DK_en 1x 05 Attack of the Algojerks

Episode first aired on November 22. 2017. Listen to the audio on Spreaker.

Believe it or not, there are some news on the mother of all datagrabs. Not because anything has moved in Italy, immutable mire that it is, but because the EU's Directorate General on Competition has gone WTF on the issue and has sent a letter to the Italian Government, asking a few uncomfortable questions:

1. how was IBM selected among competitors
   (from what we know there was no tender)
2. what would be Italy's share in the IP resulting from the analysis of its health data
   (we also know IBM has straight-facedly proposed it be none at all)
3. if other competitors could be granted the same level of access at the same conditions
   (that is, for free, with no agreed scope and no oversight? I sure hope not!

As I have been repeating for the last few months: promising a country's entire trove of health data with no oversight, no tender, no contract and no economic return is a bit much to go unnoticed, even for rule-dodging experts as we Italian traditionally are.

Also, the DG Comp would very much like to know a little more on those 60M€ that the agreement promises IBM for, I don't know, for the valiant effort of opening a research centre in a first-world country where wages are spectacularly low.

Anyway, the Italian Government was given 20 days to respond in writing. The request being dated October 31, that puts the deadline on the 20th of November, that is, today.

Prepare the popcorn.

In the meanwhile, we have to face the... Attack Of the Algojerks.

Music: "Who's Complaining" (from Cover Girl)

I don't know about you, but I have the impression that things are accelerating. To be precise: I have the impression we are careening downhill with no brakes, and anyway no driver.

I feel like the brazenness of the digital world is reaching its charlatanism, up up near the limits of the scale.

Algojerk : (n.) somebody taken by passion for the computer, to the point of siding with technology for its own sake. The a. will blindly support anything that appears "more technological'' than the status quo. Normally employed as a programmer, sysadmin and sometimes even in management, the a. can be spotted because his technical ability (or, more often his own perception of his technical ability) far surpasses his awareness of his own actions. The a. is essentially a waeponised nerd. This differentiates him, for instance, from a functional or hierarchical superior who has equal (or, more often, lower) technical ability but full awareness and that, for this, belongs in the category known as piece of shit.

Personally, I would not be up against algojerks, they are fundamentally naïve chaps who cannot see beyond their keyboard; they are mostly harmless, and sometimes fun. There are just two problems:

1. first, algojerks are enablers for the pieces of shit out there
2. second, for quite a few years now algojerks have been the breed of informatician preferred by the market, to the point where now it is even cool to be one. Algojerks even get funding for their own startups.

Seriously, how do you call a guy whose motto is ``move fast and break things'' and all those who worship him as the brightest example to follow.

Today algojerks have been weaponised to do the dirty work as useful idiots for the pieces of shit who pull the strings and reap the earnings.

One day we'll need to talk about how programming culture and ethos have been marginalised and dismantled over the past 20 years, so that a generation of coders who cannot see beyond the keyboard and who haven't the slightest ethical concern could be groomed as manpower for dystopia.

Where does all this leave us? Well, we are the resistance, and it's about time we made ourselves heard.

Facebook takes on revenge porn

Here's a headline from a few days ago, it's about revenge porn.

Revenge porn: posting intimate pictures or videos of a sexual partner on the social networks. It's a disgutsing practice, almost exclusively used by males against female partners. It draws on the more primitive and savage part of the male self-image, the part that still sees a female as an object that, once used, can only be considered "damaged goods"

I think revenge porn does not even make you a piece of shit, it makes you a penis-hanger.

But let's get back to the piece of news I mentioned; apparently the eggheads at Facebook have come up with another earth-shattering idea, that deserves our attention:

International Business Times, 3 november 2017: Facebook wants to help revenge porn online --but first it needs your nudes

No, I'm not putting you on, this is a piece of real news, it's been widely reported and apparent the feature is being tested in Australia.

In order to fight revenge porn, Facebook asks its users for their nude pics, so they can be fingerprinted and automatically blocked should anyone try to post them against the users' will.

What could go wrong, huh? Let us all stoop in the presence of such geniuses.

Oh, by the way, the other idea from these algojerks was to combat fake news by giving them robo-generated negative comments. I kid you not.

Clip: from Space Balls:
BLACK HELMET: Are there any other assholes on this ship?
WHOLE CREW: YO!!

I don't know what they smoke or take to come up with such stuff but surely it's not legal, even in California.

Anyway this tells us what slobs our digital overlords are in the end.

But the attack of the algojerks doesn't end here. This kind of thing is what they do when they are left to their own devices, so to say. They are teenage-brained guys with fingers faster than their brains, piecework key-punchers. Their evil is unawareness, not malice.

The real problem starts when algojerks, by nature meek and domesticable, are weaponised by some real bastard. That is when horrors like the following are born:

Let me see if you're working

The Guardian, 6 Novembre 2017 Big Brother isn't just watching: workplace surveillance can track your every move)

Well, this one needs a little more pondering.

