#productivity theater

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI’s productivity theater

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

When I took my kid to New Zealand with me on a book-tour, I was delighted to learn that grocery stores had special aisles where all the kids'-eye-level candy had been removed, to minimize nagging. What a great idea!

Related: countries around the world limit advertising to children, for two reasons:

1) Kids may not be stupid, but they are inexperienced, and that makes them gullible; and

2) Kids don't have money of their own, so their path to getting the stuff they see in ads is nagging their parents, which creates a natural constituency to support limits on kids' advertising (nagged parents).

There's something especially annoying about ads targeted at getting credulous people to coerce or torment other people on behalf of the advertiser. For example, AI companies spent millions targeting your boss in an effort to convince them that you can be replaced with a chatbot that absolutely, positively cannot do your job.

Your boss has no idea what your job entails, and is (not so) secretly convinced that you're a featherbedding parasite who only shows up for work because you fear the breadline, and not because your job is a) challenging, or b) rewarding:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

That makes them prime marks for chatbot-peddling AI pitchmen. Your boss would love to fire you and replace you with a chatbot. Chatbots don't unionize, they don't backtalk about stupid orders, and they don't experience any inconvenient moral injury when ordered to enshittify the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

Bosses are Bizarro-world Marxists. Like Marxists, your boss's worldview is organized around the principle that every dollar you take home in wages is a dollar that isn't available for executive bonuses, stock buybacks or dividends. That's why you boss is insatiably horny for firing you and replacing you with software. Software is cheaper, and it doesn't advocate for higher wages.

That makes your boss such an easy mark for AI pitchmen, which explains the vast gap between the valuation of AI companies and the utility of AI to the customers that buy those companies' products. As an investor, buying shares in AI might represent a bet the usefulness of AI – but for many of those investors, backing an AI company is actually a bet on your boss's credulity and contempt for you and your job.

But bosses' resemblance to toddlers doesn't end with their credulity. A toddler's path to getting that eye-height candy-bar goes through their exhausted parents. Your boss's path to realizing the productivity gains promised by an AI salesman runs through you.

A new research report from the Upwork Research Institute offers a look into the bizarre situation unfolding in workplaces where bosses have been conned into buying AI and now face the challenge of getting it to work as advertised:

https://www.upwork.com/research/ai-enhanced-work-models

The headline findings tell the whole story:

96% of bosses expect that AI will make their workers more productive;

85% of companies are either requiring or strongly encouraging workers to use AI;

49% of workers have no idea how AI is supposed to increase their productivity;

77% of workers say using AI decreases their productivity.

Working at an AI-equipped workplaces is like being the parent of a furious toddler who has bought a million Sea Monkey farms off the back page of a comic book, and is now destroying your life with demands that you figure out how to get the brine shrimp he ordered from a notorious Holocaust denier to wear little crowns like they do in the ad:

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2004/hitler-and-sea-monkeys

Bosses spend a lot of time thinking about your productivity. The "productivity paradox" shows a rapid, persistent decline in American worker productivity, starting in the 1970s and continuing to this day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

The "paradox" refers to the growth of IT, which is sold as a productivity-increasing miracle. There are many theories to explain this paradox. One especially good theory came from the late David Graeber (rest in power), in his 2012 essay, "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit":

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit

Graeber proposes that the growth of IT was part of a wider shift in research approaches. Research was once dominated by weirdos (e.g. Jack Parsons, Oppenheimer, etc) who operated with relatively little red tape. The rise of IT coincides with the rise of "managerialism," the McKinseyoid drive to monitor, quantify and – above all – discipline the workforce. IT made it easier to generate these records, which also made it normal to expect these records.

Before long, every employee – including the "creatives" whose ideas were credited with the productivity gains of the American century until the 70s – was spending a huge amount of time (sometimes the majority of their working days) filling in forms, documenting their work, and generally producing a legible account of their day's work. All this data gave rise to a ballooning class of managers, who colonized every kind of institution – not just corporations, but also universities and government agencies, which were structured to resemble corporations (down to referring to voters or students as "customers").

