> This inability to understand the difference between using a technology and having the same technology used against you is endemic to the industry. Take Crossover, which bills itself as "the Fitbit of productivity," but whose customers rhapsodize about the product giving them "powers of near X-ray vision." The point of a Fitbit is to help you improve something that matters to you – but Crossover's customers want to use it to punish other people for failing to follow orders. It's the difference between a Fitbit and a prisoner-tracking cuff – which make crossover "the ankle-braclet of productivity."
This was the most insightful point in the article for me. The distinction between being a user and being a target applies to much more than bossware, too. (Generative AI being an obvious recent example.)
The electronic health records bit totally resonated. I was involved in a selection committee for a new health record for the municipal public health clinics I worked for a number of moons ago as the physician champion. They went with the product that the billing, finance and statistics department wanted, ignoring the fact that the interface was poorer for the clinicians and that the beancounters worked with the data, not with the program itself (i.e., forgetting that "garbage in garbage out"). I made the strategic mistake of saying honestly that we could learn to work with anything but it was suboptimal; they heard the first part but not the second and went with it, then they got mad when I refused to endorse it and sell the other clinicians on it. In the end it was never implemented and they chose Epic a few years later that now everybody hates. A massive waste of time and money.
> The bossware problem is a boss problem, in other words. It follows that fixing the bossware problem is the workers' job, and indeed, the Times feature notes that Amazon has been dismantling its bossware surveillance in a bid to reduce its workers' support for unionization, which promises to ban bossware from Amazon workplace. Bosses deride unions as reducing "freedom" – but just the threat of unions delivers more freedom to workers than any right-to-work law ever could.
Cory be like "I wrote about this in a story of mine in 2019" when the bit about YT's mom in her office in Stephenson's Snow Crash, 30 years before TFA was written, perfectly captures the present situation.
This was the most insightful point in the article for me. The distinction between being a user and being a target applies to much more than bossware, too. (Generative AI being an obvious recent example.)