> The term “Little Tech” was popularized by the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, which argued that excessive regulation was stifling innovation.
When someone says regulation is stifling innovation, the odds are 90%+ that what they mean is "we want to find loopholes to make money by screwing people over". When a VC firm says that, the odds are 100%.
> When someone says regulation is stifling innovation
It’s also wild how firms deploying “technologies that promise to track, manage, and supervise workers” aren’t themselves considered to be adding regulation to their processes.
There should be, but the regulation that A16Z is mentioning is Andreessen's longstanding fight over IPOs and SPACs.
I don't necessarily agree with him (there is room for improvement, but we made these regulations due to the bubble in the 90s and 2000s), but he's been very open about this for at least 15 years now.
> the regulation that A16Z is mentioning is Andreessen's longstanding fight over IPOs and SPACs
The idea that SOX is what’s keeping SpaceX and OpenAI private should have died after the JOBS Act’s failure. But I guess SPACS were a nice Covid bailout for Wall Street.
But Andressen's contention ain't about OpenAI or SpaceX - it's about money pits like Kong, Envoy, or Illumio that should have IPOed or SPACed in 2019-21 but have founders who chose to remain private because they would have been screwed over by the public market.
From an A16Z leadership perspective, they have a significant roster of 2011-19 vintage startups that they would have preferred to list so they could redeploy capital (and make their carry), but didn't because listing sucks if you're a founder (as Pat pointly elucidated on multiple occasions during 20-22 while raising his growth round). And their valuations are too high so later stage investors push back in board meetings.
As yk, it's business - we're all looking for our own net benefits, but some are more let's say "personalist" about their positions.
And to reiterate, I agree with your stance and point - I'm just trying to voice the other (imo unjustified and greedy) PoV that explains some of the statements and actions coming out of these guys. It's not like I have many places to kvetch without career ending implications - I can only annoying Dan P enough times
There's a reason why YC has so many companies in a cohort. They know most will fail, and honestly, will stink. It's a reason why so many of the companies that post here that mention what cohort they were in often get a collective (but silent) "who?" from the readership.
Depends fund to fund and startup. Some funds and VCs (like the one I work with) are fine with an acquisition as an exit if the stars align. Others (like A16Z) are funding in order to IPO and make the next Facebook.
I often work in highly regulated markets. Every regulation I've seen makes sense, even if sometimes it costs a TON of money to get thru - most of the time the biggest problems and highest costs with regulation are when the gov tries to do some bullshit private public partnership and have private companies do accreditation and stuff like that.
Loopholes are "holes" and blind-spots in the law. A reduction in regulation involves opening more of those.
It's not about making something totally unregulated (in which case there wouldn't be a need for loopholes, as any bad practice would be fine).
More about reducing the more targeted and detailed parts of regulations that prevent loopholes and keeping the "core laws" - that then have gaping holes and blind spots.
> When someone says regulation is stifling innovation
What they mean is SOX and regulation around IPOs and SPACs.
This has been a significant sticking point of A16Z's leadership (and other VCs) for 15 years now.
Most startups funded in the 2010s have decided to remain private, take an acquisition, or continue to raise later and later stage rounds (eg. Stripe, Databricks), which has impacted the amount of capital funds like A16Z, Accel, Sequoia, etc can deploy, and tends to benefit traditional IBs like JPM, GS, Barclays, etc.
This is why A16Z and YC backed LTSE, and supported SPACs for the brief window they were opened.
There is a need for compliance, but liquidity is starting to become difficult to realize for early stage investors.
> VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech
Their definition for "surveillance tech" is broad, and includes a significant portion of the Security, Compliance, and Defense startups which are often required by legislators or insurers due to breaches (eg. Snowflake).
Generally speaking, we fund startups if they are solving a problem we have heard about from our peers AND that it has a tangible TAM that can justify later stage participants.
I mean there is lots of worthless regulation. The Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) form is new as of last year, and adds complexity to company formation while also risking tanking the company if you don't fill it out properly. The real-world upside is basically nil, despite their promises of fraud prevention.
Lots of these laws exist, and they stifle innovation. We're approaching a point where you need a lawyer and document service for a company formation, and these laws prevent small companies from attempting formation and can kill growing companies.
> [Updated March 26, 2025]: All entities created in the United States — including those previously known as “domestic reporting companies” — and their beneficial owners are now exempt from the requirement to report beneficial ownership information (BOI) to FinCEN.
