A world in which your boss spies on your brainwaves? That future is near
The reptilian annual World Economic Forum at Davos, where the masters of the universe meet to congratulate themselves on their benevolent dictatorship, is home to many sinister ideas. Sharing the latest sinister ideas with business leaders is, in essence, why the event exists. This year, one of the creepiest discussions of all was delivered under the guise of progress and productivity.
Nita Farahany, a Duke University professor and futurist, gave a presentation at Davos about neurotechnology that is creating “brain transparency”, something I previously associated more with a bullet to the head. The new technologies, which Farahany says are being deployed in workplaces around the world, may prove to be nearly as destructive. They include a variety of wearable sensors that read the brain’s electrical impulses and can show how fatigued you are, whether you’re focused on the task at hand or if your attention is wandering. According to Farahany, thousands of companies have hooked workers ranging from train drivers to miners up to these devices already, in the name of workplace safety. But what we are really discussing is workplace surveillance.
Farahany paints a picture of a near future in which every office worker could be fitted with a small wearable that would constantly record brain activity, creating an omnipotent record of your thoughts, attention and energy that the boss could study at leisure. No longer would it be enough to look like you’re working hard: your own brainwaves could reveal that you were slacking off.
Farahany acknowledges that there could be drawbacks here: “Done poorly, it could become the most oppressive technology we’ve ever introduced on a wide scale.” Yet, she seems more enthusiastic about the technology’s promise for corporations, saying rather sanctimoniously that the workplace surveillance “bossware” that exists today tends to make employees upset “even when it makes their lives better”. She also displayed a slide showing that nine out of 10 employees say they waste time at work every day, and opined that perhaps there was “good reason” for employers to want to keep tabs on everyone, after all. This is the sort of logic that makes sense to people whose jobs consist of flying to Switzerland for international conferences rather than, say, working at a gas station.
Farahany is a very smart person. But her professional milieu may have lulled her into falsely believing that corporations will not do the most unspeakable acts imaginable in order to make an extra dollar of profit. She argues that these technologies offer promising benefits for people to improve their own experiences at work, and that as long as we “make a choice to use it well”, and operate from a starting principle of “cognitive liberty” to protect individual choice, the future of workplace surveillance can be one in which workers and businesses alike are made stronger by the slow evolution of our brains into cybernetic, connected, measured mechanisms.
It is that fundamental sense of optimism that is, I’m afraid, screamingly naive. One need not be a futurist to divine how this will go. “Bossware” is common today, in the form of less flashy but equally invasive technologies of all sorts: what workers type, what they look at, how long they are “inactive” on their keyboards, how they drive, where they stop, when they apply the brakes, how direct the route they take is. A Coworker.org database of bossware found that more than 550 products are already in use in workplaces. Everywhere you look, workers are being tracked, watched, measured, scored, analyzed and penalized by software, human overseers and artificial intelligence, with the aim of wringing every last cent’s worth of productivity out of the flawed and fragile flesh-and-blood units of labor who must, regrettably, be used as employees
No longer would it be enough to look like you’re working hard: your own brainwaves could reveal you were slacking off
until the robots get a little bit more manual dexterity. The crowning insult of it all is that in most cases, the people enduring the surveillance are paid much less than those who are inflicting it.
All of this raises the question: what exactly is your employer buying when they give you a paycheck? For bosses, the answer is simple: “Everything.” It is a bedrock principle of capitalism that the employer owns the employee. The past several hundred years of human progress can be read as a very slow battle of humanity to pull free of this nightmarish entitlement. For centuries, of course, employers actuallyowned people. Even after they were forced to give up slavery, they tried to maintain the greatest possible degree of control. Coal companies owned the houses their workers lived in. The Chamber of Commerce owns local politicians who create the public policy that governs the towns where workers live. And it was long considered routine to fire and blacklist any workers who did troublesome things in their free time, like “talk about communism” or “organize a union”. The sum total of the entire past century’s civil rights laws, labor rights laws and corporate regulations have not been enough to eradicate the firm conviction of business that, when they give you a salary, they are buying your whole life.
In this light, it becomes clear that granting companies the ability to monitor our brainwaves is not a slippery slope so much as it is a one-way superhighway to the panopticon. Even if we set aside the obvious opportunities this provides companies to improperly depress wages and build pretextual cases to fire labor activists, the normalization of this technology represents a shrinkage of humans’ space and a growth of the space for capital. The time in our day that belongs to us rather than to commerce declines further. The area in which you get to be a person rather than an economic unit gets smaller. What companies never discuss is the fact that, once we allow them to claim this time and space and data as theirs, they will never, ever want to cede it back to us again.
At Davos, Farahany said that neurotechnology in the workplace “has a dystopian possibility”. But that is not stating the case strongly enough. Absent stringent regulation, it has a dystopian certainty. Waiting to see how this all turns out is a very dangerous idea. The biggest mistake you can make with dystopias is assuming that they never become real.
Hamilton Nolan is a writer based in New York
our conviction that educators – and not politicians – should be writing up our lesson plans and deciding what transpires in our classrooms, our belief that students can (and need to) consider complicated issues.
As someone who has taught for decades, I can hardly imagine abruptly cutting off class discussions that have veered (as they inevitably will) into these now forbidden areas. Must we fear that our students will report us as insurrectionists and felons for having mentioned the grotesque racial disparities in our prison populations? I believe that education not only involves the transmission of hard information but also helps students to think for themselves, to weigh opposing arguments and to make informed decisions. How can these goals be accomplished when we are being told to (quite literally) whitewash our nation’s history, to deny that we are walking on appropriated land in a country built by kidnapped and enslaved people, when we are being encouraged to lie about the very ground beneath our feet?
Students aren’t as stupid as the Florida legislature seems to think, and by adopting these new regulations, we are only encouraging them to distrust their teachers and the system that so blatantly misrepresents the realities they so clearly observe around them.
In the past, authoritarianism – and the indoctrination that sustains it – has used educational systems to further its agenda. We can recall images of firstgraders wearing little red kerchiefs and saluting the eastern bloc dictators, of students let out of class to welcome the Führer to town. We know that democracy depends on the free and open exchange of ideas, on conversations that begin early in the life of its citizens – and that fascism thrives when only one point of view is permitted. DeSantis’s rulings, and the campaigns that have engendered them, are inherently antidemocratic.
We cannot change history by censoring it. We cannot pretend that we were never a slave-holding society, that racism ceased to exist when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. We cannot erase the past, or influence a young person’s gender and sexuality by removing a book from the library. Students are not political pawns or ideologues-intraining. They are our future and it’s frightening to imagine a future populated by citizens who were forbidden to argue and debate, to hear about a historical event from multiple perspectives and to learn to make the critical judgments and necessary distinctions that will help them navigate our increasingly complex and challenging world.
It’s been noted that Ron DeSantis graduated with a degree in history from Yale, where he was presumably encouraged to engage in – and to learn from – the open debates that he is now attempting to stifle. Presumably, too, he learned what a good education is, what it means to be taught to think – and that is precisely what he is denying students who are less privileged than he and his Yale classmates.
It’s a political decision designed to win over the Trump supporters that the governor will need in his bid for the presidency – that is, white working-class Americans who don’t understand that their own children are also being denied the education that will help them overcome the class divisions that perpetuate our economic inequality. Private school students will still be able to study history in depth, to learn to reason, to process and assess the accuracy of what they are being told. It’s the public school kids who will be funneled into the low-paying jobs, the dim futures for which their schooling has (not accidentally) prepared them.
Ultimately, what’s most troubling about the new restrictions and proscriptions is that historical facts are being recast as snowflake propaganda. The truth is being distorted or omitted at a moment when we, as a nation, have never so desperately needed to maintain our grip on reality.
Without being taught to distinguish truth from fiction, without being asked to think, without learning how this country evolved – a history not just of heroism and noble principles but of theft, brutality and crime – our students will be easy prey to every conspiracy theory that comes along. They will find it far more difficult to imagine and implement the important ways in which we hope to become a more equitable, less racist – and better educated – society.
Francine Prose is a former president of Pen American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
We cannot erase the past, or influence a young person’s gender and sexuality by removing a book from the library