I’m a CS student, I have some time before I graduate and have kind of dipped my toes in various things without specializing in anything. I would like to know what would be useful for the movement, so that I can use my skills to contribute.
And before people say “everything is useful”…well yeah but it’s nice and fulfilling to have specific ideas I can work on learning/building myself.
Also where can I find leftist open source projects? I know lemmy and this website for one are open source but not sure of others.
Learn to organize (workplace, housing, etc. etc.). I’m not kidding. Way more important than any code-related skills you’re learning in school from the POV of benefiting the proletariat, and something woefully lacking in most coders despite our coming proletarianization being obvious. You can join the IWW and they’ll teach you for free.
Actual technical skills? Probably infosec stuff. Do CTFs, etc.
Very little of the rest of it is useful for proles in a world ruled by the bourgeoisie. And once that’s not the case, just pursue what interests you in the same way you would any career as a software engineer because it’ll all be useful. Could also look at emigrating to an AES state where that’s already true.
:jesse-wtf:
my first page of results is various infosec capture the flag game sites and the childrens tumor foundation
Bug Hunting/Ethical Hacking and Pentesting.
Bug bounties unfortunately suck. The ones paying a ton are basically evil digital mercenary companies that sell the exploits to gulf state monarchs or the NSA. The companies whose software is vulnerable will pay like a fraction of it because otherwise their own staff would leave and become contractors
But still, I agree with this. Develop and use exploits and tools. In addition to on the ground organizing as others have say, I would say knowing how to take down systems and protect others is critical if something major happens and it’s no longer a LARP, or if you simply want to make a message when some asshole does something.
I’m not going to advocate to joining some soulless defense contractors, but a lot of pentesting gets you close to large companies and governments without directly benefitting from children being murdered.
None. Want to benefit the leftist movement? Switch majors to something in the Humanities.
Signed: 20+ IT worker
I don’t think humanities will benefit anyone either lol. Look at all the so called communist academics. Few are actually in touch with people.
I thought about it some more, and I think some journalism might be beneficial. You might expose corruption and obtain insider sources who can provide information to help organizers. I imagine a lot of union drives would’ve been silenced by the media if it weren’t for insiders exposing attempts at surveillance and manipulation ( remember Amazon colluding with traffic light companies to make people late for union voting? )
Realistically, the only way to benefit is to actually talk and interact with people on a ground level regardless of your major. Technology will be useful in times of intense organizing like strikes and protests where infiltrators are a plenty. Teaching people basic privacy and evasion techniques will help even if the feds already have crackers and back doors for the encryptions
But other than that, most projects are not going to help anybody. If you’re actually serious about benefitting the movement, you’ll get a decent job and not give a shit about owning a house or car as an “investment” (as in, use the objects as intended, not speculate with them) and instead use your wealth to buy/cook food, buy clothes, contribute to event costs, or help strikers pay bills and groceries.
Many people are adverse to communism of socialism, but the truth is when push comes to shove, they will support whoever is giving them food and water. Look at Ohio. Many of them welcomed Trump even though he was responsible for deregulation, but he brought food and water while Biden was in Ukraine. Performance like that will only garner seldom support until you get tired of pretending to care. If you prove that you actually care and are willing to give up something to benefit others, people will either come to support or tolerate you.
Distributed mesh systems
Has any mesh network ever actually be useful? It just sounds like a neat thing but it require so much participation with no clear result.