It was an anti-money-laundering thing, and money laundering is back in. Once again you can create US companies which are owned blindly by Cayman companies whose beneficial owners are either (a) sanctioned or (b) US nationals who don't want to pay tax.
The way to resolve those problems is to make the penalties steeply progressive, not based on the "size of the company" but on the wealth of those beneficial owners. The reason "little tech" is a misnomer is that a company with a VC firehose behind it isn't little in any meaningful sense. If Andreessen is giving you millions of dollars and you don't file your forms right, Andreessen should have to pay a large fine. If they don't like that then they can stop funding companies and then companies can succeed or fail on their own merits rather than on how well they can convince some VC people to open their wallets.
It's funny how sometimes it seems countries move in lockstep. Just two years later the UK introduced similar legislation to require verification of company directors among other things like banning PO Boxes. And the deadlines for compliance are in the same year (this year).
My understanding was you could have to pay 500 a day (inflation adjusted to ~600) for each day you're late. That's a quarter million after a little over a year.
When I last incorporated with stripe atlas they told me I had to do it, although maybe they just wanted an extra fee. Either way I maintain this sort of thing adds complexity and makes it hard for people to start businesses who are experts in things other than incorporation law
> you could have to pay 500 a day (inflation adjusted to ~600) for each day you're late. That's a quarter million after a little over a year
That’s not filling it out improperly, it’s forgetting to file. I’m also not familiar with any cases where this fine was unfairly applied. (I agree with you that BOI is as over broad as it’s badly named.)
Well the BOI went into effect in 2024, so I wouldn’t be surprised if nothing has happened. The concern is in 10 years, when someone decides to “crack down” on “corrupt” business and fine small companies millions of dollars. I know it’s fun to hate crypto (much of it is a scam) but this is essentially what the SEC and Biden admin did to them.
It’s a quiet law that has potential to explode, and I was quite scared of it when I incorporated.
Andreessen has been interacting with Thiel’s network on Twitter for a few years now. These guys always have takes that can appear intriguing for being contrary to popular opinion, but once you see where the money originates, their attitudes become predictable.
Andreessen in particular has spent a few years flirting with the literature they send him. It might have been sincere (a lot of this literature is popular among Silicon Valley rightists), but in retrospect it seems like it was just a PR campaign to make him look like one of the “cool” billionaires. Once Andreessen gave the “Little Tech” interview, it became apparent to a lot of people where his true interests were.
Similar things happened with Elon Musk, JD Vance, Blake Masters, Palmer Luckey, and others in that sphere. I think Mark Zuckerberg tried to buy his way in in the last few years, but I’ve never seen any evidence that it worked.
I dunno, I thought that it used to be common knowledge in these circles that "we need this to protect the children" meant the government-critter was malicious. I.e. approximately the reverse. I'd say if anything, these days the above can be expanded to apply with regard to any sufficiently narrowly defined and sympathetic group.
Do you think can change the brakes on your own airplane? How many disposable nicotine vapes are legal for sale in the US? How far do you have to be from a road to camp in a national forest? What is the Jones Act? Can you shoot down a drone? Do you have to obey a flight attendant? What is a nickel made out of? What are the elements of a pre trip inspection for a tractor trailer? Etc., etc.
> The US basically has none outside of banking and healthcare
This isn't even remotely true. Heavy regulation is actually one of the reasons why it's so hard to do things like build new housing or get high-speed rail, for two popular examples.
Anyone who has worked in regulatory compliance at software or hardware companies will also roll their eyes at the claim that the United States has basically no regulation.
The number of pages in the federal regulations only grows over time (admin to admin). Construction of any kind, including housing, education and childcare come to mind as things you missed.
I.e. - everything that people complain is really expensive.
Most industries in the US are heavy regulated. The ones that are not so heavily regulated - like software, and/or evade a lot of regulation abroad - like many consumer goods from shirts to cars - are the ones not getting more expensive.
They want the rule of law to end, the end of responsibility - and they dont want to understand, that the result is a decaying oligarchy similar to russia. Its the ideological equivalent to having your cake and eating it.
If they were actually oligarchs, they'd have already done what they want.
Conflating some wealthy people who have, at best, mild influence over the government, with actual oligarchs in an oligarchy is... rhetorical nonsense.
I get how it happened. We started referring to wealthy Russians in the 90s who actually wielded substantial control over government similar to oligarchs and we continued to refer to them as such even after they lost any semblance of political power, but still.
