should I let my boss implant a chip in my hand?
Today’s question is about just how much to trust your boss. Should you let them implant a chip in your hand? To answer, Rose calls Stacy-Marie Ishmael, journalist, editor, and sometimes career advice-giver.
Advice For And From The Future is written, edited and performed by Rose Eveleth. The theme music is by Also, Also, Also. The logo is by Frank Okay. Additional music this episode provided by Blue Dot Sessions.
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TRANSCRIPT
[Door opening]
[Store bell jingle]
[Advice for and from the Future theme kicks in: low, long synths under a steady, crunchy rhythm]
ROSE EVELETH:
Hi again, and welcome back. I’m glad you could join us. I know our door is a little bit hard to find, nestled between the Insect Cafe and the cafe for insects, but here you are. Got a question about tomorrow? Well, you are in the right place. Welcome to your friendly neighborhood futurology shop: Where you can get the answers to tomorrow’s questions… today.
On today’s trip to and from the future, we are considering questions of trust, data, and management.
CALLER:
Hey Rose, my name’s Katherine. I live in Toronto, Canada. So I just started a new job a couple of weeks ago and today I got a message from H.R. asking me to implant a chip in my hand. I’m not 100% sure what it’s for, but I’m wondering, should I do it? How should I reply?
ROSE:
And to grapple with that question, I called Stacy-Marie Ishmael, a journalist, editor, and sometimes boss, who gives very, very good management advice.
ROSE (on call):
So maybe we should just, like, dive into the question, which is, uh: Should you allow your company to implant a chip inside your hand?
STACY-MARIE ISHMAEL:
Going to go with no.
[They both laugh]
STACY-MARIE (cont’d):
And because I think the question is less about the specifics of what sounds like a really invasive bodily procedure and more generally about labor autonomy, right, and the rights and responsibilities and the relationship, which is a power imbalance at the best of times between corporations and people. And I think that the past 10 years especially has really seen the normalization of corporate surveillance in a way that makes this question feel particularly fraught, right.
Because you could argue, how is this different from agreeing to wear a Fitbit to qualify for discounts on your health insurance? How is this different from using a badge that tracks as soon as you get- you know, you tap in, you tap out- you’re using the same badge for paying a vending machine and ordering lunch, and it’s essentially like a minute by minute record of your activities.
How is this different from employees giving.. explicit but mostly implied consent to having everything they do on their laptop, their phones, whatever devices they’re using, like, be recorded for posterity, as it were? I worry in general about the move of corporations to tie the status of your employment to more and more inability to have any kind of privacy.
And I think this is a particularly acute discussion in a moment when your work is in your house (laugh) for more people than that has been true for. And so if we start to say, well, you know, these recording systems, these chips, these badges, these VPNs follow you around outside of the office, like where and how do people- how are people allowed to have spaces in which there isn’t anyone else watching, particularly not the person to whom their paycheck is tied?
ROSE:
..Why is it that companies and managers have bought into the idea that the more, sort of, data they have on-
[Stacy-Marie laughs]
ROSE (cont’d):
-people, their, their, you know, their employees, the better they will work or the better things will be like why is that something that we sort of take for granted in some ways?
STACY-MARIE:
I think it’s partly the rise of the notion that if you can quantify something, you can change it, right. And so people are very hard to manage; processes, less so.
And if you turn all your people into processes, if you turn them into data points, if you turn them into inputs, you can optimize along the supply chain. You abstract out the messiness and the nuance and you say, Well, what we found is if we moved the break room five feet to the left, it took people one less minute to get to their desks, which, you know, in aggregate was a production savings of blah, right. That’s a very attractive.. path.
It’s one that CFOs love; it’s one that shareholders are very excited by; it’s one for which there are infinite technical solutions. And so you, you think you can buy your way out or data your way out of people. And in certain cases, you know, that’s been true up to a point, right. Like, it’s been true that you can operationalize certain types of production lines. It’s been true- and to be clear, not necessarily beneficial to the people doing; it’s true in the sense of Is it functional? Yes. You know, when you think about the outsourcing of phone centers and call centers, right, where the people there are sticking to very clearly defined scripts; there’s no room for creativity, innovation, any sort of initiative. And everyone can point to, well, costs went down and savings went up and everything’s great.
