilege, position etc. Best actions are low effort + high impact, worst actions are high effort + low impact. What is effortful and impactful is going to look very different for different people, so there will be some actions and causes that maybe isn't a great idea for you to pursue.

3. Social justice has always been and will always be a long-term project. I really disagree with posts being like "how can you lead a regular life while this is happening". In fact it is essential to lead a regular life and have joy, community, connection, art - this is also what you're fighting for everyone to have! You depriving yourself from the good things in life doesn't actually help anyone.

You also cannot pour from an empty cup, and so you must refill your cup regularly. The sum of a lifetime of sustained actions will be a lot greater than a couple of years of intense activity then intense burnout/sickness because you simply cannot keep going. Burnout and unprocessed trauma can also wreak havoc in groups and networks too, so by ensuring you take care of yourself you're not inadvertently passing some of this to other people.

4. Check your ego at the door. This is not about you and being the best ally, a morally perfect person, a martyr or saviour or anything like that. We are all cleaning a giant pile of shit together while the shit machine generates more shit, and the hope is maybe one day everything won't be covered in shit, but in the meantime removing some of it is still worthwhile, even if we can't remove all of it. You're doing cleaning work - essential, important, but definitely not glamorous.