Cory Doctorow writes about „Bossware and the shitty tech adoption curve”:

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.
 
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.”
 
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
 
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.

Tagged as: cory, democracy, rant, surveillance, work | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Samstag, 20210306, 12:30 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)