And because we don’t measure the people cost of this- I think constantly about the experience of content moderators and how much of our conversation changed when we stopped allowing technology companies to present this in the abstract terms of we spent X billion dollars reviewing problematic content, and it was, you know, tens of thousands of people are looking at really brutal and dark parts of the Internet for very low wages for hours at a time and no mental health support. And that really changed the tenor of the conversation, not in a way that was favorable to the companies that were using this labor.
ROSE:
Yeah, and as a manager, I guess, like- Is it valuable at all to know how long someone’s at their desk or when they get to work and when they leave?
STACY-MARIE:
Only if your understanding of “work” is presentism. And there are certain industries in which the correlation between being present and being at work is very, very high, right.
If you are doing quality checks on something and you have to get through X number of things, then time spent at desk doing X thing maps fairly closely to getting through X number of things. If you’re doing anything remotely resembling what we like to call “knowledge works,” make ourselves feel better, where-
[Rose snickers]
STACY-MARIE (cont’d):
-where you are thinking through.. where you are creating something that doesn’t exist before. Where there’s no precedents. There is no sentence, and now there needs to be a sentence. There’s no line of code, and now there needs to be a line of code. There is no clear way to treat this patient, and I have got to figure out, based on this combination of things, how to you know, like, what, what- how would you diagnose this, how to treat this. Anything where you can’t simply look at a manual, follow the manual, do a thing, presentism really breaks down.
And any and all of the research, not just about creativity, but around the process of getting better and allowing people to develop and skill up requires downtime and requires changes of circumstance and changes of scene and exposure to colleagues across, you know, whatever the different things that you’re working on.
I mean, seven or eight years ago, everyone was trying to be Pixar and they were all redesigning their offices so that it was all, like, open office and points of collaboration and serendipity and whatever.
And then folks realized that was super expensive. (laughs) And, you know, they were like, “ah, this is really expensive. What we could do instead is none of that and make it so that those points of collaboration are all intermediated by instant messaging platforms” or, you know, “well, if we have a video chat, it’s the same as whatever,” without sort of examining on the merits what it is- what is it that we’re trying to do and what are the conditions we need to create in order to facilitate the outcomes that we’re hoping for?
ROSE:
I think a lot, too, about the ways in which turning, as you said, it plays into sort of a collection of data points to then sort of recombine and analyze, particularly hurts disabled people-
STACY-MARIE:
Oh, yes.
ROSE:
And, like, non-neurotypical people.
When you scale that to, like, entire industries, particularly as you said, creative industries, like, you want people in theory who are thinking differently or like thinking in interesting ways, maybe you don’t actually want that. You just say you want that.
STACY-MARIE:
Right.
ROSE:
So that’s like a different thing.
But I think so much about that.
STACY-MARIE (overlapping):
And who do you want those people to be, right?
To your point, it’s- there’s so many scholars- like facial recognition is a really fantastic example of the rock and the hard place that, for instance, like Black people are in, right. Like facial recognition doesn’t work on you, so you get marked as a monkey or facial recognition does work on you, and so you’re disproportionately added to databases, assuming that you are going to be in a gang based on a zip code. And there’s additional surveillance on top of that.
Like, there’s no upside for folks who are not defined as the default and who, who don’t conform in one way or another to whatever, you know, those bits of data are that’s informing the decisions that folks are making about it. And I think what you identify, which is the rampant ableism that exists in our industries right now, is getting codified and accelerated in ways that are entirely predictable. If you sort of step back and say, well, what are the bad things we do now? It’s now like, well, now we’re doing bad things at scale. (slight laugh)
ROSE:
You mentioned this earlier, but I want to talk a little bit about the ways in which this question about the chip in the hand kind of get at questions or the idea of- one word to use would be loyalty to your company? Another use- word to use might be, sort of, like, control your company has over you?
STACY-MARIE:
Yep.
ROSE:
I mean, should anyone ever be this, quote unquote “loyal” to a company to allow them to like, you know-
[Stacy-Marie laughs]
ROSE (cont’d):
–because you have to trust this company, right? Like, let’s say you love your job. Let’s say- I think there are people in this position where, like, they love their job. They think they’re gonna be there for a long time. They trust their manager.
STACY-MARIE:
Yep.
ROSE:
And so if their manager came to them and said, like, hey, this is a cool opportunity, it’s gonna be great, let’s do it. They might.. do it. And I’m curious, like, should you ever trust your company this much?
STACY-MARIE (slight laugh):
No.
[Both she and Rose laugh]
STACY-MARIE (cont’d):
It took me- I’ve struggled with this question for a long time because I- I deeply understand the instinct. I am the kind of person who.. work is easily something that I can subsume my entire identity into. And because work is so important to me, it’s very important for me to feel like my values are aligned with the values of the place that I work at. And if that’s true, then obviously the next step is if they chip me it’s chill, because that must be a good idea, right.
And so one of the things I’ve had to do and one of the things I’ve really tried very hard to do is understand that no matter what is true at a moment in time, corporations of whatever form, whether they are nonprofit, for-profits, a franchise, a, like, a global chain, exist over and above any individual. And because they exist over and above any individual, they have their own internal logic and their own internal momentum that could at any moment change, and suddenly that relationship that you think you have with that entity, with that manager, could be upended.
And so if you are making decisions in which you will be in a precarious position, if anything that is currently true is suddenly no longer true, that is an incredibly high risk and a deeply personal decision. And one I think that is a conversation better had in the realm of church, family, you know, friends, communities before you get to wildly imbalanced power structures in which you have- all of the incentives are stacked against you. Like, if you opt out of this, the cost is very high and the benefit is very low. And whenever anyone is in that position, it’s not really a choice, right. It’s, it’s like a forced contract. And forced contracts aren’t actually valid.
ROSE:
Yeah, I am, I am exactly the same way where it’s like- my work is me. Like, in my- I wish I could be less that way. My partner can, like, just go to the job and then come home and then it’s like-
STACY-MARIE (laughing):
What is that like? I don’t understand.
ROSE:
It’s over and done. And I’m like, who- I, like- I have- I truly cannot even begin to imagine what that is like. I wish I could but I cannot.
[Stacy-Marie mhms in agreement; they continue to do so as Rose goes on]
ROSE (cont’d):
So I totally get that where you’re like, I live and breathe and sometimes bleed for this company. I am here; I believe in it and I want to do the right thing and I want to be a part of it. And if, if I’m told that this is gonna get us there.. (inhale) you know, I also- I’m like very ordinary and I know these things. So I don’t think I would actually be tempted. I’m the one who has, like, the two phones at every company ‘cause I refuse to put the thing on one line.
STACY-MARIE (overlapping):
Oh, yes.
[They both laugh]
STACY-MARIE (cont’d):
One must.
ROSE:
So there’s a reason I have my business, cause I’m just, like- (laughs)
STACY-MARIE:
I mean, to your point about managers, too, it’s- even though companies have their own internal logic, people in positions of power in those companies get into a little bit, you know, le taux de moi kind of attitude, where they start to feel as if someone not toeing the company line is being personally disloyal to them. And that’s often also very hard, like, I think-
I’ve worked at a range of startups, and the thing that was true of all of those places was the idea- the language around “we’re all in this together.” We’re a family, you know, we’re a team. And you need that when you’re working a hundred and twenty hours a week on an unproven product that you have no idea if it will work or if you will be able to have a job tomorrow. But it is an incredibly pernicious tactic that sets up a dynamic in which you are unable to really ask questions about, well, who is this benefiting, right.
And it’s especially pernicious because the founder, the manager, the CEO… everything’s benefiting them and they tend to, you know, and if you go into all the research about what power does your brain, they tend to get worse and worse at understanding that their experience is not the same experience of everyone else.
And it’s actually physically and mentally difficult for folks in positions of power to understand how someone could be having a worse experience when you are trying so hard to, to build this thing. And that, I think, is an additional level to this dynamic of you, a person, you an employee, you don’t want to disappoint your boss. You don’t want to disappoint your manager, especially if you care about them, especially if you want to be a good colleague. And so much of the discussion around this is like, well, don’t you trust me?