Even if you think all that record-keeping might be useful, there's no denying that the more time you spend documenting your work, the less time you have to do your work. The solution to this was inevitably more IT, sold as a way to make the record-keeping easier. But adding IT to a bureaucracy is like adding lanes to a highway: the easier it is to demand fine-grained record-keeping, the more record-keeping will be demanded of you.

But that's not all that IT did for the workplace. There are a couple areas in which IT absolutely increased the profitability of the companies that invested in it.

First, IT allowed corporations to outsource production to low-waged countries in the global south, usually places with worse labor protection, weaker environmental laws, and easily bribed regulators. It's really hard to produce things in factories thousands of miles away, or to oversee remote workers in another country. But IT makes it possible to annihilate distance, time zone gaps, and language barriers. Corporations that figured out how to use IT to fire workers at home and exploit workers and despoil the environment in distant lands thrived. Executives who oversaw these projects rose through the ranks. For example, Tim Cook became the CEO of Apple thanks to his successes in moving production out of the USA and into China.

https://archive.is/M17qq

Outsourcing provided a sugar high that compensated for declining productivity…for a while. But eventually, all the gains to be had from outsourcing were realized, and companies needed a new source of cheap gains. That's where "bossware" came in: the automation of workforce monitoring and discipline. Bossware made it possible to monitor workers at the finest-grained levels, measuring everything from keystrokes to eyeball movements.

What's more, the declining power of the American worker – a nice bonus of the project to fire huge numbers of workers and ship their jobs overseas, which made the remainder terrified of losing their jobs and thus willing to eat a rasher of shit and ask for seconds – meant that bossware could be used to tie wages to metrics. It's not just gig workers who don't score consistent five star ratings from app users whose pay gets docked – it's also creative workers whose Youtube and Tiktok wages are cut for violating rules that they aren't allowed to know, because that might help them break the rules without being detected and punished:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

Bossware dominates workplaces from public schools to hospitals, restaurants to call centers, and extends to your home and car, if you're working from home (AKA "living at work") or driving for Uber or Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise

In providing a pretense for stealing wages, IT can increase profits, even as it reduces productivity:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

One way to think about how this works is through the automation-theory metaphor of a "centaur" and a "reverse centaur." In automation circles, a "centaur" is someone who is assisted by an automation tool – for example, when your boss uses AI to monitor your eyeballs in order to find excuses to steal your wages, they are a centaur, a human head atop a machine body that does all the hard work, far in excess of any human's capacity.

A "reverse centaur" is a worker who acts as an assistant to an automation system. The worker who is ridden by an AI that monitors their eyeballs, bathroom breaks, and keystrokes is a reverse centaur, being used (and eventually, used up) by a machine to perform the tasks that the machine can't perform unassisted:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But there's only so much work you can squeeze out of a human in this fashion before they are ruined for the job. Amazon's internal research reveals that the company has calculated that it ruins workers so quickly that it is in danger of using up every able-bodied worker in America:

https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage

Which explains the other major findings from the Upwork study:

81% of bosses have increased the demands they make on their workers over the past year; and

71% of workers are "burned out."

Bosses' answer to "AI making workers feel burned out" is the same as "IT-driven form-filling makes workers unproductive" – do more of the same, but go harder. Cisco has a new product that tries to detect when workers are about to snap after absorbing abuse from furious customers and then gives them a "Zen" moment in which they are showed a "soothing" photo of their family:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-bringing-zen-first-horizons-192010166.html

This is just the latest in a series of increasingly sweaty and cruel "workplace wellness" technologies that spy on workers and try to help them "manage their stress," all of which have the (totally predictable) effect of increasing workplace stress:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/15/wellness-taylorism/#sick-of-spying

The only person who wouldn't predict that being closely monitored by an AI that snitches on you to your boss would increase your stress levels is your boss. Unfortunately for you, AI pitchmen know this, too, and they're more than happy to sell your boss the reverse-centaur automation tool that makes you want to die, and then sell your boss another automation tool that is supposed to restore your will to live.

The "productivity paradox" is being resolved before our eyes. American per-worker productivity fell because it was more profitable to ship American jobs to regulatory free-fire zones and exploit the resulting precarity to abuse the workers left onshore. Workers who resented this arrangement were condemned for having a shitty "work ethic" – even as the number of hours worked by the average US worker rose by 13% between 1976 and 2016:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

AI is just a successor gimmick at the terminal end of 40 years of increasing profits by taking them out of workers' hides rather than improving efficiency. That arrangement didn't come out of nowhere: it was a direct result of a Reagan-era theory of corporate power called "consumer welfare." Under the "consumer welfare" approach to antitrust, monopolies were encouraged, provided that they used their market power to lower wages and screw suppliers, while lowering costs to consumers.

"Consumer welfare" supposed that we could somehow separate our identities as "workers" from our identities as "shoppers" – that our stagnating wages and worsening conditions ceased mattering to us when we clocked out at 5PM (or, you know, 9PM) and bought a $0.99 Meal Deal at McDonald's whose low, low price was only possible because it was cooked by someone sleeping in their car and collecting food-stamps.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/20/disneyland-workers-anaheim-california-authorize-strike

But we're reaching the end of the road for consumer welfare. Sure, your toddler-boss can be tricked into buying AI and firing half of your co-workers and demanding that the remainder use AI to do their jobs. But if AI can't do their jobs (it can't), no amount of demanding that you figure out how to make the Sea Monkeys act like they did in the comic-book ad is doing to make that work.

As screwing workers and suppliers produces fewer and fewer gains, companies are increasingly turning on their customers. It's not just that you're getting worse service from chatbots or the humans who are reverse-centaured into their workflow. You're also paying more for that, as algorithmic surveillance pricing uses automation to gouge you on prices in realtime:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

This is – in the memorable phrase of David Dayen and Lindsay Owens, the "age of recoupment," in which companies end their practice of splitting the gains from suppressing labor with their customers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-03-age-of-recoupment/

It's a bet that the tolerance for monopolies made these companies too big to fail, and that means they're too big to jail, so they can cheat their customers as well as their workers.

AI may be a bet that your boss can be suckered into buying a chatbot that can't do your job, but investors are souring on that bet. Goldman Sachs, who once trumpeted AI as a multi-trillion dollar sector with unlimited growth, is now publishing reports describing how companies who buy AI can't figure out what to do with it:

https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/gs-research/gen-ai-too-much-spend-too-little-benefit/report.pdf

Fine, investment banks are supposed to be a little conservative. But VCs? They're the ones with all the appetite for risk, right? Well, maybe so, but Sequoia Capital, a top-tier Silicon Valley VC, is also publicly questioning whether anyone will make AI investments pay off:

https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/

I can't tell you how great it was to take my kid down a grocery checkout aisle from which all the eye-level candy had been removed. Alas, I can't figure out how we keep the nation's executive toddlers from being dazzled by shiny AI pitches that leave us stuck with the consequences of their impulse purchases.

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/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter

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

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

[coldasyou]

maybe I am just sentimental and easily impressed but tbh I disagree with the whole “yes local theater is almost always bad but it’s still important” thing bc I think a lot of local and amateur theater is really good actually! like yes I also agree that it’s important to support local arts no matter what the quality so I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad message but I also think if we really want people to go out and support community theater it’s also important to remember that there is a lot of talent outside of broadway or major touring productions so yeah going to see community productions is not something I feel I need to begrudgingly do just out of principle it’s something I genuinely enjoy.  

[haleyusesherwords]

Aabria’s conversations with the D20 art department be like:

Aabria: Can I cut a hole in the table?

Rick Perry: No.

Aabria: Okay, what about a hyper realistic zombified bear carcass?

Rick Perry:….we can probably figure something out

Aabria: Now, what about talking to the DM screen?

Rick Perry:……..I have no idea what you could possibly mean but tell me more

[paloma-ascends-into-hellfire]

Jack Bauer???

[one-time-i-dreamt]

The hot new thing on Tumblr was the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company production of King Lear with Ian McKellen, so every meme and reaction image was just screencaps from King Lear.

[theatreism]

JEREMY JORDAN timeline (broadway, off-broadway & west end)

[dyleeart]

Quick DEH doodle after watching the show

[vrronica-sawyer]

very normal group of queer people chilling on modern day earth

gung ho guns version

[secretceremonies]

Bernadette Peters for the stage production of La Strada (1969)

[inkwell-illustrations]

My dream role is Davey Jacobs!

(Tell me yours in notes/tags)

[jtl07]

a college theater au that's been in the back of my mind and just gonna let free for shenanigans because why not

"Bea can do it!"

silence drops suddenly, swiftly, completely throughout the black box. Beatrice doesn't know if she's ever felt the theater be this still as she herself freezes, half-kneeling in the midst of the cables she was arranging, carefully not looking at neither Shannon -one of her oldest friends and the director and the one who can and will see everything on her face- nor at Ava -her best friend, her (supposedly not so, according to Shannon) secret crush- who plows forward with her trademark fervor and lack of grace.

"she’s been helping me with all my lines -"

"helping is a strong word," Bea mutters to herself.

"- and she already knows all the blocking-"

"because that's my job"

"and the audience is gonna love her even more than they love me. Shannon, think of how good it could be!"

Beatrice can feel Shannon wavering but final project or not, Beatrice has to protest. "Ava, i can’t possibly stage manage and act at the same time.”

"it's not impossible," Shannon says thoughtfully, "and it's just for one of the plays."

"we can all help out," Mary chimes in, not even looking up from her screen as she continues programming the lighting. the others are already nodding and smiling encouragingly and for once in her life, Beatrice wants to curse: this production for bringing together her most favorite and the most supportive of people; JC for being a kind-hearted son who'd dropped everything -including this production- to take care of his suddenly ill mother; and Ava for her logic and that pout and that look in her eyes -

breathe, her mind commands, and she does, sharply, deeply. goes over the facts: opening night is 2 weeks away; it's one play in a half-dozen collection of 1-act plays; the production is worth 40% of Shannon's final grade; no one else can help. in her mind, Beatrice tries to argue the last point - tries to suggest one of the other actors but she knows that both Camila and Lilith have their hands full with their roles for the other short plays; tries to suggest finding someone else but how could they possibly audition and rehearse with someone completely new in the time they have left?

then she makes a mistake, a classic one: she catches Ava's eye. finds in Ava's gaze hope and encouragement wrapped up in that warm regard that makes Beatrice do stupid things - like trying every ice cream store within a 10 mile radius of campus and having to deal with Ava's inevitable stomachache; like staying up until 2am watching Beatrice's favorite documentaries because had Ava insisted, because Ava'd said she was interested; like letting herself start to believe - that maybe, just maybe Ava could feel the same way too.

like saying: "fine." sighs for good measure "fine."

Ava cheers and Beatrice doesn't miss the relief that moves through everyone else -she ignores Shannon's swiftly hidden grin- then stands still when Ava bounds towards her and kisses her on the cheek.

"there's more where that came from," Ava giggles, waggling her eyebrows as she shimmies away and Beatrice freezes for a second time that day.

because she forgot.

the kiss.

fuck, Beatrice thinks - knows the only one she curse for this is herself.

[milolovesbmc]

Thinking about Bowtie Productions Falsettos, and I see no one talking about it, so here's a fun little thing I noticed!!

During March of the Falsettos, the men are wearing baseball uniforms, i think it's interesting how in this specific production, the mens childishness is shown by (their love for) sports. As in, in the bit in MOTF where they're muttering and talking at the very start they're muttering "baseball" and sport related stuff, which I think is a really interesting way of portraying this immaturity.

Anyways, where I'm getting with this is, their baseball (MOTF) uniforms say Falsettos at the front, which I think is really funny, because that means this literally is the march of the Falsettos, they're LITERALLY the Falsettos. In the back, they each have a different number, like you would have in any baseball uniform, and THAT'S what I want to focus on. I think this is really well done because MOTF is all about how Trina views the men, as childish and immature, but also about how she views each of them:

Starting off with the most obvious one, Whizzer's says 69, which wildly known to be the number of/the number that represents sex, this is because Trina views him as lustful, this could tie back to the view/belief that existed at the time around gay men being overly sexual and perverted, but that's a whole other can of worms I could get into some other time.

Marvin's says 01, which very obviously is tied with being the first, the one on the top, the best, basically. This is tied to his need to control everything and everyone, of "wanting it all", he needs to be at the top so that everyone will do as he says.

Moving on, Jason's number is 13. In Judaism, 13 signifies the age at which one becomes a man, due to this being the age at which a Jewish child has his Bar Mitzvah. Obviously, in MOTF, Jason isn't 13 yet, he's somewhere around the age of 10 or 11 years old, and we actually get to see him get Bar Mitzvah'd during the end act 2. This could signify how, even though he's not literally a man yet according to Judaism, Trina views him as one. Jason's portrayed as the most mature of the four men, seeing as he is the only one who isn't singing in Falsetto (in a high voice), this is how Trina thinks of him.

Finally, the one I'm most interested by, Mendel's says 42. Funnily enough, I first thought this was a reference to 420 (since they couldn't put a 3 digit number) and they were somehow implying Mendel smoked weed or something, I don't know why but that was what I first thought of. However, 42 is apparently the number gives as the answer by a supercomputer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” in a novel by Douglas Adams, making this number signify the answer to the ultimate question (the meaning of the universe, everything, to put it simply). Was this intentional? Most probably not, but I think it's really fascinating that Mendel has this specific number, it could signify how during Trina's song (previous to MOTF) Trina treats marrying Mendel as the thing that'll change her life, the thing that will (supposedly) finally make her happy, she sees (her upcoming marriage with) Mendel as the answer to everything.

[wanderinghedgehog]

Just watched a recording of a community theater production of Les Mis. It has taught me three things. Small theaters are great actually, the acting is best when people are having fun, and it’s kinda funny when they stage Javert’s suicide so that he falls from the back of the bridge instead of the front and they put a mattress behind the wall so the actor doesn’t die but when he falls the audience can hear very clearly the sound of him hitting the mattress.

[crystaltreebee]

Wow I wonder how many Newsies Characters I can name from memor-

44

I can name 44 Newsies characters from both 1992 and livesies from memory. 28 Newsies, 16 non Newsie characters. That’s not good. That’s an issue. I already have half the songs memorized.

[suddenlysomewherethatsgreen]

Will Roland as Seymour Krelborn in the Guthrie Theater Minneapolis production of Little Shop Of Horrors

[respectthepetty]

Jade was always odd

Middleman's Love decided to go full-clown on us, but . . . Jade was always living in another BL in Bed Friend.

And the man was always a mess.

That was the first episode of Bed Friend! The man has always been quirky. Hell, he snort-nose-bubble cried when King picked out the ring for Uea!

This fool is a believer in everyone being in a relationship because he is an innocent angel who still believes in fake shit like Santa and soulmates.

He is eccentric and is going to drive everyone crazy next week with his love for karaoke because he has never been capable of reading the room.

He likes doing random corny stunts like posing as a mannequin while waiting for his pharmacist because like a 54-year old dad, he thinks it's super funny.

Hijinks and shenanigans are this man's specialties.

Which is why his best friends are Uea, who needs some light in his life, and King, who finds his kooky behavior endearing.

Jade's watch was snitching on him, yet he was thinking, "I'm gonna match-make the hell out of the interns!" He is operating off of one brain cell, and it's being stretched thin between his friends, his job, and his family.

Y'all let my man live!

I don't call them Yellow/Orange Oddities for nothing!

THEY'RE ODD!