#⌦ data center

[neo--knight]

ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴛʏᴘᴇ ᴏғ ᴀɴɢᴇʀ ᴅᴏ ʏᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴠᴇ?

// sᴇᴇᴛʜɪɴɢ ʀᴀɢᴇ

all you see is red. you're not too loud, but you don't make your anger silent either. you'd never tell them you're angry, but their friends will whisper in their ear about you. if they tried to come and talk to you, you'd probably yell at them. you hate them with everything you are.

ᴛᴀɢɢᴇᴅ ʙʏ:: @righteousruin ᴛᴀɢɢɪɴɢ:: you.

[scipunk]

Scanners (1981)

[mostly-natm]

can you draw bashir?

I can. The jury is still out on if I should.

[opendirectories]

[fuzzyghost]

[odinsblog]

A multinational corporation—driven by greedy shareholders and a profit motive—buying its own nuclear reactors; all to power “green” “carbon neutral�� A.I. data centers.

I mean, what could possibly go wrong? 🤦‍♂️

[stuckinapril]

the neurologist i shadow is so funny bc she has a valley girl accent and yet she's the smartest person in the room. this woman was casually doing case consenus ab a man w frontotemporal dementia in the highest girliest voice imaginable. i want to be her i think

[humanoidhistory]

Computer center at Swedish State Railways office at Tomteboda, Stockholm, Sweden, July 21, 1965.

(digitaltmuseum)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The reverse-centaur apocalypse is upon us

I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

In thinking about the relationship between tech and labor, one of the most useful conceptual frameworks is "centaurs" vs "reverse-centaurs":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

A centaur is someone whose work is supercharged by automation: you are a human head atop the tireless body of a machine that lets you get more done than you could ever do on your own.

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. While workplace monitoring is as old as Taylorism – the "scientific management" of the previous century that saw labcoated frauds dictating the fine movements of working people in a kabuki of "efficiency" – the lockdowns saw an explosion of bossware, the digital tools that let bosses monitor employees to a degree and at a scale that far outstrips the capacity of any unassisted human being.

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." But bossware doesn't just let your boss spy on you – it lets your boss control you. \

It turns you into a reverse-centaur.

"Data At Work" is a research project from Cracked Labs that dives deep into the use of surveillance and control technology in a variety of workplaces – including workers' own cars and homes:

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work

It consists of a series of papers that take deep dives into different vendors' bossware products, exploring how they are advertised, how they are used, and (crucially) how they make workers feel. There are also sections on how these interact with EU labor laws (the project is underwritten by the Austrian Arbeiterkammer), with the occasional aside about how weak US labor laws are.

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

It's…not good. 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. Workers are expected to use the app every time they arrive at a site, begin or complete a task or subtask, or start or end a break.

For bosses, all of this turns into a dashboard that shows how each worker is performing from instant to instant, whether they are meeting time targets, and whether they are spending more time on a task than the client's billing rate will pay for. Each work order has a clock showing elapsed seconds since it was issued.

For workers, the system generates new schedules with new work orders all day long, refreshing your work schedule as frequently as twice per hour. 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. Some jobs are easy, and can be completed in less time than assigned. When this happens, the average time to do a job shrinks, and the time allotted for normal (or difficult) jobs contracts.

Bosses get stack-ranks of workers showing which workers closed the most tickets, worked the fastest, spent the least time idle between jobs, and, of course, whether the client gave them five stars. Workers know it, creating an impossible bind: to do the job well, in a friendly fashion, the worker has to take time to talk with the client, understand their needs, and do the job. Anything less will generate unfavorable reports from clients. But doing this will blow through time quotas, which produces bad reports from the bossware. Heads you lose, tails the boss wins.

Predictably, Microsoft has shoveled "AI" into every corner of this product. Bosses don't just get charts showing them which workers are "underperforming" – they also get summaries of all the narrative aspects of the workers' reports (e.g. "My client was in severe pain so I took extra time to make her comfortable before leaving"), filled with the usual hallucinations and other botshit.

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. The enthnographic parts of the report veer between chilling and heartbreaking.

Microsoft strenuously objects to this characterization, insisting that their tool (which they advise bosses to use to check on workers' location every 60-300 seconds) is not a "surveillance" tool, it's a "coordination" tool. They say that all the AI in the tool is "Responsible AI," which is doubtless a great comfort to workers.