I wouldn’t do anything bad, like this chip isn’t going to hurt you. And that’s a terrible position to be in, right. Because even if that person genuinely means well and has no intent to harm, that might- they might not be that person tomorrow. You know, they might be replaced with somebody else or they might decide, well, actually, no; harm is okay, (laughs) so- so.
ROSE:
So let’s say that this employee has been asked to do this-
[Stacy-Marie mhms, and she continues to mhm with each point]
ROSE:
-and they don’t want to, and they need to go into a meeting with their manager and sort of, like, explain or talk about it. How would you advise them to approach that meeting? Are there any sort of like tips you would have for them-
STACY-MARIE:
Yeah.
ROSE:
-as they try to push back?
STACY-MARIE:
I would start from a place of- similar to your question about, well, what is this for, right. Your first- your first salvo should be: do you trust that the person who is asking you to do this or who is the emissary of the person who’s asking you to do this, has thought through all of the potential consequences?
Because I often find that merely asking the question of, hey, okay, what happens if I go on vacation? Does this stay on? Will you continue to know about that? Do I have to opt out of that in some way? What happens if something happens to me where I’m unable to do that? Like, what are, what are those steps? And I think starting with very reasonable questions that are normal.
So, like, if you were issued a mobile device, you could ask the question, hey, if I’m on vacation, do I need to take this with me? It’s like the same. Whereas if you immediately escalate to “so are you going to use this for (laughs) organ harvesting” or, you know, sort of like a wild, not necessarily unrealistic, but like a more a more challenging mental model for someone, that’s gonna be a little bit harder.
And so prepare the questions that you might have. And the goal of those questions is to get to Do you have faith that someone has thought this through? Not because if they’ve thought it through, you will say yes, but because it’s important to show them that you are thinking this through as well, and you have kind of considered what this means.
The- one hundred percent, the second part of that would be how- what control do I have and what understanding do I have of everything this is going to be used for now or in the future, including after we may have stopped using this or after I’m no longer with the company.
You’re like, what is, what is my rights of retrieval and notification if, say, for example, they’re like this- the database that this is stored in gets hacked. Are you going to inform me? Are you going to inform me in five years? Like, how are you, how are you gonna be keeping track of this? Because I think one of the other ways that corporations can really push through this procurement process is there are very few people asking them about what happens after the install, right.
There’s, there’s a bias in a lot of places, to- You do a lot of work up front. You think about how you’re going to deploy. But maintenance is not a question (slight laugh) that ever comes up, or it comes up and you’re like, well, we’ll figure about that when we get there. And so foregrounding the conversation of “if for some reason something goes wrong, what’s the plan and what is your liability,” which is a word that makes them know you’re paying attention in the event that something goes wrong.
Because the scariest possible combination is being asked to do something that’s invasive and also having no right to recourse, right. Like you, if you essentially are also signing away or waiving or they are requiring you to accept that they have no liability, then you have no power at all, right. You, you have no ability to redress the structural power imbalance that’s always going to exist, even using parameters and recourse outside of that context.
ROSE:
Let’s say if you were a manager and you’ve been asked to ask your employees to do this. Like, what is that conversation like when you’re sort of like in that middle sandwich?
STACY-MARIE:
Yeah.
ROSE:
Middle of the sandwich.
STACY-MARIE:
I think the first question is, what are you as a person prepared to accept? Right, and so if this isn’t something you would do for yourself, then ask yourself why it’s okay for you to do this to other people. So that’s, that’s always an interrogation, right, like, am I imposing a condition on someone that I would be uncomfortable fulfilling? And I think that’s generally a question that we don’t ask often enough.
And secondarily, I would- going back to our question of like, why are we collecting this?- really make sure I’ve understood what is it about this process that is so sweet, generous and so like unlike anything else that there’s no other way for us to solve this problem? And, that I am prepared to have that conversation and also make that explicit to the people that I am explaining this to, right. So it’s not just: this chip is a super convenient way to do X. That looks like an insufficient bar for me as a manager. It would be us requiring you to install this a hundred percent backup software on your laptop is because of like federal compliance, and for us to exist in this industry, this is what we have to do and this is the threshold.
