(2024-08-02) Doctorow The Reverse Centaur Apocalypse Is Upon Us

Cory Doctorow: The reverse-centaur apocalypse is upon us. In thinking about the relationship between tech and labor, one of the most useful conceptual frameworks is "centaurs" vs "reverse-centaurs":

A reverse-centaur is someone who is harnessed to the machine, reduced to a mere peripheral for a cruelly tireless robotic overlord that directs you to do the work that it can't, at a robotic pace, until your body and mind are smashed.

Bosses love being centaurs.

Armed with bossware, your boss becomes a centaur, able to monitor you down to your keystrokes, the movements of your eyes, even the ambient sound around you. It was this technology that transformed "work from home" into "live at work."

It turns you into a reverse-centaur.

The latest report in the series comes from Wolfie Christl, digging into Microsoft's "Dynamics 365," a suite of mobile apps designed to exert control over "field workers" – repair technicians, security guards, cleaners, and home help for ill, elderly and disabled people: https://crackedlabs.org/dl/CrackedLabs_Christl_MobileWork.pdf

Microsoft advises its customers to use its products to track workers' location every "60 to 300 seconds." Workers are given tasks broken down into subtasks, each with its own expected time to completion.

Bosses can flag workers as available for jobs that fall outside their territories and/or working hours, and the system will assign workers to jobs that require them to work in their off hours and travel long distances to do so.

Each task and subtask has a target time based on "AI" predictions. These are classic examples of Goodhart's Law: "any metric eventually becomes a target." The average time that workers take becomes the maximum time that a worker is allowed to take.

No boss could exert this kind of fine-grained, soul-destroying control over any workforce, much less a workforce that is out in the field all day, without Microsoft's automation tools. Armed with Dynamics 365, a boss becomes a true centaur, capable of superhuman feats of labor abuse.

And when workers are subjected to Dynamics 365, they become true reverse-centaurs, driven by "digital whips" to work at a pace that outstrips the long-term capacity of their minds and bodies to bear it.

Other reports in the series show how retail workers and hotel housekeepers are subjected to "despot on demand" services provided by Oracle: https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/retail-hospitality

Call centers, are even worse. After all, most of this stuff started with call centers: https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/callcenter

There's also a report about Celonis, a giant German company no one has ever heard of, which gathers a truly nightmarish quantity of information about white-collar workers' activities, subjecting them to AI phrenology to judge their "emotional quality" as well as other metrics:

As Celonis shows, this stuff is coming for all of us. I've dubbed this process "the shitty technology adoption curve": the terrible things we do to prisoners, asylum seekers and people in mental institutions today gets repackaged tomorrow for students, parolees, Uber drivers and blue-collar workers. Then it works its way up the privilege gradient.

Thanks to bossware, your boss doesn't have to look you in the eye (or come within range of your fists) to check in on you every 60 seconds

I recently learned a useful term for this: an "accountability sink," as described by Dan Davies in his new book, The Unaccountability Machine, which is high on my (very long) list of books to read.