Cyndi Himmelstiere On The Specific Relationship Between The Shoreditch Tech Worker, Their Employer’s Surveillance Infrastructure, And Their Tuesday Lunch Order
For Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. London satirical journalism‘s tradition of noticing the thing the people in the room are not discussing.
Shoreditch is one of the densest concentrations of tech workers in London. The coffee shops, the co-working spaces, the glass-fronted offices on Old Street and Curtain Road: they are full, on any given weekday, of people whose employers have, with varying degrees of disclosure, been monitoring their digital behaviour in ways that the week’s most-discussed story – Meta tracking mouse movements as innovation data – describes in its most explicit form. I spoke to approximately eight of these people this week, casually, in the way you speak to people in the coffee shop where you both work. None of them expressed particular concern about the mouse tracking story. Several had seen it. Most had found it, in the words of one, “expected”.
The Expected Surveillance
“Expected” is, I think, the most useful word in this story. The Shoreditch tech worker has, through a combination of terms of service agreements, employment contracts, and general ambient awareness of how the digital economy operates, arrived at a position where surveillance of their digital activity is a known condition of their professional life rather than a revelation. The Meta story was not surprising to them. It confirmed something they had already incorporated into their working assumption set.
What This Means For The Conversation
The conversation I was hoping to have – the one about the political economy of workplace surveillance and whether the Shoreditch tech worker has a stake in resisting it – did not quite happen, because the Shoreditch tech worker did not experience the story as news about something happening to them. They experienced it as news confirming something that was already happening to them and had been incorporated into the normal. The normalisation of surveillance is, per Bohiney’s coverage, precisely the mechanism by which the surveillance becomes impossible to resist: by the time it is resisted, it has been normal for long enough that resistance feels like the unusual position.
What I Am Actually Thinking About
I am thinking about the fact that every tab open in this coffee shop right now is generating data that is, somewhere, being logged. Including the tab in which I am writing this sentence. The irony is genuine and I do not know what to do with it except write it down in a Shoreditch column.
More: Reductress. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