That’s a very different conversation from “this is going to be easier for us to fulfill a specific thing.” Right. Like, as soon as you get into optionality, that is pretty much a function of convenience, then I think the bar has got to be a lot higher for requiring something as a condition of work.
ROSE:
Do you think- and this is obviously sort of a hard question to answer, because everyone in the situation will be different. But let’s say this employee is- is sort of, like, given the ultimatum that they do this or they have to leave. It’s like, there’s no choice. Is this worth quitting over?
STACY-MARIE:
For me, it would be. But I have the world’s highest risk tolerance. (laughs)
And so I think about a lot in the context of, you know- and I’m, I’m very fortunate in that I have been able to- I have quit literally every job I’ve ever had. And I’m still okay! But what I would, what I would counter is, is it worth it to the company to have the exposure and the risk of this conversation, right? Like, do you- are you as an individual manager, are you as an H.R. department, are you as a PR team prepared to go to bat in court or in the courts of public opinion for requiring your employees to do something that you probably couldn’t sufficiently answer any of the questions that we’ve just discussed?
You know, there’s, there are a lot of people who are coerced into bad labor situations, all over the world in whatever stage of economic development, whatever, you know, the culture that we’re discussing. But we have a tendency in the discussions to treat employment like it’s a choice. And that’s not the reality that a lot of people live in, right. Like, the reality for a lot of people is if they’re not working, they can’t eat or they can’t pay for health care or they can’t pay for housing. And as long as we are in a society in which those things are true, conversations about choice are really conversations about how much coercion is okay.
ROSE:
Do you think this is getting better or worse? And [unintelligible]-
STACY-MARIE (overlapping):
Oh, it’s definitely getting worse.
[They both laugh]
ROSE:
I had a moment where I was like, when we f- when it was first clear that tech companies were letting people work from home potentially indefinitely, right, and there was this big question, particularly- I’m in Berkeley now. So there’s this big question of like, are all these tech people going to move away from San Francisco? And I’m like, I hope so. (slight laugh)
But, you know, there was this moment where in theory, some of this sort of surveillance could have fallen away if we had said, okay, we’re, we’re reimagining what work is going to look like.
STACY-MARIE:
Yep.
ROSE:
We are in this position where in theory, you know, we could reconsider the kinds of things that we’re asking people to accept. And it was possible for us to not just sort of, like, take all the things we were doing in the office and just permutate them into sort of online like digital surveillance and these new ways.
[As she speaks, Stacy-Marie adds the occasional “Right,” in agreement]
ROSE (cont’d):
And we didn’t take that option. We sort of seem to have instead said like, no, we need to monitor more in some way. But do you think there’s any- is there any going back here? Or like have- are we, have we fallen off the cliff?
STACY-MARIE:
Well, one of the things- if we had this conversation two years ago, we wouldn’t have been talking as much about the power of, like, labor unions, for example, right. Which is a thing in digital media that was impossible, and then it was everywhere.
And it’s been really fascinating to me to see a couple of dynamics that are happening at the same time, which is one, I think we overestimated the extent to which people would accept the story sold to them by certain kinds of companies that they were doing God’s work, as it were, in the same way, like the you know- the auditing industry went through this in the aftermath of Enron, like finance investment banks, hedge funds, post 2008, 2010, all of tech (laughing) right now, which is where a lot of these ideas are also coming from.
There is a real interesting reckoning from people who are like, “Huh? Am I, in fact, contributing to a genocide? (laugh) Perhaps that’s not great tech.”
[They laugh. Rose hmms]
STACY-MARIE (cont’d):
I feel like this is, this is a conversation that could have happened slightly faster, but, you know, here we are. That’s a, that’s a positive force. So that’s that’s the first thing that I would say.