Let's see: there's this company, sorry, this /talent management/ company, called Crossover. Take note: if you meet them, you've been warned.

This /talent management company/, I said, asked itself a tough question that unfortunately will sound familiar to too many managers and CEO, which is this:

How can be sure my remote workers are not idlers?

When I was young, I thought in my innocence that only in Italy looking busy was more important than getting work done. After all, our managerial culture never evolved past the 1950's.

But through the years I've found many examples to the contrary:

• people who made a career out of prowling the corridors with an open laptop in their hands, force-feeding their PowerPoint deck to innocent passers-by
• others who played Solitaire with such vigorous intensity (of course with their back to the wall) to distinguish themselves as toilers to the hawkish eye of the boss and overtake their colleagues who were busy doing the toiler's share of work in addition to their own.
• again others who collected overtime enjoying porn sites and thanks to overtime, got promoted.

But I am sure you have your own stories here.

So, the terrible problem of remote workers who may really be idling instead of working.

In Italy there is no such problem: if you propose remote work as a freelancer, you'll see your fee halved; as an employee, you'll see your workshare doubled. Hey, you'll work from home, you'll get plenty of free time, no?

But in the States, where remote work means less fixed expenses on office premises, the problem does exist. And how can the noble CEO make sure the wily remote workers do not mistake their fee for a free handout?

Enter Crossover: the company-issued laptop will take a screenshot and a picture of you from the front camera every 10 minutes or so; this will join the application telemetry and the keyboard logs and be distilled into a "focus score" and an "intensity score" that will be used to gauge your real value.

Let me stress that Crossover is not the only company selling this kind of crap. An entire hare-brained industry is flourishing.

Now let it sink in, I'll need a minute lest I go ballistic.

Ok. Where do we start?

Let's start from the initial assumption: that a remote worker may really be idling rather than working.

You see, intellectual work works more or less this way: the better I get at doing something, the less time I need to do it, hence my time earns me more. Or, in a given time I can do something more difficult, hence my time earns me more. I can even get to the point where I am one of the few capable of doing something, and my time earns me more. But my time is limited, and my only incentive is that it earns me more.

So, whoever thinks I can go to the gym on paid time, well, thinks I am stupid.

If, on the other hand, I really go take a massage instead of working, we're saying my client can't tell the difference from my results, and he should be complimented for his ability to choose people and evaluate results: entrepreneurs like him need no competition.

Let's also consider this idea that an entrepreneur may have an /interest/ in controlling not results, but the time required to reach them.

The first thing to say here is that this bring workplace relationships back to the 1800s or so, so much for the rhetoric on knowledge workers and result-based work.

According to legend, knowledge workers and entrepreneurs sit at a table and agree on a price for some work. Once an agreement is reached, the knowledge worker act independently.

So far, the legend. In reality, entrepreneurs constantly try to extract more value from the knowledge worker's time. Unfortunately, entrepreneurs and knowledge workers don't act on a level playing field. The entrepreneur has inordinately more contracting power, which makes such usurer practices especially repulsive. It's worth repeating that knowledge workers keep themselves professionally up-to-date entirely on their own time and dime.

So, trying to time-squeeze somebody in an intellectual profession is not only morally repulsive, but also profoundly stupid, because the person will retreat into doing whatever can be done the fastest. So once again my compliments, dear entrepreneur, by insisting on paying peanuts you're finally employing a monkey.

You see, I could understand. I could understand these thick-skinned capitalists who build empires squeezing employers and customers. I could understand the pursuit of their own exclusive interest: get rich and let of the world go fuck itself.

The truth, though, is far less heroic. People who are into this kind of workplace surveillance are not the thick-skinned alphas they play. They are just idiots who don't know how to price people's work and, lacking that, resort to pricing time. Idiots not in a clinical sense, which may constitute mitigating factor, but in a Cipolla sense: people who do damage to others and do not really profit from it.

Such people do not deserve the honour of having others who work for them. But reality, though it lacks ant sense of decency, has no shortage of irony. Those entrepreneurs will soon find themselves with the employees they deserve.

As for me, when I consult my meter runs only during meetings, that curious work ritual with no purpose and no agenda where everyone's time is suddenly worthless. The only things my client can negotiate are deadlines and results, all else is off limits.

Aha, some of you may say, but things would change if you were employed, wouldn't they? Well, no. Duties are defined, deadlines are set. And since my job is not about laying bricks, evaluating results is the only sensible way to quantify my work. Incidentally, focusing on results is the only sensible way to quantify somebody's work even if it concerns laying bricks.

It's all effort saved for the boss who doesn't have to waste his time making sure people look busy and can do his own job: managing the bottom line, improving processes, defining strategies. In a word, preparing for the future while everyone else is busy making the present work.

