> This inability to understand the difference between using a technology and having the same technology used against you is endemic to the industry. Take Crossover, which bills itself as "the Fitbit of productivity," but whose customers rhapsodize about the product giving them "powers of near X-ray vision." The point of a Fitbit is to help you improve something that matters to you – but Crossover's customers want to use it to punish other people for failing to follow orders. It's the difference between a Fitbit and a prisoner-tracking cuff – which make crossover "the ankle-braclet of productivity."
This was the most insightful point in the article for me. The distinction between being a user and being a target applies to much more than bossware, too. (Generative AI being an obvious recent example.)
The electronic health records bit totally resonated. I was involved in a selection committee for a new health record for the municipal public health clinics I worked for a number of moons ago as the physician champion. They went with the product that the billing, finance and statistics department wanted, ignoring the fact that the interface was poorer for the clinicians and that the beancounters worked with the data, not with the program itself (i.e., forgetting that "garbage in garbage out"). I made the strategic mistake of saying honestly that we could learn to work with anything but it was suboptimal; they heard the first part but not the second and went with it, then they got mad when I refused to endorse it and sell the other clinicians on it. In the end it was never implemented and they chose Epic a few years later that now everybody hates. A massive waste of time and money.
> The bossware problem is a boss problem, in other words. It follows that fixing the bossware problem is the workers' job, and indeed, the Times feature notes that Amazon has been dismantling its bossware surveillance in a bid to reduce its workers' support for unionization, which promises to ban bossware from Amazon workplace. Bosses deride unions as reducing "freedom" – but just the threat of unions delivers more freedom to workers than any right-to-work law ever could.
Cory be like "I wrote about this in a story of mine in 2019" when the bit about YT's mom in her office in Stephenson's Snow Crash, 30 years before TFA was written, perfectly captures the present situation.
Yeah but he didn’t write it so it doesn’t matter, that’s why he has half a dozen links to his own work in a short essay.
The man isn’t wrong but the relentless self promotion Doctorow does always comes over as mildly off putting.
At first I LOL WTF, but then I remembered how far down the societal ladder goes. Some schools have a constant problem with vandalism. Knowing which kids are in the halls at what time will help narrow down which shithead ripped the sink off the wall.
At least in schools that information has little consequence, while at-will work ensures this is just the 5 lines needed for the Cardinal to hang a man with.
I'd imagine that the kind of companies that used "bossware" to spy on their remote workers are also the kind of companies that have long since RTOed. Both things are signs of a toxic work environment where the management doesn't trust their employees to work.
The remaining market for this kind of malware would likely be schools because retaining the ability to do Zoom school is probably useful for when they have to cancel classes due to inclement weather. Because everybody knows that K-12 school is mostly a waste of time so you have to surveil students to make sure they aren't just blowing the whole thing off and playing Fortnite or Minecraft.
If we want to prevent surveillance capitalism we’re going to need to establish a constitutional right to privacy in the US (and the legal equivalent in other countries).
In EU we now have a time tracking law mandating companies to track and keep track of their employee’s hours.
While one can defend it in a good faith, it is not a stretch to see how it enables and empowers the behavior from this article.
If you're the kind of person who goes to the comments first, I'm here to tell you there's no need to read the article. Just say "bossware" to yourself 10 times.
This was the most insightful point in the article for me. The distinction between being a user and being a target applies to much more than bossware, too. (Generative AI being an obvious recent example.)