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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."
Social media breeds the lifestyle where privacy is just putting clothes on; all else is fair game. Although, I do use Facebook and Google+ myself, I'm careful what I post
Hi, Ethanol-fueled! I like your comment and find it interesting!
Unfortunately, not having some sort of public profile is becoming a detriment.
I was at a job fair and I was told by the recruiter for IT that I needed a LinkedIN profile because they did all their recruiting their. First, I restrained myself from asking, "WTF are you doing here , then?!"
I responded that I'm uncomfortable with social media.
He responded that LinkedIN is nothing like Facebook where you have people posting on your page.
He didn't get the whole privacy concerns.
I went home, gritted my teeth and created my LinkedIN profile. And now, a very large portion of my life is up there - our working life is the largest and a very important aspect of our lives, after all. And considering how judgmental, cruel and snobbish employers are (I worked for a while as a minimum wage laborer during the hardest time during the meltdown) and the fact an electronic profile gives no indication of my personality (and no opportunity to address someone's concerns about something), I am afraid I am probably going to end up back as a laborer - a very well educated laborer.
Things are all automated and depersonalized now. You have machines making the decisions and people trusting the machines. We are turning into a dystopian "future" that'd make a Nebula Award jealous.
ahhh yes another story about over-reaching corporate/government culture invading the private inner sanctums of our lives...how predictable...the song remains the same only the names change.
i mean, really now, how many times over the past 80 years has this story been written?
the real story here isn't that huge entities want to know/control all aspects of things, but the overall acceptance is this culture in society...i know lots of friends who think all this geo-twit blog diarrhea is great fun. but imo they all live carefully constructed lives where they see threats everywhere, just as corporations and governments do, and fear the unknown.
i don't live a carefully constructed life...i just live.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
The Jungle is still happening in real life, in real factories. Maybe not here in the USA, but in many other places. It's sort of offensive / ridiculous to compare the two. "No work life balance while making $125,000 a year" is not the same as sweatshop slave labor, and it's silly to compare the two.
It's about time that somebody called attention to "we own you" management that want full on slavery but with less responsibility to the slaves than the old fashioned kind. All that shit like making employees wear recording devices and sacking them for what they get up to in private after the Christmas party (getting rid of the women and not the men - assigning the blame Taliban style), really needs to be brought out into the sunshine. Ordinary office or sales employees shouldn't have to put up with the sort of control that people in the military know to expect and get something in return for that loss of liberty.
I like to point this out too. Before digital technology people were criticized for being "bookworms", or if you were reading in public you had your "nose stuck in a book".
I also remember my family each taking a section of the newspaper and reading it, sometimes pointing out articles to each other. It was great. And it is no different than me reading my iPad while my son reads his.
So in some ways not much has changed.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
But was The Jungle anywhere close to true? It does not seem so.
Instead, some of these same historians dwell on the Neill-Reynolds Report of the same year because it at least tentatively supported Sinclair. It turns out that neither Neill nor Reynolds had any experience in the meatpacking business and spent a grand total of two and one-half weeks in the spring of 1906 investigating and preparing what turned out to be a carelessly-written report with preconceived conclusions. Gabriel Kolko, a socialist but nonetheless an historian with a respect for facts, dismisses Sinclair as a propagandist and assails Neill and Reynolds as “two inexperienced Washington bureaucrats who freely admitted they knew nothing”8 of the meatpacking process. Their own subsequent testimony revealed that they had gone to Chicago with the intention of finding fault with industry practices so as to get a new inspection law passed.9
9. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Agriculture, Hearings on the So-called “Beveridge Amendment” to the Agriculture Appropriation Bill, 59th Congress, 1st Session, 1906, p. 102
Read more: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/ideas-and-consequences-of-meat-and-myth#ixzz2gK8kSBB9
“The Jungle” is a pure work of fiction. It has absolutely no basis in reality. A 1906 report by the Bureau of Animal Industry refuted Sinclair’s severest allegations, characterizing them as “intentionally misleading and false,” “willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,” and “utter absurdity.” Quoting Mr. Crumpacker on Sinclair’s allegations of diseased meats, “the chief inspector said there was not a single animal that went into the slaughterhouses that was not inspected before it went on foot; and if one was diseased, had a lumpy jaw, or appeared to be out of condition, he was separated, and then a skilled veterinarian made a thorough examination of that animal after the rest had been passed; and then they had inspection on the inside.”
Read more at http://www.libertariannews.org/2010/09/17/meat-packers-rape-you-and-you-love-it/
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.