Slashdot Mirror
The Circle Skewers Google, Facebook, Twitter
theodp writes "This week's NY Times Magazine cover story, We Like You So Much and Want to Know You Better, is an adaptation from The Circle, the soon-to-be-published novel by Dave Eggers which tells the tale of Mae Holland, a young woman who goes to work at an omnipotent technology company and gets sucked into a corporate culture that knows no distinction between work and life, public and private. The WSJ calls it a The Jungle for our own times. And while Eggers insists he wasn't thinking of any one particular company, the NYT excerpt evokes memories of Larry Page's you-will-be-social edict and suggests what the end-game for Google Glass might look like."
Solution: free people from the necessity of getting a job and working for an ignorant boss. Vote for government to provide a basic income to anyone who asks, and stimulate the natural creative instinct with challenges. The focus should be on the advance of knowledge, not "any job is a good job". With free MOOCs and the ability to collaborate in an ad-hoc way through the unprecedented communication tool that the internet provides, it is no longer necessary for individuals to work for a company to contribute.
That is exactly what I was referring to - the dregs of American management appear to have a fantasy of a slave workforce that they do not need to feed or house. That becomes especially clear when they are working in other nations where US law does not apply and they try to apply conditions considered unacceptable everywhere because they think they can get away with it. Perhaps the US is exporting these clowns because they are useless at home, or perhaps at home they have adult supervision and something resembling respect for the law or at least fear of it.
While the vast majority of the US has got over slavery there's still those holdouts that create such poisonous workplaces that would be even worse if they could get away with it.