You mean the guy the administration smeared as an ineffective, incontinent drug addict and who had to duck out because of the harm to his companies? The guy who promised trillions in cuts an managed to deliver almost none? The guy who is now railing against the budget bill and being ignored by those actually in power?
His power is nothing compared to actual oligarchs in real oligarchies in history. The Thirty Tyrants could pass laws, sit in judgement and execute anyone they wanted for any reason (and did). They controlled every aspect of Athens. Musk got some people to retire early, got some people fired (often temporarily), was overruled by the judiciary and the administration regularly and was generally ineffectual.
He was given unprecedented power over federal agencies by the president after giving the largest political donation in US history. He had more power than many people will real roles and functions. The fact he appears not to have accomplished much with it says more about his competence as a leader than the nature of oligarchy.
There are already several books about Surveillance capital. It’s not just VC money but public money, too. People pay taxes to get monitored by the government then go to work at a job where further monitoring takes place. Maybe one day houses will come with a build in no tech safe room free from surveillance and it won’t just be the bathroom as Bill Gates joked about in 2007 with his interview alongside Steve Jobs
Tangential comment, about this "background check" tools that the article briefly mentions:
> Latin America, where labor laws are less strictly enforced [...]
> in Mexico, provides identity verification tools that do various checks including biometrics, and also cross-check against government databases and blacklists.
These two issues are closely related. Here in Mexico, a lot of companies share "blacklists" of ex-employees that have gone to labour court, regardless of the reason or the result. Because of this, very few people ever go to labour court against a company here, even if they know that they're legally on the winning side.
Fortunately not all companies are like that, but the chilling effect still remains.
One would hope the courts would award more damages for that. "My company wronged me, in order to make things right I had to appeal to the court which will do further harm to me because I am now blacklisted". The court should recognize that and aware even bigger damages.
I want to live to see these tools being deployed in VC offices. What are these guys doing anyway besides going to the gym, having coffee dates, and putting out BS posts on X?!
Most of their job actually consists of having coffee dates, as well as looking like an impressive, put-together "thought leader".
A rank & file VC is essentially a salesman. Their job is to understand everything that's going on in their sector, and have warm intros available so they can sell the founders of the actually-promising startups on having their firm invest. In general, you don't do this in the office. You get out and meet lots of people in the industry.
Likewise, if you're a founder going into fundraising mode, your full-time job is to be a salesman. You go out and meet lots of investors and blow shit up their ass so they all believe you're the next hot thing, and then you play them off against each others so they keep escalating their termsheets. I've had founders tell me that everything you do in the fundraising game is performative - you should treat it like a months-long acting gig where everything you do is designed to elicit the desired emotional reaction to get investors to open their portfolios.
When I was young I worked at a startup where the CEO was out of the office most of the time.
One of my coworkers was irate about how he had to work hard, while the CEO was out there doing who knows what. Being young and impressionable it started to rub me the wrong way, too.
Eventually one of the older guys informed me that the CEO was going out on sales trips to potential customers, meeting with investors, and doing a number of other in-person things that the company needed. That's why he wasn't in the office.
I felt foolish for thinking that his job and my job should look the same and occur in the office.
The disgruntled coworker didn't care, though. He wanted the CEO to be butts-in-seats and staring at a monitor because that's the only type of work he understood. I get the same vibes when people sneer at VCs for stuff like "meeting people all day". That's their job.
At least you recognize it. A lot of developers never get to the point where they accept that without the business side, the code doesn't matter. (To say nothing of where their paycheck comes from)
Sure is funny that their "very important job" is to fly first class, stay in 3 star hotels, wine and dine and schmooz, have immense influence, and make a million dollars a year doing it.
Sure is convenient while they chafe at the actual laborers for taking too many bathroom breaks.
> Their job is to understand everything that's going on in their sector, and have warm intros available so they can sell the founders of the actually-promising startups on having their firm invest
VCs’ job is to raise money. Sexy founders and past returns help with that. But the money is essentially booked when an LP signs a commitment.
On some level they deeply desire for everyone to pay attention to them at all times, and they fear being ignored and irrelevant. Someone like that will struggle to understand that others don't get the same enjoyment out of being watched.
The reality is, anyone in an executive or investor position almost doesn't even have a "job" in the way a salary employee does. There isn't really a unit of measurement other than connections and deals made, both of which may not even help them directly at that exact moment. They could be making deals for other individuals.
Their job is to travel around, meet people, find new opportunities and network.
Go to Disney? Make sure to book the Grand Floridian or Four Seasons (not hardware store) and make sure to let all your contacts know you are in town.
