Exactly. The way they try to convert human beings into data they can parse, collate, and delete reminds me of part of the big speech at the end of The Great Dictator:

"Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts!

You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural!"

We have to hold on to the understanding that there is a living, breathing human being behind every single data point they're carelessly bulldozing.

💥

"I’m also angry at what was taken from me. At what’s being taken from all of us. I’ve watched a wonderful job, a wonderful place to work, a wonderful team get pulled apart by rich men in ill-fitting suits, each of them parroting the same talking points around “realignment” and “right-sizing”.

Very clear description of the motivation and greed behind recent DOGE(dept of government enshittification) *privatization scheme* for personal gain.

"Instead, as Anil Dash predicted, the billionaire’s so-called “efficiency“ “department” is best understood as a sprawling form of procurement capture, in which a group of impossibly rich individuals are trampling over the regulations — and the federal workers — that stand between them and a deep, deep revenue stream: your tax dollars. "

For the benefit of other non-Americans who are looking on in horror and don't know what 18F is:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F

"18F helps other government agencies build, buy, and share technology products. The team consists of designers, software engineers, strategists, and product managers who collaborate with other agencies to fix technical problems, build products, and improve public service through technology."

@b_cavello Beyond the labor laws: Even heads of major agency divisions are resigning, loudly, because they know they can make a bigger difference going loud than getting axed. And staying on and remaining silent is over the line for many. (I’m sure you know this! I’m just making the connection.)

There’s no simple or single answer here and I think we benefit more from careful thinking about specifics than from scorn and demands based on cartoony oversimplification. 🤷🏻