In Microsoft's (mild) defense, they are not unique. 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

I've written about Arise, a predatory "work from home" company that targets Black women to pay the company to work for it (they also have to pay if they quit!). Of course, they can be fired at will:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners

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:

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/processmining-algomanage

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, until we're all being turned into reverse-centaurs under the "digital whip" of a centaur boss:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

In mediating between asshole bosses and the workers they destroy, these bossware technologies do more than automate: they also insulate. 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 and tell you that you've taken 11 seconds too long on a task. 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:

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[vahalia-cress]

[dearestcherry]

an outfit from orbonne. i find it has such cute details, especially the comically big sleeves and laced-up corset waist.

[honoura]

Festival of the Hunt: Sign-Ups Open!

Howdy y'all! The promised time has come -- the sign ups for the Festival of the Hunt! Please check the Carrd for all the details, which includes date, time, and locations! If anyone has any questions, either reach out to me here or on Discord (if you have my discord). This includes asking to participate as a DM, if being a hunter isn't for you! Or if you just want more than twelve hunters.

[nightingale-xiv]

Servatis a maleficum.

[riftdancing]

Once a humble coffee shop nestled in the heart of a great free company, The Fireside was the go-to place for members of Firelight Trading Company looking for a bite to eat after a long mission. Realising its potential as both a meeting place and a means of capital, its proprietor expanded the business throughout the various city-states of Eorzea until The Fireside became synonymous with coffee, company and great food; sourly needed after the anguish of The Final Days. Now, patrons old and new can gather to enjoy the hospitality and cosy atmosphere these avenues provide. Welcome to The Fireside! This establishment was made to focus on the creation and fostering of late-night/oceanic roleplay. Though physically located in Balmung/Crystal's Shirogane, the Fireside's expansion into almost all the city-states creates a space where your character can walk in from almost anywhere, and our focus on a coffee-shop with a laid-back atmosphere encourages off-the-cuff, casual roleplay that can turn into more. For more information, or to keep in touch with our events, feel free to join our discord here!

The Fireside will be re-opening for events shortly after Dawntrail's release. The staff are going to take some time to get through the MSQ and give everyone else a chance to play the expansion for a little bit before we begin again, but we're making a come back! Please look forward to it!

Until then, as always, the cafe is open to the public 24/7 for both your /gpose and roleplay hobbies! However, during off hours the café will not currently be staffed. Please feel free to NPC any baristas or waiters you might need for your Roleplay in the mean time.

Thank you so much for your interest! We're eager to serve you again!

Feel free to visit our beautifully overhauled website: The Fireside

The Fireside is located @ Plot 53, 3rd Ward, Shirogane on Balmung (Crystal)

[opendirectories]

[fair-fae]

Lady Faye and Val Covington are getting married (again)! @its-the-val-pal

Celebrating 10 years of marriage together, the Covingtons have chosen to renew their vows to one another in the first public ceremony of their love following their original private elopement. Join us at the Sanctum of the Twelve on Sunday, June 16th at 9:00 PM EDT on Balmung. A reception with food and drinks will follow at Shroudrose Teahouse & Speakeasy at Lavender Beds, Ward 5, Plot 58 on Balmung. If you wish to attend the eternal bonding ceremony, please contact me or Val so we can deliver you an in game invitation.

Syncshell: MSS-ELCNWSM9K514 Password: FayeValWedding

Q: Do I have to be IC? A: No, you do not have to be IC or participate in any role-play, but please be mindful that this is an IC event, and be respectful to those who are role-playing and their immersion.

Q: Does my character have to know the couple IC? A: No! First dibs on the invitations will go to those close to Val and Faye, but you can consider this a public occasion. Anyone can attend, and if you can't find a reason for your character to be there IC, you can always attend OOC.

Q: I can only make it to the ceremony/reception, but not the other! A: That's perfectly fine! Both are not mandatory. Come and go as you need. The eternal bonding invitations are only necessary if you are attending the ceremony, so please do not request one if you will only be going to the reception.

Q: Do I have to be on Balmung? A: Unfortunately, due to the game's limitations on eternal bonding ceremonies, only characters on Balmung may attend the ceremony. However, characters on any world may still attend the reception at the teahouse following the ceremony.