Probably won't even go to the parks, just spend your time meeting with other ultra high wealth individuals.
Going to a conference? Make sure you have 3-5 other meet and greets planned such that you are always going from person to person.
Its a job that most people on this forum cannot even imagine.
By it's very nature it has to be excessive, because the ultra wealthy live a life of excess.
> anyone in an executive or investor position almost doesn't even have a "job" in the way a salary employee does
This describes anyone at the top of their field. A star engineer or academic can spend their time however they please. (And giving them that freedom is generally a profitable bet.)
> By it's very nature it has to be excessive, because the ultra wealthy live a life of excess
It really doesn’t. It just glances with excess. You can pitch your company at Cannes or the Super Bowl without buying tickets to the events.
The difference is the "job" involves getting real money for your effort because you're a big equity holder, and the job also does not wear you out physically unless you let it because meeting and talking with people doesn't have too many occupational hazards other than COVID-19.
Yeah unfortunately the rich are always against the same for them; aka government regulations.
Our modern rich were raised in a more religious time and our understanding of neuroscience today makes it pretty obvious they're still just patronizing geezers who think we owe validation of their story.
When by the numbers every billionaire could not wake up tomorrow and we'd barely notice. It's not even a school shootings worth of victims.
All their "be metrics driven" gibberish did not work out the way they'd hoped. Just a handful of morons humanity will carry on without some day.
Oh, we’d notice if the billionaires died overnight. Every news outlet and social media site would have a post about their boss dying. Every politician would immediately signal their intention to put every possible resource into getting to the bottom of it (as a reassurance to their new masters).
* Stereotyping and hating on management types? Check
* Cynical flippant comment? Check
* Small jab at X? Check
I think worker surveillance is pretty awful myself but I just don't think this comment will lead to high quality replies. There's very little light and mostly heat in this comment but it will jive with the community culture strong enough to generate a bunch of grievance-oriented replies. The purpose of this comment is mostly to remind readers that we can strongly dislike something without reaching for low-effort ragebait to criticize it. Honestly, worker surveillance is so dumb it should be simple to dump on it factually.
It should be expected that the relationship of the uktra-rich tech elites and the labor class that works for them would be adversarial. If anything I think it is positive that people are more conscious of their own class.
You vaguely gesture at this being somehow negative. We can strongly dislike something while recognizing the forces behind that something as well. Employee surveillance does not exist in a vacuum, it exists in the same continuum of RTO, of mass layoffs while corporations make record profits, etc and so forth.
I think if we use the "should be expected" idea to excuse bad discourse then bad discourse will consistently win. The issues most worth discussing are usually the most controversial ones after all.
The only reason I made this comment is because as HN has been getting a lot bigger post-2022 Reddit API changes, I've been noticing a lot more low effort rage/engagement bait in the comments. The mods here have added the "Don't be curmudgeonly" guideline recently to combat this trend but I think the bait is really degrading the quality of conversation here to the point where this might as well just be any old generic comments section on the net. At some point HN falls into the same problem that every newspaper comments section, Reddit, and Nextdoor fell into: farming ragebait for approval removes the incentives needed for quality discourse and crowds non-ragebait out. I think some of this too is that the right now HN is growing faster than the mod team can deal with the comments.
I think it's largely a losing battle, but I'll try because I've spent too much on this site to not try. But I will be honest I am spending a lot less time here because of this decrease in quality.
(I'm also cognizant that I broke an HN guideline, namely "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.")
Ironically, I don't think very highly of HN community, but probably not for the same reasons as you. Suffice to say I thought poorly of it prior to 2022.
Alas, communities are what people make of them, and they change as people enter and leave those communities.
People are allowed to be cynical, allowed to take jabs at the clown show that is X, allowed to criticize VC and surveillance culture.
You should consider contributing to the discussion instead of making off-topic, passive-aggressive comments policing what people are allowed to like, discussing stereotypes while directly stereotyping OP and this community in general.
Sure. But it’s appropriate to point out that it’s low cognitive effort venting.
OP could have done that with more tact, and more constructively. But it’s ironic that turning this into a “what have VCs done for you lately” rant plays into their advantage by turning a system that involves certain skills and differentiated abilities into an ersatz caste system, where apparently the idea of taking a client to dinner is somehow unfathomable for mere engineers.
If your bottom line is actually affected by a change in employee performance that needs automated surveillance to be noticed, are you just not running a profitable buisness?
