If a person works in a factory or a retail store every day for their entire life, none of the work that they do will lead to the discovery of the historical development of the capitalist mode of production. In their work they do not conduct the experiments which would lead to this knowledge. An understanding of historical materialism and political economy can only come from a scientific analysis of philosophy, history, and the conditions of the working class.

If you need a quick explainer on the communist theory of social revolution, I think this is a pretty solid one. Part II can be read here and gets more into specific US contexts.

What we are learning at an alarmingly fast pace is that not only are some of the locks easy to pick, in some cases the door is wide open or there’s a giant hole in the wall.

You may or may not have noticed (though I did make a blogpost about it) but I took down this site for a couple hours last night -- the reason being a massive PHP exploit that this site (& a few others I selfhost) were vulnerable to.

I'm not really sure what to do with this, other than what I can do -- be wary, pull things offline if need be. I am a bit of a pessimist in general and I know that, but I do think it is a very rough time to be "getting into" hosting websites, and yet that is what I'm doing.

This stuff has seeped into the soil like a crude oil spill. There is so much viral hyperbole about what these things are capable of that is often followed by a sobering and less sexy reality. What I mourn is the loss of trust, the alienation of people with institutional knowledge and the chaotic disruption of real communities by strangers walking in like a toddler with a Glock.