When I took my kid to New Zealand with me on a book-tour, I was delighted to learn that grocery stores had special aisles where all the kids'-eye-level candy had been removed, to minimize nagging. What a great idea!
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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:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter
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Related: countries around the world limit advertising to children, for two reasons:
1) Kids may not be stupid, but they are inexperienced, and that makes them gullible; and
2) Kids don't have money of their own, so their path to getting the stuff they see in ads is nagging their parents, which creates a natural constituency to support limits on kids' advertising (nagged parents).
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There's something especially annoying about ads targeted at getting credulous people to coerce or torment *other people* on behalf of the advertiser. For example, AI companies spent millions targeting your boss in an effort to convince them that you can be replaced with a chatbot that *absolutely, positively cannot do your job*.
3/
Your boss has no idea what your job entails, and is (not so) secretly convinced that you're a featherbedding parasite who only shows up for work because you fear the breadline, and not because your job is a) challenging, or b) rewarding:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer
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That makes them prime marks for chatbot-peddling AI pitchmen. Your boss would *love* to fire you and replace you with a chatbot. Chatbots don't unionize, they don't backtalk about stupid orders, and they don't experience any inconvenient moral injury when ordered to enshittify the product:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification
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Bosses are Bizarro-world Marxists. Like Marxists, your boss's worldview is organized around the principle that every dollar you take home in wages is a dollar that isn't available for executive bonuses, stock buybacks or dividends. That's why you boss is insatiably horny for firing you and replacing you with software. Software is cheaper, and it doesn't advocate for higher wages.
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That makes your boss *such* an easy mark for AI pitchmen, which explains the vast gap between the valuation of AI companies and the utility of AI to the customers that buy those companies' products. As an investor, buying shares in AI *might* represent a bet the usefulness of AI - but for many of those investors, backing an AI company is actually a bet on your boss's credulity and contempt for you and your job.
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But bosses' resemblance to toddlers doesn't end with their credulity. A toddler's path to getting that eye-height candy-bar goes through their exhausted parents. Your boss's path to realizing the productivity gains promised by an AI salesman runs through *you*.
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A new research report from the Upwork Research Institute offers a look into the bizarre situation unfolding in workplaces where bosses have been conned into buying AI and now face the challenge of getting it to work as advertised:
https://www.upwork.com/research/ai-enhanced-work-models
9/
The headline findings tell the whole story:
* 96% of bosses expect that AI will make their workers more productive;
* 85% of companies are either requiring or strongly encouraging workers to use AI;
* 49% of workers have no idea how AI is supposed to increase their productivity;
* 77% of workers say using AI *decreases* their productivity.
10/
Working at an AI-equipped workplaces is like being the parent of a furious toddler who has bought a million Sea Monkey farms off the back page of a comic book, and is now destroying your life with demands that you figure out how to get the brine shrimp he ordered from a notorious Holocaust denier to wear little crowns like they do in the ad:
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2004/hitler-and-sea-monkeys
11/
Bosses spend a lot of time thinking about your productivity. The "productivity paradox" shows a rapid, persistent decline in American worker productivity, starting in the 1970s and continuing to this day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
The "paradox" refers to the growth of IT, which is sold as a productivity-increasing miracle.
12/
There are many theories to explain this paradox. One especially good theory came from the late David Graeber (rest in power), in his 2012 essay, "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit":
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit
Graeber proposes that the growth of IT was part of a wider shift in research approaches. Research was once dominated by weirdos (e.g. Jack Parsons, Oppenheimer, etc) who operated with relatively little red tape.
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The rise of IT coincides with the rise of "managerialism," the McKinseyoid drive to monitor, quantify and - above all - *discipline* the workforce. IT made it easier to generate these records, which also made it normal to expect these records.
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Before long, every employee - including the "creatives" whose ideas were credited with the productivity gains of the American century *until* the 70s - was spending a huge amount of time (sometimes the majority of their working days) filling in forms, documenting their work, and generally producing a legible account of their day's work.
15/
All this data gave rise to a ballooning class of managers, who colonized every kind of institution - not just corporations, but also universities and government agencies, which were structured to resemble corporations (down to referring to voters or students as "customers").
16/
Even if you think all that record-keeping might be useful, there's no denying that the more time you spend *documenting* your work, the less time you have to *do* your work. The solution to this was inevitably *more IT*, sold as a way to make the record-keeping easier. But adding IT to a bureaucracy is like adding lanes to a highway: the easier it is to demand fine-grained record-keeping, the more record-keeping will be demanded of you.
17/
But that's not all IT did for workplaces. There are a couple areas in which IT *absolutely* increased the profitability of companies that invested in it.
First, IT allowed corporations to outsource production to low-waged countries in the global south, usually places with worse labor protection, weaker environmental laws, and easily bribed regulators. It's *really hard* to produce things in factories thousands of miles away, or to oversee remote workers in another country.
18/
But IT makes it possible to annihilate distance, time zone gaps, and language barriers. Corporations that figured out how to use IT to fire workers at home and exploit workers and despoil the environment in distant lands thrived. Executives who oversaw these projects rose through the ranks. For example, Tim Cook became the CEO of Apple thanks to his successes in moving production out of the USA and into China.
19/
Outsourcing provided a sugar high that compensated for declining productivity...for a while. But eventually, all the gains to be had from outsourcing were realized, and companies needed a new source of cheap gains. That's where "bossware" came in: the automation of workforce monitoring and discipline. Bossware made it possible to monitor workers at the finest-grained levels, measuring everything from keystrokes to eyeball movements.
20/
What's more, the declining power of the American worker - a nice bonus of the project to fire huge numbers of workers and ship their jobs overseas, which made the remainder terrified of losing their jobs and thus willing to eat a rasher of shit and ask for seconds - meant that bossware could be used to tie wages to metrics.
21/
It's not just gig workers who don't score consistent five star ratings from app users whose pay gets docked - it's also creative workers whose Youtube and Tiktok wages are cut for violating rules that they aren't allowed to know, because that might help them break the rules without being detected and punished:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions
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Bossware dominates workplaces from public schools to hospitals, restaurants to call centers, and extends to your home and car, if you're working from home (AKA "living at work") or driving for Uber or Amazon:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise
In providing a pretense for stealing wages, IT can increase profits, even as it reduces productivity:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no
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One way to think about how this works is through the automation-theory metaphor of a "centaur" and a "reverse centaur." In automation circles, a "centaur" is someone who is assisted by an automation tool - for example, when your boss uses AI to monitor your eyeballs in order to find excuses to steal your wages, they are a centaur, a human head atop a machine body that does all the hard work, far in excess of any human's capacity.
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@pluralistic "What do you mean the thing we're paying $300 per seat per year can't replace the occupant of the seat? The engineers at this other company I asked chatgpt about say it can do that!"
"Boss, I looked into it and it turns out the engineers at that company either lied or didn't write that article you read. The thing doesn't do the thing."
Cory Doctorow
Bruno Postle
Les Orchard
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spacebarbarian
Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