Thread by @doctorow

Just as the Texas blackouts were a payday for energy companies that profit from human misery, the pandemic is a gold-rush for the #bossware companies that spy on workers required to convert their homes to rent-free office space to their employers.

pluralistic.net/2020/07/01/bos…

1/

Bossware's origins are Taylorism, the time-motion/scientific management fad of the late 19th century, when charlatans dressed up in science-coats and micromanaged skilled tradespeople with humiliatingly detailed proscriptions.

2/

The digital age is a fantastic boon to bosses who want to spy on and punish working people, and following the shitty technology adoption curve, they tried bossware first on the low-waged, precarious workers who lack the social power to push back against it.

3/

These workers didn't take it lying down. As @jamiekmccallum writes in @TheProspect , laundry workers fought the "electronic whip" of "gamified" bossware; long-haul truckers "slow rolled" to protest "electronic location devices," etc.

prospect.org/labor/remote-c…

4/

The theory of the shitty tech adoption curve predicts that vendors use resistance from low-status subjects to find and remove rough edges from abusive technology, then move the smoothed-over tech up the social power gradient to higher-status workers.

5/

Work-from-home (AKA "live at work") is a perfect opportunity to refine the shitty technology of bossware, a bonanza for collaborators like "ActivTrak, Avaza, VeriClock, Boomr, Hubstaff, TSheets, StaffCop, Time Doctor, DeskTime Pro, TrackView, InterGuard and Wiretap."

6/

Pre-lockdown, these tools were already logging keystrokes, intercepting email, logging clicks, capturing still images and videos of workers at their desks, and transmitting workers' locations in and out of work hours.

7/

Now, with bosses in a panic at the thought of workers "stealing" the time to look after kids, cook a meal, or take a leisurely toilet break, bossware is an easy sell. Companies like @InterGuard report 300% revenue growth through the pandemic, a profiteering success story.

8/

Interguard is just one of many bossware vendors that has learned the lesson of the laundry workers and their fight against the electronic whip: its product is designed to be stealth-installed and to run without the worker's knowledge or consent.

9/

This makes it especially well-suited as a punitive technology, and indeed, Interguard markets its products as a means to "conduct covert investigations and bullet-proof evidence gathering without alarming the suspected wrongdoer."

10/

Back in 1987, Congress's Office of Technology Assessment sounded the alarm, warning that in the absence of unions, bossware would lead to "unfair or abusive monitoring" (shortly thereafter, Newt Gingrich shot the OTA in the head and left its corpse to rot).

11/

When white-collar workers encounter bossware, it's often dressed up as "metrics" - a putatively neutral statistical exercise that might even benefit workers by helping them improve their output. But the pitch to bosses is all about finding and firing the low-performers

12/

The joke's on them. Bossware like Office 365 (which gathers exhaustive data on workers) deliver proprietary commercial intelligence to Microsoft - control-freak bosses trade the store to a convicted monopolist in exchange for worker surveillance.

pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the…

13/

Remember, OTF predicted unionization could prevent bossware abuses. Unsurprisingly, bossware is key to union-busting, with bosses using it to discover and punish union organizers in the workplace - at the very moment that tech workers are using digital tools to join unions.

14/

Meanwhile, precarious workers - the disproportionately Black, woman workers tricked into signing up for the call-center service Arise, are kept from fighting the worker misclassification that forces them to pay "cancellation fees" to quit their jobs.

pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/pap…

15/

It's as neat an example of the shitty technology adoption curve as you could ask for, and it demonstrates the need for solidarity among all workers. Bossware got rolled out against precarious, low-status workers first because they lack the political power to fight it.

16/

If elite/high-waged workers had raised a stink then and joined their blue collar comrades in fighting back, they might have strangled bossware in its cradle - but now it's too late. Bossware is literally in their homes, watching them with a baleful, unblinking eye.

17/

I'm an sf writer, so I know that no one can predict the future and only fools and charlatans claim to know what the future will bring. But I also know that there are leading indicators, waves that follow a predictable pattern in their sweep.

18/

Abusive tech starts with asylum seekers, prisoners, parolees; moves up to kids, people on benefits and mental patients; then to blue-collar workers, then white-collar workers, then everybody, even first class fliers being watched by seatback cameras.

19/

Solidarity is the preventative and the cure: not just in empathy, but also in self-interest. We have to fight abusive tech wherever we find it, because if we don't, we'll have to fight it when it reaches us - and by then, there may be no one left to fight it with us.

20/

Cryteria (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9…

CC BY:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.…

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb…

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb…