Wiedzieliście, że Krytyka Polityczna publikuje po polsku eseje Cory'ego Doctorowa @pluralistic?
Np. ten o tym, że ciągłe patrzenie ludziom na ręce sprawia, że nie uczą się i nie rozwijają. Taka oczywistość, ale jednak nadzór np. w pracy jest powszechny. I ta nazwa #bossware - piękne:
#Surveillance#Bossware#WorkplaceSurveillance#Privacy: "Learning, growth, and fulfillment all require a zone of privacy, a time and place where we are not observed. Far from making us accountable, continuous, fine-grained surveillance by authority figures just scares us into living a cramped, inauthentic version of ourselves, where growth is all but impossible. Others have observed the role this plays in right-wing culture war bullshit: "an armed society is a polite society" is code for "people who make me feel uncomfortable just by existing should be terrorized into hiding their authentic selves from me." The point of Don't Say Gay laws and anti-trans bills isn't to eliminate gender nonconformity – it's to drive it into hiding.
"Silicon Valley ideology valorises disruption in the board-room but crushes it in the increasingly digitised and surveilled classroom, and grinds its face into the concrete floor of the Amazon warehouse"
In Blood In the Machine,@bcmerchant delivers the definitive history of the #Luddites, and the clearest analysis of the automator's playbook, where "entrepreneurs'" lawless extraction from workers is called "innovation" and "inevitable":
If you'd like an essay-formatted 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:
Craft workers in home workshops are told that they're their own bosses, but in reality they are constantly monitored by #bossware that watches out of their computers' cameras and listens through its mic. They have to pay for the privilege of working for their bosses, and pay to quit. If their children make so much as a peep, they can lose their jobs. They don't work from home - they live at work:
This week on my podcast, I read "Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet," my recent @medium column about building a better internet:
If you'd like an essay-formatted 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:
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare - but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.
But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you're not running an #AdBlocker. It's being able to remotely verify that you haven't disabled the #bossware your employer requires. It's the power to block someone from opening an #Office365 doc with #LibreOffice.
My god, they sure hate#LinaKhan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of #Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory.
She sure must be doing something right, huh?
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this to read or share, here's a link to pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
And its bad conduct didn't end with the browser wars. You remember how the lockdown turned all our homes into rent-free branch offices for our employers? Microsoft seized on that moment to offer our bosses keystroke-and-click level surveillance of our use of our own computers in our own homes, via its #Office365#bossware product:
If you've followed my work for a long time, you've watched me transition from a "#linkblogger" who posts 5-15 short hits every day to an "essay-#blogger" who posts 5-7 long articles/week. I'm loving the new mode of working, but returning to linkblogging is also intensely, unexpectedly gratifying:
Back in 2016, @bunnie and #EdwardSnowden released the #IntrospectionEngine, a separate computer that you could install in an Iphone, which would tell you whether it was infected with spyware:
But while there are some really interesting positive applications for this kind of software, the negative ones - unbeatable #DRM and tamper-proof #bossware - are genuinely horrifying.
My latest @locusmag column is "The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have A Point," about all the ways that I agree with the Right's paranoid fringe, whom I mostly disagree with:
If you'd like an essay-formatted 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:
Covid is real. The swivel-eyed loons say it was made up or exaggerated, and in any rate, it was a pretext to impose restrictive and extractive policies on everyday people. Covid is real, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a pretext, too.
For example, covid let our bosses declare our homes to be branch offices of their commercial premises, and then use #bossware to spy on us and control us in our own homes, turning "work from home" into "live at work":
In 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term "web-log" to describe his website "Robot Wisdom," where he logged his journeys around this exciting new digital space called "the web." Two years later, @peterme shortened "web-blog" to "#blog":
If you'd like an essay-formatted 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:
Sticking with labor for a moment: the Biden administration is investigating the use of #bossware - the spyware your boss uses to monitor your driving, keystrokes, web usage, location, hand-movements, facial expressions, even your eyeballs:
"#ReverseCentaurs," because they're the inverse of the #AI theorists' idea of a "#centaur," that is, a computer-assisted human. Instead, they are human-assisted computers, with their every last move scripted to the finest degree by #bossware that they have to pay for: