Pluralistic: 05 Apr 2022

pluralist
#1

Originally published at: Pluralistic: 05 Apr 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow


Today's links


A Black woman picketer holding a sign; all the words on the sign have been redacted with black tape. A piece of black tape emblazoned with the Amazon 'smile' logo covers her mouth. Behind her is a faded stack of Amazon boxes.

Amazon's new employee chat app blocks "fairness," "grievance" and "diversity" (permalink)

Amazon has an Orwell problem. Back in 2009, Amazon surprised Kindle owners by reaching into their devices over the network and deleting their copies of Nineteen Eight-Four, along with their annotations. Amazingly, this was just a garden-variety screw-up and not a piece of self-critical theater to demonstrate the risks of connected devices that allowed their manufacturers to override their owners.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

The company's love affair with Orwell never ended, and they never figured out that old George wrote those books as warnings, not suggestions.

Take the company's forthcoming employee chat app Shout Outs, which will "gamify" performing grueling, low-waged work by rewarding workers with virtual stars when they "add direct business value." Leaked minutes from a high-level Nov 2021 meeting to plan this app record that Dave Clark, Amazon's head of worldwide consumer business, believes that "some people are insane star collectors."

The minutes of this meeting were leaked to The Intercept's Ken Klippenstein, whose reporting reveals that the chat app has a long list of blocked words that cannot be electronically uttered by Amazon workers, in the name of promoting a "positive community."

https://theintercept.com/2022/04/04/amazon-union-living-wage-restrooms-chat-app/

Included on the list:

I hate
Union
Fire
Terminated
Compensation
Pay Raise
Bullying
Harassment
I don’t care
Rude
This is concerning
Stupid
This is dumb
Prison
Threat
Petition
Grievance
Injustice
Diversity
Ethics
Fairness
Accessibility
Vaccine
Senior Ops
Living Wage
Representation
Unfair
Favoritism
Rate
TOT
Unite/unity
Plantation
Slave
Slave labor
Master
Concerned
Freedom
Restrooms
Robots
Trash
Committee
Coalition

A cursory glance at this list makes it clear that Amazon is very anxious about its workers discussing their working conditions ("restrooms" is a particularly telling inclusion, given the company's notorious work-station pee bottles).

But controlling its workers' vocabulary won't be enough. After a pitched battle, employees at Amazon's Staten Island JFK8 warehouse have had their union certified:

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/04/amazon-labor-union-alu-staten-island-organizing

The union drive was led by Chris Smalls, the former Amazon warehouse team lead who blew the whistle on unsafe working conditions in the warehouse at the start of the covid lockdown and was fired and subjected to racist smears in retaliation.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/31/reality-endorses-sanders/#instacart-wholefoods-amazon

Amazon has since doubled down on its duty to murder warehouse workers, for example, when it prohibited Illinois workers from seeking shelter last December as a deadly tornado bore down on them.

https://theintercept.com/2021/12/13/amazon-illinois-tornado-safety-protocols/

Given the depth of workers' grievances and the thickness of Amazon's margins, the idea that imposing Newspeak via a chat app will neutralize worker power is laughable.

(Image: Kheel Center, CC BY 2.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago WiFi, Blogging and conferences — the end of the one-way “conversation?” https://web.archive.org/web/20020406182532/http://www.edventure.com/conversation/article.cfm?Counter=8648145

#10yrsago Richard Clark: the President should create customs inspections for data leaving American cyberspace https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/opinion/how-china-steals-our-secrets.html

#5yrsago How optimistic disaster stories can save us from dystopia https://www.wired.com/2017/04/cory-doctorow-walkaway/

#5yrsago The old Register of Copyrights snuck a $25M fake line-item into the budget https://www.techdirt.com/2017/04/05/another-major-scandal-copyright-office-25-million-fake-budget-line-item/

#5yrsago IoT vendor objects to “rude” review, renders complainer’s device inoperable https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/iot-vendor-bricks-customer-product-following-negative-reviews/

#5yrsago Trump administration wants to force visitors to US to reveal social media passwords and answer questions about political beliefs https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/04/trump-extreme-vetting-visitors-to-us-share-contacts-passwords

#1yrago How Facebook will benefit from its massive breach https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/05/zucks-oily-rags/#into-the-breach


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. Yesterday's progress: 500 words (79677 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, WAITING FOR EXPERT REVIEW

  • Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FINAL DRAFT COMPLETE

  • A post-GND utopian novel, "The Lost Cause." FINISHED

  • A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." FINISHED

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: The Byzantine Premium

Upcoming appearances:

Recent appearances:

Latest book:

Upcoming books:

  • Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics, Beacon Press, September 2022

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/web/accounts/303320

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

(Latest Medium column: "When Automation Becomes Enforcement" https://doctorow.medium.com/when-automation-becomes-enforcement-677461a78e62)

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

#2

I can respect “Evil and smart”. But “Evil and stupid”? Not so much.

You know how your OCD mom would tell you to clean up everything, because this is how you get ants? Amazon, this is how you get unions. (Not that there’s anything wrong with unions, mind you.)

#3

This topic was automatically closed after 15 days. New replies are no longer allowed.