Panopticon Now: Tech Companies Push to A Forever-Remote World Is Pandemic Profiteering That Will Fuck Us for Decades to Come
“The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city….”
Foucault, Discipline and Punish
The country is frightened, sick, heavy with mass-death and unprecedented job loss; forced to shelter in place with workplaces and the stuff of communal humanity suddenly emptied. Yet in the midst of the pandemic, tech is not only holding its wealth but expanding it. With 38 million Americans recently unemployed, Bezos is about to become the world’s first trillionaire; if you thought such tidings would sate the greed of his monopoly, nothing will. He’s yanked the paltry $2 extra an hour in hazard pay from warehouse workers risking death from COVID-19. Facebook has hit an all-time stock high and Zuckerberg has added billions in value to his personal net worth. Tech continues to make money hand over fist; that this happens in the midst of a global pandemic that devastates everything else it touches points to the fundamental aberration of the industry and its true technology: to profit off the misery, isolation and fear of humanity. Perhaps there has never been a moment when the economics of the thing spoke so deeply the divide between the profits of tech companies and the interests of the people.
But oh, the pandemic-profiteering is good: with 62% of American workers working from home during COVID-19, and much of the populace on lock-down, there’s been a sudden and dramatic uptick in use of technology platforms -- just when you thought they couldn’t possibly gain more screen time. With a taste of the profits to be had in a remote-everything world -- remote schooling, remote concerts, remote relationships, remote working -- Twitter, Facebook, Stripe, Square and Slack have all announced their intentions to switch to a fully remote-worker strategy: This is only the start of a concerted effort to manifest the perpetually remote world that will extend the COVID-19 tech windfalls into the forever future.
History will record COVID-19 as a turning point for Technology Empire. As Naomi Klein states: “It’s a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces, but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. Of course, for many of us, those same homes were already turning into our never-off workplaces and our primary entertainment venues before the pandemic, and surveillance incarceration ‘in the community’ was already booming. But in the future that is hastily being constructed, all of these trends are poised for a warp-speed acceleration.”
The surface area for increased technology usage and profit is enormous. We’re at the start of a brand new tech campaign to rip out, replace, displace, disrupt existing infrastructure -- we’ve never seen the world more fragile and vulnerable to such efforts, or tech so strongly positioned to take it on. While there are public health and other arguments for a remote-first strategy in a pandemic age, a push to a remote-first culture that is led by tech companies and designed to primarily benefit them, will only lead to more inequality, more wealth consolidation into the hands of tech oligarchs, more surveillance of workers, and more concentration of power in the hands of employers and corporations. While remote work offers theoretical benefits to employees, as Y-Vonne Hutchinson points out, we have to additionally look at issues like “employer transparency; worker organizing; pay equity; regulatory oversight; privacy; strategic relationship building, promotions & growth.”
Through the techno-capitalist lens, what price will we pay for the tech company’s next bubble -- the all-in-everything-remote bubble?
For workers, a shift to remote will only tighten the grip of capitalism on our day to day lives, and how much labor can be extracted from us. Remote work makes it possible to squeeze even longer hours out of workers than their in-office counterparts; in one survey they work more than 40 hours a week some 43% more than in-office employees. Tech companies themselves are already masters at squeezing maximum work out of their employees, after guinea-pigging various work-increasing strategies on their workers -- regular 60-80 hours work weeks; pioneering the never-ending work day with first e-mail and then always-on work place chats like Slack; and entire classes of software (Business Execution software, HR software, performance software) originally adopted by startups and digitally-savvy tech companies that are designed to track and optimize worker behavior; to say nothing of the automated systems like that Amazon uses on its warehouse workers (“One of the things that we hear consistently from workers is that they are treated like robots in effect because they’re monitored and supervised by these automated systems,” [Stacy] Mitchell says. “They’re monitored and supervised by robots.”)
After testing these methods on its own for so long, it’s ready for roll-out to a much larger group, and COVID-19 is the perfect opportunity to expand. Zuckerberg highlights this strategic initiative in a recent post on the decision to move to a remote workforce: “For us specifically, it should help us advance some of the future technology we're developing. Since so much of what we build is around helping people feel connected and present with others no matter where they are -- like our private messaging apps, video chat, Workplace, Portal, and eventually virtual and augmented reality -- living our values will help us accelerate the development of these technologies.” One of the true “innovations” of the technology sector is weaponizing its white collar employee base against the world, this is one more example among others including city-eating gentrification and unprecedented wealth inequality
The model proposed by a remote-only future maps too perfectly onto Foucault’s description of the panopticon - in this instance, the home becomes the cell and the central tower becomes the ubiquitous technology eye of tech supergiants. As Foucault points out: “The Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. To try out pedagogical experiments — and in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using orphans.... The Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analysing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them."
The model that Zuckerberg now envisions supercharges the ability to monitor and “optimize” workers, and if successful, will mean that the entire global workforce of the world is turned into a petri-dish for Facebook’s unethical and non-consensual wide-area population studies designed to squeeze ever more out of workers who must cede more and more of their lifespan to the pursuits and aims of techno-capitalism.
