Cooperative Economics for Engineers
summary
Claim: tech workers share more practical incentives with historical cooperatives and pirates than with managerial hierarchies. The talk traces concrete mechanisms — medieval guilds that train and insure craftspeople, lex mercatoria merchant contracts, pirate codes that allocate generous shares and pay for lost limbs, Luddites smashing stocking frames (early punch‑card machines), recent Google walkouts, NPM union drives, and Palantir/AWS ties to ICE — and warns of imminent laws criminalizing interference with cloud/AI systems. Examples and outcomes are specific, not just rhetoric.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Start
- 6:59What Is Tech Labor Going To Look like in the Future
- 7:47The Roman Empire
- 10:40Middle Ages
- 12:04Medieval Guilds
- 12:29Local Institutions
- 23:09Unionism
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