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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.
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.
Hey, watch it. This is Dave Eggers we're talking about. Dave fucking Eggers. Every time he sets his pen to paper, the entire staff of The New Yorker looks up from their screens and stops typing, just watching in stunned awe. Scientists have shown that each David Eggers book of the last 20 years has raised the collective IQ of the entire United States by an average of 6.2 points, even among people who had their friends tell them about it but never actually read it themselves. Another study showed that just holding a Dave Eggers book in your hand so that the cover is visible makes you 14 percent more attractive than conspicuously reading The New York Times Review of Books on the subway. I did my master's thesis on the electromagnetic properties of Dave Eggers (in places with low EMF interference, people have actually reported that their fillings started picking up signals from NPR when Eggers is around) and I can assure you, this man is a blessing upon the literary world no less significant than the Christ-child, and you are not fit to shine his shoes.
Breakfast served all day!
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.