Esme Povirk @madewokherd@computerfairi.es

Every time conditions worsen, someone starts pushing the idea of a general strike. Shut it all down! Starve the system! And yeah, it sounds powerful—but here’s what they don’t tell you:

It’s a honeypot.

And no shade with this subpost, but:

If you're suggesting one? It tells me how theoretical and abstract your current relationship to our times is: your post probably isn't going to start a general strike - even though a prosecutor would have no trouble arguing that.

You see...

Under U.S. law, organizing a general strike—especially across industries—is straight-up illegal. The Taft-Hartley Act (1947) makes it a felony to advocate for a mass strike across sectors. Courts ruled long ago that calls for general strikes count as criminal conspiracy—which is why labor leaders, radicals, and workers have been crushed every time they tried to organize one.

Think about that: The state doesn’t just want you working, it wants you to believe striking is an option—so they can catch you the second you push too far. They let the words circulate, they let people dream about it, but they’ve ensured that the mechanisms for a general strike are dead on arrival.

So what do we do?

Instead of fighting on their terms, we need to cultivate the material conditions of a general strike without setting ourselves up for repression. The goal isn’t a moment of resistance; it’s a slow, grinding attrition against capital’s demands.

This is something workers and business owners in China have long understood. Within an economy that monitors, tracks, and punishes direct defiance, workers and small business owners have built an entire ecosystem of passive, small-scale disruption:

躺平 (Tangping) – “Lying flat”: Refusing to overwork, avoiding excessive consumption, cutting down on participation in capitalist growth.
摸鱼 (Moyu) – “Touching fish”: Finding ways to slack off at work, do personal tasks on company time, and subtly resist productivity expectations.
Small business "slowdowns": Deliberately taking longer to fulfill orders, delaying processes, and subtly reducing efficiency to limit corporate extraction.
All of these are done within the boundaries of legality, while still achieving the material slowdown that a strike would bring.

Instead of calling for a general strike and waiting for someone to deliver it, start cultivating these practices. The goal isn’t just to “not work”—it’s to starve capital without painting a target on your back. If millions engage in passive disruption, undercut overconsumption, and prioritize resource-sharing over waged survival, we create the material slowdown that capital dreads.

They’ve made a general strike impossible. So we don’t give them one. We give them something worse: an economy that bleeds out, quietly, without a single illegal call to action.

@mcc Whenever I am coaching new engineers who are trying to figure out what to do now that they built something and it doesn't work, I tell them this;

"Verify that everything you think is true, actually *is* true. For anything that isn't or is unexpected, find out *why*."

At the end of that exercise they will nearly always know what the problem is.

something I wish I had learned much earlier in life is that if you are weird, trying to be buttoned-down and normal in spaces that aren't for being weird in might feel safe, but being fully weird signals to other people that you are safe for them to be weird around, which is more important

Instead of, “I can’t unmask because no one will accept me,” what if it’s, “I must unmask because people already aren’t accepting this masked me?”

What if it’s, “I need to find out who will accept the real me.”

#AutisticMasking #ActuallyAutistic #Autistic #Neurodiversity #AuDHD #unmasking