I think a lot of HN is more familiar with office tech jobs than the types of businesses this article is talking about. The companies they linked do things like allowing workers to clock-in remotely from their phones, and then the app uses GPS to record where you clocked in.
> If your bottom line is actually affected by a change in employee performance that needs automated surveillance to be noticed, are you just not running a profitable buisness?
This website is called "Rest Of World" because it focuses on countries outside of places like the US and Canada, where small businesses aren't operating with the fat profit margins of a SaaS company. Employee productivity and timeclock fraud can completely change the nature of a small business running on razor-thin profits in a developing country. It's a completely different ballgame than some software developers scrolling Reddit for a couple hours every day at a SaaS company.
In the world of hourly workers where turnover is high, timeclock fraud will run rampant in a non-trivial portion of your workforce if people realize it's not being monitored closely. The subset of people abusing it also changes over time. Some employees start out operating by the book and then start pushing the limit to see how much they can get away with.
The article doesn't really do the topic justice by blurring the lines between "app that lets workers clock in at remote jobsites" and "AI tool to surveil employees". I think a lot of comments are assuming it's all the latter.
I'm having a hard time understanding what kind of jobs you are speaking of that are both hourly, off site and bring in a low margin? Not a jab genuinely not clear to me!
Edit0: after reviewing the article, it's very amusing to me that as an employee I had an app for my last desk job that demanded all those except possibly (not certain) for GPS, it might just have identified my location from the wifi connection I was using, as punching would only work on work wifi. And I work in Canada!
The concept missing from this is output. All of this meta-data seems superfluous. If I completed my work at 4am in Brazil or at Noon in New Jersey, what does it matter to the company. The thing that does matter - the quality of the work - isn't being assessed and might even be masked by the meta-data.
To be completely honest, while the former makes some sense, the latter is where businesses want it to go, and that holds true in the US as much as it does in China or Indonesia.
I think what everyone is talking about is supremely relevant, because often it starts with some arguably legitimate use case then over time morphs into the thing everyone didn't want.
I agree, and the metric for productivity should be clear, and measured, rather than recording and monitoring the process of work. The reason employers want to monitor process is because they cannot find a good metric for productivity, for which they feel cannot be gamed - esp. knowledge workers; you don't measure by lines of code written, bugs fixed or features delivered, as they are all surely game-able.
The article is from restofworld.org so does not focus on Western countries but that doesn't mean this isn't a problem here too. Bossware is everywhere.
Makes me think of the short novel Manna, about a dystopian future where working class humans are micro-managed by AI. (And an alternative future where everyone shares in the benefits of technological progress.)
I think all we can do is help every little way we can to ensure AI is distributed, that we can own our own AI deployments and robots, rather than letting it all roll up to a few billionaires owning everything.
The reality is that the current AI boom is just supercharging a longstanding trend of massive surveillance. Governments and the monied classes distrust everyone else by default, and continue instituting surveillance to protect their interests at the expense of everyone else.
It’s also everywhere:
* Academia has seen a glut of sensors and tech to surveil labs, classrooms, students, and faculty
* Retail and service workers are tracked via camera or phone and yelled at remotely by the boss if they’re not appropriately productive in any given moment
* Small businesses often leave telemetry and default data collection policies in place, letting private companies monitor their staff and business
The only tools available to us at this point are sabotage, awareness, and resistance. We need to build a society where people trust each other by default again, instead of assuming harm until proven otherwise. We also need governance and regulations at every level stating that surveillance of any sort must be as narrowly scoped as possible, that data retention is limited to as little as practicable, and that sharing of surveillance data with any party other than those compelled by law and warrant is illegal.
We’re in an era of peak productivity and flat wages, with the largest wealth pumps in human history funneling more money into fewer hands. This kind of surveillance isn’t just offensive or unacceptable, it’s grotesque in its treatment of our fellow humans.
The surveillance proliferation reflects a fundamental workplace cultural transformation driven by counterculture influence on professional norms.
Traditional workplace governance relied upon internalized behavioral standards eg duty, shame, professional integrity, functioning as self-regulating mechanisms. The systematic erosion of these cultural guardrails necessitated external monitoring systems substituting for previously internalized accountability.
The “trust but verify” approach emerged from practical necessity of maintaining organizational functionality within a workforce increasingly disconnected from traditional concepts of professional duty and self-accountability.
> The “trust but verify” approach emerged from practical necessity of maintaining organizational functionality within a workforce increasingly disconnected from traditional concepts of professional duty and self-accountability.