Indeed, just when you thought tech companies couldn’t harvest any more data from us, the new remote-only vision -- what Naomi Klein calls the “Screen New Deal” -- promises to increase the lucrative extractions of surveillance by several orders of magnitude. Facebook in particular stands to benefit from the social/consumer sector into the work and school space; it has hastily moved to launch a competitor to Zoom called Facebook Rooms; along with the to-date floundering “Workspaces”, a clear signal that’s its eyeing a workplace take-over and ready to move quickly and competently to capture it. A remote-only world also offers a number of “killer app” use case scenarios for Facebook’s big “bet on the future”: Oculus virtual reality. (And here we must mention that Oculus was founded by a right-wing extremist who now builds military surveillance technology actively in use at the Mexico/US border.)
For Zuckerberg’s part, he’s stated for years that he envisions everyone wearing Oculus on their face all day, providing a constant stream of data back to the Facebook mothership; as Veve Jaffa has noted: “Following Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus in March 2014, Mark Zuckerberg released a statement revealing his plans for the company: ‘…this is just the start. After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.’ Using the Oculus as an omnipresent interface for everyday life would eradicate personal privacy as we know it; concerningly, the casual nature with which he suggests we conduct doctor’s appointments via virtual reality hints at our voluntary assent to the proceedings… while you’re exploring virtual reality, Facebook is exploring you. The Oculus headset constantly streams personal user data, even when the Oculus is not in use.”
Indeed, while moves like Google’s Ring, Amazon’s Alexa and the shady background processes that pop ads for travel destinations right after you off-handedly mention a beach vacay to your pal have begun their incursion into the home, the opportunities of remote-first life to provide tech companies with the truly 24/7 data stream they yearn for make such efforts look like child’s play. COVID-19 might be Facebook’s biggest boon yet in accelerating its vision of a Facebook-owned virtual future; as Naomi Klein discusses, COVID-19 stands to also accelerate Google’s visions of an Artificial and Machine Learning-focused future. These are areas that tech has been making heavy investments in for years, but failed to come anywhere close to widespread adoption or the “killer app” use cases they’ll require. For some of the most insidious versions of techno-dystopian future that they have architected or we have imagined, COVID-19 is an unexpected blessing to tech companies and more of an unmitigated nightmare to the rest of us.
Indeed, if remote work could offer any benefits to workers, many are cancelled out by the realities of how tech companies operate. I.e. the concept that tech companies will be able to recruit a more diverse workforce under a remote model is cancelled out by the fact that tech companies and industry more broadly employ sexist and racist hiring techniques, networks, and standards. Further, the benefits of remote working/schooling won’t accrue equally for all workers. The COVID-19 crisis has already highlighted issues in remote work: i.e. Women are already experiencing the negative effects of remote working on their career. Via The New Strait Times in discussion with Dr Haslinda Abdullah: "The pandemic has caused the physical and mental conflation of work and domestic duties… Women are still overwhelmingly responsible for managing households despite mostly having a full-time job like their husbands. This may explain why male academics are able to use this time to increase their productivity, while women may not.”
We’ve also seen an uptick in domestic violence as well as an increase in the severity of child abuse and child sexual abuse during COVID-19. While some of this is certainly attributable to the economic stress that many families find themselves in and the fact that men respond to pressure by abusing women and children, we really need to investigate whether a remote-only environment will increase incidence and severity of abuse overall. At least working can get abusers out of the home and occupied for some percent of the day, and work can be a respite for some victims (though workplaces are also a site of abuse). Moving to a fully remote era without looking at the implications for women, children and victims of domestic and sexual abuse is highly dangerous -- but of course tech companies have always ignored such scenarios, even though their products are consistently and reliably used by abusers and gendered harassment and child abuse flourish on these platforms. As always, domestic violence victims are the inevitable and uncared for “Casualties” of tech growth.
Perhaps nothing speaks to the heart of issue more than the reality that Facebook is known for creating mass dissatisfaction, and there’s no reason to believe that their incursion into an ever-more Facebook-mediated remote world would be any different. Studies have found that these tools increase depression and loneliness, another study found that “...while real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with overall well-being. These results were particularly strong for mental health; most measures of Facebook use in one year predicted a decrease in mental health in a later year.” Facebook has long known that their products make people fucking miserable, but hasn’t done shit to change that. In fact, I would argue that the creation of human misery creates Facebook’s profit potential… so what happens when tech tools of manufactured discontent become our primary work, learning and social environment?
Many of these issues should be addressed through worker’s organization; we cannot accept the creation of a remote world *for us* that has no consideration or care for the impact *on us*. But COVID-19 is leaving workers in a uniquely bad position to organize. And it’s entirely possible that a remote-only work environment will interrupt worker’s organization on a larger scale. Union organizers have long held that relationships between workers, and that one-on-one conversations between them are essential to organizing work. A fully remote environment will also likely make it easier for tech companies and bosses and employers to engage in union-busting activities and leverage digital tools, like that Amazon has already developed to suss out and squash the activity. It is instructive that Foucault, in his work on the Panopticon, says describes the fundamental separation between workers as vital to function of the panopticon:
“The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents.”
Indeed.
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