#ciberrealism

[...] But telematics ratcheted up that pressure. Now drivers were called to account for a litany of small sins. They were asked to justify bathroom breaks and any other deviations—“stealing time” in corporate-speak—that could chip away at their SPORH (pronounced “spoor”) count, or Stops Per On-Road Hour. “I have no problem doing a heavy, hard job,” Bill told me. “But now, after you do the job, you have to look back every day and say, ‘Did I do this? Did I do that?’ They have a report that tells them everything that you did wrong. For instance, if you turned the truck on before you put on your seat belt, that’s wasting gas.” [...] She was born in 1965, when the techno-utopian dream was ascendant, but the workplace she describes, like Cruz’s warehouse, is the inverse of those earlier predictions. Every time she scanned a piece of merchandise, another countdown began on her screen, indicating how many seconds she had to reach the next item, as if she’d graduated to the next level in a video game. Her progress toward hourly goals was also tracked. [...] If workers are to prevent companies from turning their workplaces into Panopticons, and firing them based on increasingly inflexible metrics, they will have to organize around new types of demands. That means bargaining for very narrow language about what kind of data may be gathered—from e-mail to phone recordings and GPS movements—and setting clear boundaries on how employers can use such information. It also means setting times and places that are off-limits. [...]