Because that should be his job, no? Everything else is up to somebody else, and if the boss has nothing else to do than lurk, then there's a cost waiting to be cut.

The truth is different: the knowledge worker is still a piece-worker. This is the wonderful corporate culture of the XXI century.

We have to repeat the obvious. If our society really were postindustrial and knowledge-based, then we'd have accepted years ago that knowledge production is not linear with respect to time.

But it's still not all.

Google Docs The Censor

Here's another piece of news: Google censors our Google Docs.

NY Times, 31 October 2017: Google Docs Glitch That Locked Out Users Underscores Privacy Concerns

As it happens, a few Google Docs users were locked out of their own documents for a few hours. Reason? An algorithm had decided the contents of those documents were illegal or in violation of the Terms of Service.

Oh my, what do these TOSs say? This:

Our services display some content that is not Google's. This content is the sole responsibility of the entity that makes it available. We may review content to determine whether it is illegal or violates our policies, and we may remove or refuse to display content that we reasonably believe violates our policies or the law. But that does not necessarily mean that we review content, so please don't assume that we do.

This is a particularly convoluted line of thought.

Let's rephrase it:

1. your content is your responsibility, and yours only
2. on the other hand we may decide it's illegal, and remove it or deny you access to it
3. but this does not mean we will, so don't count on our reviewing unless we actually do it.

So Google autonomously decides whether some content violates the law. How odd, I seem to remember it took a judge for that.

I know, I know, it's all written in the terms of service, like it or leave it blah blah blah.

I won't argue. Let's stick to the practical: do these terms sound reasonable to you?

Here we have a private entity, that for all we know may even be in a conflict of interest, that arrogates to itself the right to enforce the law regarding the supposed legality of content that you produced and for which you alone are held responsible.

Surely, something that can be denied to me by another private entity without any legal process is a curious definition of "property".

We've all heard how there is no cloud, only someone else's disk.

OK, so whose is my document when it sits on someone else's disk? How dependable is a service that claims the right to decide whether what I write violates the law?

And let's ignore what may happen to commercial information stored in the cloud. Because you're not storing that kind of content, do you?

Yes, I know it is the same shit Facebook does every single day. That it's the fashion does not make it any less disgusting or any less idiotic, politically speaking.

What's my point? My point is we've been naïve. We really believed this Web 2.0 thing, sharing and building content together.

We poured billions of man/days into the platforms, and the platforms have amassed billions of dollars.

But we were the only believers. The only business model the platforms ever had is to extract our data and resell it to whomever would pay for them.

In the Information Society, users are just data cows.

But only if we let algojerks and their masters have it their way. Because the truth is that algojerks have a very limited perspective, and there are many alternatives to their trivial worldview; there are alternatives to their products and the miserably utilitarian vision of their masters.

Of course, these alternatives require we are willing to act as thinking beings, not cows.

But once we decide we are, we can leave a net that tries to turn us into kids craving a prize for the time and the value we are robbed of.

We can leave software producers who are hell bent on making pathological addicts out of us.

And once we've left, we can rediscover things like responsibility, reflection, self-awareness.

These are not concepts for a bovine mind, they require that we never stop learning, maybe even a little effort.

This is the real continuing education of the real society of information, the one that enriches and empowers us, not the one we are sold to make us feel one step too much behind or one step too much ahead to get paid.

So, are you ready to stop being datacows?

Because you know:

If you're not worried, you're not paying attention. And if you believe you have nothing to hide, it's because you lack imagination.

Not only another network is possible, it has always existed and is growing, and it's a network where /people/ use computers, not the other way around.

One more thing...

I had just finished typing the script when some piece of news popped up in my feed. New, ghastly research by Steven Engelhardt, Gunes Acar and Arvind Narayanan at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy unequivocally shows how the current Web is used to record every single user activity from remote. Basically, it's like having a body camera on when we browse the Web. All is recorded, including of course passwords. There is an entire industry devoted to this.

It's nothing really new, but the extent and the maturity of the commercial products they review is really worrying, and I've seen a few things in tech. Basically we are witnessing full-fledged surveillance and monitoring applications barely disguised as marketing intelligence.

All this is of course just barely legal in Europe and will be more so in May when the GDPR sets the record straight. But the fact that businesses have no qualms about developing and deploying this kind of technology is revolting.

I think we can at last agree that the state of the Web is a festering mire, and we must start acting now. If deactivating JavaScript by default means some sites won't work, then be it.

Marketers and their friends are building a dystopia just to make people click on ads. History will have a name for them, and it won't be a pretty one.

You think I am exaggerating? Install tracking blockers and script blockers on your browser now. Take just one day to assess the difference.

The level of difficulty you will experience in navigating is a direct measure of the level of surveillance you are subject to.

If you're cool with it, then it's your own lookout. But you have been warned.