How Liberation Became Surveillance

Commentary

My email to a friend went unanswered for an unusually long time, so I texted and called. It turns out that his office recently blocked all personal email on his work machine. No normal email sites can be accessed, and certainly no applications with direct messages. Only one thing is now allowed on work machines: work-related matter, exclusively. You can check your phone during lunch, but otherwise office culture discourages that. Anyone sneaking a peek at a phone comes under suspicion.

If you work for a decent-sized company, this comes as no surprise to you. It’s how every company is doing it these days. The information architecture is heavily centralized. Every keystroke is logged. Nothing happens on your screen that is not recorded and known by others, even in real time. There is no browsing the web. You do what you are told, and the enforcement is ferocious.

There is no mystery why people are so unhappy with their jobs. It also explains why so many in the professional sector welcomed lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. It felt like freedom. This is why so many were reluctant to go back to the office. They did not want to go back to the surveillance state. The bosses made them all come back because of the urgency of regaining full control over the lives of their workers.

Please indulge me in a trip down memory lane here as a prelude to see how we got here. When the digital age dawned in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the ethos was of universal human liberation. The internet represented freedom and individual empowerment. We had new tools that would lead to a personally curated world in which every person would be a node in a global and voluntary matrix of spontaneous order.

I believed in this vision and became a champion of it.

I was managing a staff of about 20 people at a small nonprofit. In those days, everyone had a stand-alone machine, either their own or one owned by the company; it did not really matter. No one was looking at what others were doing on their machines. Everything was working just fine.

In the late 1990s, the AOL Instant Messenger came out. Most people in the office downloaded it with glee. It allowed everyone to text everyone else. It was a lovely toy and fun. I foresaw no issues with this at all. Indeed we used it for communication in the office and with remote employees. (This was long before many other tools became available for professional use.)

I had hired a new employee for some library work. I did extensive training with him. I left him to get to work, returning hours later to see how things were going. He had downloaded the AOL Instant Messenger. He was typing on it furiously, not for work but just to keep up with his friends. Blah, blah, blah. I did not mention this at the time, but when I came back before the close of business, it was the same thing.

So far as I could tell, this person had no idea what a job was supposed to be, or believed that his only job was to show up and chat with his friends. So far as I was concerned, the guy was a thief, stealing time he was paid to use for production. I ended up firing the guy a month later simply because he did not actually do anything.

As I thought about it, however, it became clear to me that I had bigger problems. It seemed like a work slowdown had occurred throughout the entire office. In every sector, routine tasks were taking longer. We were missing deadlines. Normal things were slipping through the cracks. I came to realize that all of these new digital tools plus endless offerings on the World Wide Web were distracting people from what they were being paid to do.

At a loss for what to do, I contacted a network specialist. He explained his plan. Every machine in the office would be owned by the company. No employee would have administrative rights to his machine. All software would be managed by a single machine through a company-wide intranet. No third-party applications could be installed. All updates would be triggered by central control. Any and all software and hardware upgrades would come from the network administrator alone.

As I thought about the new system being proposed, it rubbed me wrong. We now have the ability for each individual to control his own means of production. Why would we forgo that in favor of recobbling the old world?

To do so would be contrary to the entire ethos of the digital age, which is supposed to be about individual discovery and creative rights. With a centralized system, we get more control, but it would also demoralize people, take away their creativity, reduce volition, and lead everyone to believe that they were living in a kind of trustless tyranny. Plus we would be taking a pass on the greatest innovation of our times.

I told this would-be network administrator to take a hike. As bad as goofing off is, it is better than despotism, which I was sure would fail worse. By my own estimation, the goof-off problem would take care of itself. People would learn to manage their attention spans. The delight of the new tools and sparkly objects online would wear off and people would get back to work.

In any case, I figured that I did not want employees who were unproductive and could not manage their own work flows. Good people would figure this out on their own.

My choice was for freedom and individual sovereignty rather than centralized control. That was fully 30 years ago. And yet: I had bet wrong. As it turns out, the entirety of the corporate sector went another direction, away from trust and toward full surveillance of every employee. The arrival of the digital age eventually came to mean not freedom but more employee control than had ever been possible. Liberation became the panopticon.

But you know what really strikes me about this new system of maximum control? It’s not clear that it really works. If you know anything about the American professional class, they are among the laziest and least productive people in the history of labor. Anyone who works for a large corporation will tell you that he is surrounded by goof-offs and bloat, mouse jigglers and lounge lizards, layabouts and fakers, time killers and bureaucrats.

All of the surveillance has not stopped this; it has made it all worse.

Elon Musk arrived at Twitter and eventually fired four out of five employees, causing the platform to work better than ever. Other large companies were inspired by this and have followed suit. The sheer amount of excess at the management level of every company—which grew when money was cheap and times were good—boggles the mind. The surveillance state in every medium and large company has done nothing to stop this from happening.

So one wonders if we took the right path here. I have my doubts. All of the spying, the crackdowns, the keystroke logging, and the centralization has removed volition from employees and gutted the creative instinct. It has also drained the workforce of that thing we call happiness born of trust.

At this very time, the workplace came to be taken over by a new tyranny of acronyms. Now everyone had to fit within new systems that go by odd sciency-sounding names such as RREs (roles, responsibilities, and expectations), KPIs (key performance indicators), and OKRs (objectives and key results), and subjected to 360-degree performance reviews, lest they face a PIP (performance improvement plan, which is really just a slo-mo method of saying, “you are fired”) and get reported to HR (human resources). It’s all part of MBOs (management by objectives), don’t you know.

You know why most companies these days have so many in-person meetings that result in nothing meaningful? It’s because people are desperate to get away from their desks and do something, anything, that approximates interacting with human beings with all of their unpredictability. Even a dreaded meeting is better than being treated like a cog in a machine.

My read on what happened: Centralization drained away the creative impulse at all levels, so that nearly everyone in every firm cooperates in creating collective theater, a pantomime of productivity rather than the real thing. Everyone knows this, but no one actually says it. It’s the machines that do the work while the people only pretend to be indispensable to the process.

There is a scene in the show “Mad Men” in which new consultants take over the advertising agency. They have a new rule that would ration the number of pencils that the staff uses. The hero of the office explains that this approach can never work. Wasting pencils, crashing on the sofa, day drinking, and all of the other terrible things people do seem like waste, but actually they are essential to the one thing that the company actually produces, which is creative new ideas. Take away the freedom to waste pencils and you turn a shop of creatives into automatons.

The show is set in the 1960s, but the lesson is prescient for our times. The urge to control, manage, and dictate always comes at the expense of experimentation, new ideas, insight, and creative exploration. This is true in government, corporations, and society at large. You cannot manage human beings as if they are robots to be programmed, monitored, clocked, and cajoled into endless repetition of known routines. This is how you kill growth—in a single firm or in society at large.

Did the digital age take a wrong turn? I think so.

What’s the lesson? Maybe we should be more cautious in the future about believing the beautiful promises of new technology. Sometimes the result is the opposite of what we expect.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.