Workplace surveillance is coming for you

Empricism washing as a form of wage-theft.

If you want to do something terrible with technology, you can’t just roll it out on people with money and social capital. They’ll complain and your idea will tank. Successful shitty tech rollouts start with people you can abuse with impunity (prisoners, kids, migrants, etc) and then work their way up the privilege gradient. I call it the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve.

The point of the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve is to normalize technological oppression, one group at a time. 20 years ago, if you were eating your dinner under the unblinking eye of a video-camera, it was because you were in a supermax prison. Now, thanks to “luxury surveillance,” you can get the same experience in your middle-class home with your Google, Apple or Amazon “smart” camera. Those cameras climbed the curve, going from prisons to schools to workplaces to homes.

The pandemic was a great accellerant for late-stage capitalism, converting our homes to rent-free annexes of our employers’ facilities, and turning “work from home” into “live at work.” Bossware, a fringe technological category, experienced a massive boom, rocketing up the privilege gradient.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware