The reverse-centaur apocalypse is upon us
Microsoft, Oracle, and other bossware dealers are transforming our workplaces with “virtual whips.”
I’m coming to Defcon! On Aug 9, I’m emceeing the EFF Poker Tournament (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the Bricked and Abandoned panel (5PM, LVCC — L1 — HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I’m giving a keynote called “Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses’ insatiable horniness for enshittification” (noon, LVCC — L1 — HW1–11–01).
In thinking about the relationship between tech and labor, one of the most useful conceptual frameworks is “centaurs” vs “reverse-centaurs”:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/
A centaur is someone whose work is supercharged by automation: you are a human head atop the tireless body of a machine that lets you get more done than you could ever do on your own.
A reverse-centaur is someone who is harnessed to the machine, reduced to a mere peripheral for a cruelly tireless robotic overlord that directs you to do the work that it can’t, at a robotic pace, until your body and mind are smashed.
Bosses love being centaurs. While workplace monitoring is as old as Taylorism — the “scientific management” of the previous century that saw labcoated frauds dictating the fine movements of working people in a kabuki of “efficiency” — the lockdowns saw an explosion of bossware, the digital tools that let bosses monitor employees to a degree and at a scale that far outstrips the capacity of any unassisted human being.
Armed with bossware, your boss becomes a centaur, able to monitor you down to your keystrokes, the movements of your eyes, even the ambient sound around you. It was this technology that transformed “work from home” into “live at work.” But bossware doesn’t just let your boss spy on you — it lets your boss control you. \
It turns you into a reverse-centaur.
“Data At Work” is a research project from Cracked Labs that dives deep into the use of surveillance and control technology in a variety of workplaces — including workers’ own cars and homes:
https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work
It consists of a series of papers that take deep dives into different vendors’ bossware products, exploring how they are advertised, how they are used, and (crucially) how they make workers feel. There are also sections on how these interact with EU labor laws (the project is underwritten by the Austrian Arbeiterkammer), with the occasional aside about how weak US labor laws are.
The latest report in the series comes from Wolfie Christl, digging into Microsoft’s “Dynamics 365,” a suite of mobile apps designed to exert control over “field workers” — repair technicians, security guards, cleaners, and home help for ill, elderly and disabled people:
https://crackedlabs.org/dl/CrackedLabs_Christl_MobileWork.pdf
It’s…not good. Microsoft advises its customers to use its products to track workers’ location every “60 to 300 seconds.” Workers are given tasks broken down into subtasks, each with its own expected time to completion. Workers are expected to use the app every time they arrive at a site, begin or complete a task or subtask, or start or end a break.
For bosses, all of this turns into a dashboard that shows how each worker is performing from instant to instant, whether they are meeting time targets, and whether they are spending more time on a task than the client’s billing rate will pay for. Each work order has a clock showing elapsed seconds since it was issued.
For workers, the system generates new schedules with new work orders all day long, refreshing your work schedule as frequently as twice per hour. Bosses can flag workers as available for jobs that fall outside their territories and/or working hours, and the system will assign workers to jobs that require them to work in their off hours and travel long distances to do so.
Each task and subtask has a target time based on “AI” predictions. These are classic examples of Goodhart’s Law: “any metric eventually becomes a target.” The average time that workers take becomes the maximum time that a worker is allowed to take. Some jobs are easy, and can be completed in less time than assigned. When this happens, the average time to do a job shrinks, and the time allotted for normal (or difficult) jobs contracts.
Bosses get stack-ranks of workers showing which workers closed the most tickets, worked the fastest, spent the least time idle between jobs, and, of course, whether the client gave them five stars. Workers know it, creating an impossible bind: to do the job well, in a friendly fashion, the worker has to take time to talk with the client, understand their needs, and do the job. Anything less will generate unfavorable reports from clients. But doing this will blow through time quotas, which produces bad reports from the bossware. Heads you lose, tails the boss wins.
Predictably, Microsoft has shoveled “AI” into every corner of this product. Bosses don’t just get charts showing them which workers are “underperforming” — they also get summaries of all the narrative aspects of the workers’ reports (e.g. “My client was in severe pain so I took extra time to make her comfortable before leaving”), filled with the usual hallucinations and other botshit.
No boss could exert this kind of fine-grained, soul-destroying control over any workforce, much less a workforce that is out in the field all day, without Microsoft’s automation tools. Armed with Dynamics 365, a boss becomes a true centaur, capable of superhuman feats of labor abuse.
And when workers are subjected to Dynamics 365, they become true reverse-centaurs, driven by “digital whips” to work at a pace that outstrips the long-term capacity of their minds and bodies to bear it. The enthnographic parts of the report veer between chilling and heartbreaking.
Microsoft strenuously objects to this characterization, insisting that their tool (which they advise bosses to use to check on workers’ location every 60–300 seconds) is not a “surveillance” tool, it’s a “coordination” tool. They say that all the AI in the tool is “Responsible AI,” which is doubtless a great comfort to workers.
In Microsoft’s (mild) defense, they are not unique. Other reports in the series show how retail workers and hotel housekeepers are subjected to “despot on demand” services provided by Oracle:
https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/retail-hospitality
Call centers, are even worse. After all, most of this stuff started with call centers:
https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/callcenter
I’ve written about Arise, a predatory “work from home” company that targets Black women to pay the company to work for it (they also have to pay if they quit!). Of course, they can be fired at will:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners
There’s also a report about Celonis, a giant German company no one has ever heard of, which gathers a truly nightmarish quantity of information about white-collar workers’ activities, subjecting them to AI phrenology to judge their “emotional quality” as well as other metrics:
https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/processmining-algomanage
As Celonis shows, this stuff is coming for all of us. I’ve dubbed this process “the shitty technology adoption curve”: the terrible things we do to prisoners, asylum seekers and people in mental institutions today gets repackaged tomorrow for students, parolees, Uber drivers and blue-collar workers. Then it works its way up the privilege gradient, until we’re all being turned into reverse-centaurs under the “digital whip” of a centaur boss:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge
In mediating between asshole bosses and the workers they destroy, these bossware technologies do more than automate: they also insulate. Thanks to bossware, your boss doesn’t have to look you in the eye (or come within range of your fists) to check in on you every 60 seconds and tell you that you’ve taken 11 seconds too long on a task. I recently learned a useful term for this: an “accountability sink,” as described by Dan Davies in his new book, The Unaccountability Machine, which is high on my (very long) list of books to read:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
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CC BY 3.0
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