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.
No tech project is going to build socialism. Many Occupy Wall street era people tried it and it went no where. That said, in the course of building a socialist movement IRL, you'll find having tech skills are occaisonally useful, either to have an online presence like a website or to automate tedious computer work.
- deploy a static site with github or gitlab pages
- DNS management.
- manage a linux cloud VM. ssh and bash etc.
- deploy services to a VM with docker-compose. Eg self host wordpress
- Processing datasets like membership lists. VBA, python, R etc.
- web scraping whatever data you'll need.
I cannot emphasize this enough, the less code the better. Keep project small and tight. Try to leverage existing functionality as much as possible.
Cryptography and networking to securely communicate during organization and monitor suspicious traffic
General OSINT skills to vet people and provide proof of any claims
Not a CS skill, but common in security work is social engineering, and hell, maybe even a little bit of journalism/blogging. Build up a reputation of some sort and attempt to find sympathetic/disillusioned sources who might expose some stuff that will help protestors/organizers
Web design/UX maybe? These days a lot of people are used to or drawn to “modern” and “sleek” designs. Marxists.org will likely deter new people lol
The first two will probably be the most “useful,” but as others have stated, it’s mostly a lucrative field to make a bunch of money
However, if you want to benefit people (which won’t necessarily further any socialist cause), you can get a job at a public organization such as hospitals and schools. Some libraries are large and popular enough to warrant in house IT staff.
Sysadmin shit, to host independent communities and servers. Not cloud BS, hosting on dedicated servers instead - from at least slightly more censorship-resistant hosts - or even home servers (greater legal risk), and load-balancing properly. High level (as in: removed from the math, not "advanced" - just get a handle on what's secure) encryption stuff, to implement secure communication that does not rely on an easy common target (custom apps potentially, including mobile apps for the zoomers - even if they're mostly just a chat frondend to GPG; I recommend user-enabled NFC key sharing if you go this route - tap a few buttons, put your smartphone against a comrade's phone, boom, trusted key exchange - do not trust smartphones for anything too critical though, and the same applies to windows computers or linux ones without proper full-disk encryption). Webshit stuff, to publish content and try and inform people (though mind you on that one wordpress would almost universally do the job). Cybersecurity stuff, finally, for data extraction and hacktivism and the like - auditing code (or fuzztesting proprietary binaries) for flaws; not publishing them straight out and exploiting them to disrupt shit or at the very least diffuse a message.
Basically what @captcha said
Put your time into getting a decent job where you do as little work as possible and use your bazinga bucks / limitless vacation policy for organizing
As a software engineer, I asked myself this question a lot when I was in school. Probably, the biggest is enabling secure communication, learning how to hide your footsteps and the footsteps of others. Secure web design, development, hosting is a big one, on top of all of the problem solving techniques you will actually be learning. I find myself benefitting greatly from working on huge projects that would have seemed daunting to me a long time ago, it's a really useful skill to take something very big and break it down into pieces until none is left.
Outside of that, the best thing you could do is organize. Join an organization if you haven't already. Meet people in your community, support striking workers, etc.
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
stay in shape, make friends with your neighbors, get some guns and learn how to use em.
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.
What if the left just started doing web 3.0 ourselves but without the crypto BS?
We can do IPFS and just donate harddrive space :meow-coffee:
How does one donate hardrive space to IPFS? I thought it worked by rehosting any data you collected?
Are there media sharing sites based on IPFS? I remember there being something like that on zeronet.
this is a good idea, let's all buy $40k worth of MaoCoins and build a publicly audible workers block chain which will back the side-chain called UpLenins for frictionless theory consensus and decentralized regulation of praxis yield curves.
Good reason to get into ham radio as well (a wireless router is just a fancy walkie talkie).
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.
cuba plays wow & cs & shit over a volunteer-run mesh network
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.
