Captain America: Brave New World

I saw it. It was OK. Not terrible, not great. It was trying to do too many things at once - rehash the "what does it mean for a Black man to be the symbol of a racist nation?" arc from "Falcon and the Winter Soldier", be a political thriller where the infrastructure of the US Government is being manipulated by a terrorist mastermind, and be a sequel to "The Incredible Hulk" (2008), a 17 year old film, without that film's lead character.

( Mild Spoilers )

I wanted to see this film because of the hostility it got online for being too "woke" - I wanted to put a bit of my cash towards its box office. I hate that seeing or not seeing films has been made into a political stance by the fascists and the racists and the incels. But I was reasonably entertained by the movie.

There is power in a union?

For a while now various friends have been talking about UTAW, the United Tech and Allied Workers Union. Technically it's a branch of the CWU, with a focus on the tech industry, and attempting to organise online rather than through geographical branches.

I've never been a member of a union, and slightly sceptical of them. We had a bad time when mother_bones needed employment support from her Unison branch but they were too busy running a high-profile campaign. And I saw the way some unions backed Labour over the National Identity Database when I was campaigning against it. I did look into UTAW but their campaigns seem worthy but not particularly relevant to the issues facing the UK tech industry. There's nothing there about AI/LLMs, nothing about return-to-office mandates and the associated risks of Covid and Long Covid.

But the people I know who are members are adamant that I would be pushing at an open door if I raised these issues on the UTAW members-only Discord, so today I signed up. We'll see how it goes and whether this is a useful activism outlet for me.