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The Shitty Technology Adoption Curve (2022)

ay's links - Workplace surveillance is coming for you: Empricism-washing as a form of wage-theft. - Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

But when lockdown turned high-status white collar workers into home-workers, their bosses rolled out incredibly invasive spyware, including tools that watched them through their cameras, listened to their microphones, logged their keystrokes, scoured their hard-drives and read their text messages. This was the second coming of Taylorism, AKA "scientific management," an early 20th Century pseudoscience practiced by high-priced, unaccountable consultants who would fan out on factory floors in literal science cosplay, including lab-coats and clipboards, and loom over workers, watching their every movement, often going so far as to film them. Their case-studies are a trip up the Shitty Tech Adoption Curve, and includes $200/hour finance exec Carol Kraemer, who discovered that her boss was tracking her time in 10-minute increments and docking her pay for stretches where she took her fingers off her keyboard – to think, say, or make notes with pen and paper.

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