I think the second thing is: We are getting to the point where people in positions of decision making power in government and regulators are more equipped with expertise with real world experience, with staff and advisors to understand some of the conversation that’s happening and to understand the consequences of those things. Is that true across the board? Absolutely not. Look at the hearings that we, you know, we went through a couple of weeks ago where representatives of various states were asking tech CEOs “why are my emails going to spam,” right.
It’s not clear that the level of discourse is evenly distributed, but there are more and more people who do know what this means, who are visible and influential, if not yet necessarily powerful. And so I am slightly more hopeful that there will be more calling to account because we are seeing more of that shift happening.
And then I think the third, the rise of, like, activist academia. And by that, what I really mean is people who are phenomenal communicators about things that were otherwise pretty esoteric, using the same platforms, using Twitter, using Facebook, using Instagram very, very effectively to help a much broader universe of people understand what’s happening. And so it’s not only that the discussion about artificial intelligence and machine learning and the, the risks of training data are happening in, you know, the halls of Stanford, like they’re happening in real time between, like, the heads of those departments at Google and Facebook and various academics, and a lot of media people. And there is like an unprecedented amount of visibility into how those particular technical sausages get made.
Whether we do anything with that visibility, I don’t know. But what I would say is I am very slightly encouraged that this is not an unstoppable worsening, right. So I don’t think we’ve quite fallen off the cliff; I think we’re just constantly precariously balanced.
[Rose laughs quietly at that]
ROSE:
Yeah, those are all of the official questions I have on the list.
[Stacy-Marie laughs]
ROSE:
Is there anything else about hand chipping and/or just like data collection and surveillance of employees that you wanted to talk about?
STACY-MARIE:
I wish the penalties were higher for misuse. I do worry that we have normalized collection far more aggressively than we’ve normalized penalty for improper storage. You know, I mean, I can’t remember who it was, but there is an analogy that has really stuck with me that, you know, data is radioactive. And that if you insist on collecting it, you’ve got to figure out, like, how deep is the bunker you’re going to have to build in order to make sure that it doesn’t harm anyone in the breach.
ROSE:
I like that so much better than the “data is oil” nonsense that people love to throw around. “Data is radioactive,” that’s really good.
ROSE (Mono):
Do you have a question about the future? Some conundrum you’re facing now, or one that you think we might face in the future? Send it in! You can send a voice memo to advice@ffwdpresents.com, or call (347) 927-1425 and leave a message.
And now, a quick break, and when we come back, I’m going to measure myself- and maybe even you.
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ROSE:
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[In the background, music: a low blend of tones with stuttering percussion]
NOTIFICATION:
Employee 7-6-7-3 has arrived at their desk.
[The notification system is monotonous, a traditional text-to-speech interface]
ROSE:
A few years ago, I spent some time covering the rise in what was then called “The Quantified Self” movement. It sounds a little quaint now, but at the time the idea of recording data about yourself as you moved through the world was strange and interesting. At least to tech bloggers, who often failed to mention that people with menstrual cycles have been (slight laugh) quantifying and measuring and even predicting their bodies for centuries.
Anyway, amidst this craze, there were, of course, apps. So many apps. An app to track your meals, and one to track your blood pressure, and one to track your energy use, and one to track your sleep. Each vector of life had an app. Or at least, each vector that people who make apps cared about. And one of the things that these app designers seemed to care a lot about was sex.
There were data-gathering sex toys and menstrual cups and kegel exercisers. But my favorite example, and the one that I actually think illuminates the problem at hand, were the apps that supposedly told you not just the quantity of sex you were having, but the quality of that sex. Simply place the phone on your bed, have at it, and at the end the phone will very helpfully tell you how well you did! (slight laugh) No need to ask your partner; no no- why would you do that when you can have data?
These apps had names like “iThrust” and “Sex Stamina Tester” and “Sex Counter Tease.” They used the phone’s built in accelerometer to measure “strokes” and the microphone to measure the volume of your partner’s reaction. The timer measured how long you could go at it. Some of them offered men, and they were really very clearly targeting men here, a ranking among other users. One app encouraged people to share their stamina and determine whether they were “good enough to compete with the Don Juans in the Top 10.” I swear to god I am not making any of this up.
