Pandemics, as the historian Yuval Noah Harari observed at the beginning of the current one, tend to accelerate history. If you doubt that then think back to, say, January 2020. If you told people then that by April that year major corporations would be insisting that most of their staff worked from home, they would have given you funny looks and checked for the nearest exit. Nobody then had heard of Zoom and something called “video conferencing” was considered either a geeky affectation or the last resort of organisations that could not afford air fares for senior executives to go to Rotterdam or Las Vegas for a one-hour meeting.
And then, in the blink of an eye, working from home had become not just an acronym – WFH – but a cliche and Zoom, like Google before it, had become a verb as well as a noun. The tiresome daily commute shrank to padding from bedroom to kitchen to a laptop on a desk. For an initial period, utopian visions of better work-life balances blossomed. But then the new reality dawned: instead of us going to the office, the office had come to us and we were working, eating and sleeping in it.
Still, we had a bit more autonomy WFH than we had in the office under the beady-eyed surveillance of managers. Or so we thought. But capitalism – and its servant, technology – never sleeps. Those managers, who had always regarded WFH as some kind of work-avoidance scam, realised that digital technology was just the ticket for keeping an eye on their newly remote subordinates. It would make sure that they weren’t idly browsing Pinterest, or bidding on eBay, or doing private emails, or a thousand other unproductive things, on the company’s dime. And so a swarm of tech companies evolved to service those paranoid suspicions. Thus was born the new industry of little tech.
Coworker.org is an admirable American non-profit organisation that builds digital tools and communities for employees to share information, form collectives and advocate for change. It also campaigns to prevent employers from dismantling hard-won employment rights through increasingly sophisticated surveillance, data-mining and the fragmentation of the workplace. And it has recently published a sizable database of companies that make “bossware” – software for enabling employers to keep a close eye on staff who are working from home.
The first thing that strikes one browsing through the database entries is that employers seeking intrusive surveillance of their homeworkers have a wide number of tools to choose from, ranging from software for general oversight (sometimes benign, as in detecting inappropriate or inadvertent attempts to share confidential files) to monitoring of a really creepy kind.
One company (chosen at random) describes itself as purveyor of “a robust, state-of-the-art technology that makes employee tracking simple and effective”. Its keystroke and activity tracking feature helps “keep track of keystroke and mouse-click activity of remote employees” and can “detect and send alerts about suspicious keyloggers, false keystrokes and prohibited data-copy attempts to the management”. And so on.
Another, billed as Your Favorite Small Business Employee Monitoring Tool asks if “you know how much time your employees spend working. Personal use of employers’ computers is widespread beyond imaginable. Track their computer activities and learn whose performance is exemplary and who is abusing their workplace.”
Most of these blurbs for broad privacy intrusions come coated with three coats of prime corporate cant about “ethics” and “consent”, which should raise a hollow laugh from employees who will see them – accurately – as amounting to this: accept this or look for work elsewhere.
Coworker.org has also released a 73-page report, Little Tech Is Coming for the Workers, which makes interesting reading. Among other things, it reveals that little tech isn’t so little: the database includes 550 companies. They include some giants that have worker-surveillance products in their portfolios, but a lot of smaller outfits that most of us have never heard of.
The report says that “venture capital, private equity and hedge funds are channelling record-breaking investments into the expansion of this unregulated marketplace whose products erode labour standards for workers and exploit weak labour protections”. For these investors, the lack of regulation is a feature, not a bug. As is the fact that the technology is a force for, as the report puts it, “depersonalisation and dehumanisation”.
This industry revealed by Coworker.org’s research may be little tech, but in key respects it’s just aping its bigger brother. Reading through the blurbs puffing its products, one comes away with the same feeling one gets from inspecting the algorithmic tools of the tech giants. In both cases, software written by a small elite is designed to monitor, classify and exploit “ordinary” people in ways that the programmers and their corporate masters would never themselves tolerate. And in that sense it’s just another example of how power corrupts those who possess it.
What I’ve been reading
Information highway
How Facebook Twisted Canada’s Trucker Convoy Into an International Movement is a nice piece of analysis on The Verge by Ryan Broderick.
Tech hurts
An insightful essay by Yaël Eisenstat and Nils Gilman in Noema magazine: The Myth of Tech Exceptionalism.
Pandemic nostalgia
Why Are People Nostalgic for Early-Pandemic Life? is a striking examination by Morgan Ome and Christian Paz of the strange nostalgia captured on TikTok and YouTube.