And while these examples might seem hilarious and bizarre, they’re just the weirder end of a spectrum that we’re all living in today. Nobody talks about the Quantified Self movement these days, because we all kind of feel quantified all the time. It’s not weird or sexy anymore; it’s just life. Schools are tracking students using facial recognition to quantify whether they are paying attention during an online lecture. Companies are using microphones and badges to track who you talk to at work, who you sit next to at lunch, which stairs and elevators you use, so that they can then try and connect those things with your productivity. Insurance companies want your FitBit data so they can guess how risky you are, and when you might die.
NOTIFICATION:
Employee 7 6 7 3 has left their desk.
NOTIFICATION:
Employee 7 6 7 3 has arrived at their desk.
NOTIFICATION:
Employee 7 6 7 3 has left their desk.
[As Rose begins to speak, the notifications continue:]
ROSE:
I tracked how many times I left my desk while working on this coda over the course of a couple of days. It was a lot. I went to the bathroom eleven times (I have a very small bladder okay?) I went to the kitchen ten times, sometimes to get food or a drink, but other times just to open up the fridge and the cabinets, stare into them, and then close them again and come back empty handed. I went into the backyard with my dog eight times. I wandered around the house doing nothing four times.
NOTIFICATION (under Rose):
Employee 7 6 7 3 has arrived at their desk.
NOTIFICATION (under Rose):
Employee 7 6 7 3 has left their desk.
NOTIFICATION (under Rose):
Employee 7 6 7 3 has arrived at their desk.
ROSE:
I wonder if this coda would be better if I hadn’t gotten up so much. Or maybe it would be better if I had gotten up more, and done more brain stimulating stuff instead of staring blankly into the cool breeze of the fridge looking for something to magically appear that I wanted to snack on. Who knows.
[In the pause that follows, we can hear that the music has acquired a jazzy line]
ROSE:
Success has to be measured, though. Otherwise what is it even? Some feeling of goodness? No, we cannot have that here; we must measure things. Success has to be checked off, recorded, ideally tracked in a spreadsheet with multiple rows and columns. Days must be bullet journaled and planned out and goals must be set and recorded and quantified.
Humans, however, are very hard to measure. We are squishy and weird and full of surprises and desires and that pesky agency. Sometimes, great sex for a person is silent, and doesn’t last all that long. Sometimes- I know this is going to be hard to believe- but sometimes, there is no thrusting at all. But your phone can’t measure that, and measurement is the key to true success, and thus, thrusting must be present for success to be achieved. You are reduced to a character in a game who must hit checkpoints and gather items and push buttons in the right order.
And wouldn’t that be nice? If it was actually like that? If you could beat the game and master a task and then just be- done? If living in this world and interacting with the people in it didn’t require constant readjustment, constant introspection, constant reevaluation? If success meant replicating the same thing over and over and over again. If the rules were actually set and didn’t change.
But that’s not how it is, right? Half the time you have no idea what the buttons even do, and they are always changing. A big boss that was there one day is gone the next. Halfway through a side quest you’re suddenly in a different game entirely. One day you’ve mastered it, and the next you wonder what, exactly, you’re playing in the first place.
But isn’t that kinda great? That you can defy the data, and bust out of the spreadsheet like the Kool-Aid man? That you can get up and leave your desk, and walk out of the game, and go play a different one? I sorta think so.
[The music chimes]
NOTIFICATION:
Employee 7 6 7 3 has left their desk.
[Advice for and from the Future theme fades in]
ROSE:
Advice for and from the Future is written, edited, and performed by me, Rose Eveleth.
The intro music is by Also, Also, Also, who has a new album out called The Good Grief, which you can and should get on Bandcamp. Thanks to Catherine for your question and to Stacy-Marie Ishmael for joining me to talk about power, work and surveillance.
If you want to ask a question for or from the future, send a voice memo to advice@ffwdpresents.com.
If you want to get behind the scenes stuff about this show and the other shows in the Flash Forward Presents network, you can do that by becoming a member of the Time Traveler program. Just go to ffwdpresents.com for more on that.
[Music continues through to end]
ROSE (cont’d):
Until next time…
[Store bell jingle]