This sticks out in my head as completely divorced from the practical reality of the modern workplace circa the past fifty years. Every single KPI has gone up: productivity, imports, exports, revenues, share price, deliverables, margins, you name it.
The counter-culture cited to justify these sorts of highly invasive spyware deployments is merely the reaction of a workforce to stagnant wages and deteriorating standards of living in the face of an economy that has left them behind, a monied class that loathes their existence, and governments who can’t be bothered to listen to their grievances over the sound of a $25k-per-plate fundraising dinner. Workers aren’t the problem, here, and surveillance does nothing to actually improve things for the majority of society.
To suggest “counter-culture” is the issue is akin to suggesting queer people are responsible for military overspending as opposed to unaccountable defense contractors and PMCs, or that the National Debt is the fault of immigrants as opposed to a government apparatus that fails elementary school maths. There is no “counter-culture” causing a problem in the workplace requiring surveillance, it’s a handful of people at the top of the organization trying to keep as much for themselves as possible demanding said surveillance to protect their own positions and interests - which conveniently happen to be directly opposed to the needs and demands of their workers.
> The “trust but verify” approach emerged from practical necessity of maintaining organizational functionality within a workforce increasingly disconnected from traditional concepts of professional duty and self-accountability.
This shift in workforce attitudes is because companies have shifted their view of labor. Labor is now fungible, and labor is not an investment, it's a necessary evil.
In order to have self-motivated employees you need to reward loyalty and build incentives where employees do their best because that ends up being what's best for them. Companies, pretty much all of them, decided this was both too much work and too expensive. So they gave up.
The reality is that workers don't give a flying fuck because not caring is the best way to progress your career. Job hopping, resume building, lying - these strategies work. Being a leader, shaking things up, even being honest - these backfire.
Companies don't want good workers. They want yes men, warm bodies, people who don't think too much. And they got that. So, everyone should be happy.
> In order to have self-motivated employees you need to reward loyalty and build incentives where employees do their best because that ends up being what's best for them. Companies, pretty much all of them, decided this was both too much work and too expensive. So they gave up.
Agreed. In the end, the public’s revealed preference for “cheap” made it hard for companies to justify the cost of investing in employee motivation.
> disconnected from traditional concepts of professional duty and self-accountability
I wonder what world you think used to exist.
"I don't want to X, but this time it's different and my hand is forced." That's a millenniums-old cope for doing shit you always wanted to do, but needed a way to not feel bad about.
You have a point, but I think the distrust was initiated by the Thatcher/Reagan neo liberal turn.
In the early 80s, I remember mass layoffs in the headlines every day. Often older, long term employees, who were more expensive. And company share prices would go up on those announcements.
When I started my professional career in 1986, I was fully aware I was an expendable cog. It didn't make me less professional, but it did make me less loyal. I wasn't planning to work for the same company for 40 years.
Sure enough, 5 years later, the company was acquired and virtually every employee fired. 2000 people. Many of whom had given 20 years to the company.
For us to build a high trust society again, we must enforce the law uniformly and consistently through unscalable and “legacy” means like police walking the beat and doing actual human investigative police work. Though murder is down, there is an uptick in property crime, and especially an uptick in people believing that property crime should not be prosecuted at all if the perpetrator is any less wealthy than a billionaire.
I don’t think most folks - even us ACAB folks - are opposed to the law being evenly enforced and applied. Nor are we opposed to law enforcement building stronger community ties and doing investigative policing instead of militarized response.
The latter half of your statement does reflect a sort of ignorance of reality: when we push for lowered persecution of, say, shoplifting under a given amount or of necessities, it’s because we understand those are often crimes of desperation better solved through social programs, food banks, or job guarantees. I’d love to see cops get off their ass and go after the actual shoplifting gangs and train raiders instead of tasering someone to the ground for stealing a couple bucks of food, but they won’t unless prosecutors are given public mandates of what they should be prioritizing (say, home invasions and vehicle break-ins instead of speeding tickets). Start with the big items and work down, as opposed to the disproven “broken windows” policing style of the NYPD.
Rest Of World, where this article is from, is a site about news outside of the West. Your talking point about high trust societies seems to be related to the West and is both orthogonal to this article and the start of its own passionate discussion that can probably derail this thread.
The parent comment also seems to be discussing the west, in many of the countries described in the article, a high trust society has never really existed at scale until fairly recently
We should absoultely and aggressively enforce property crime.
With that said, I'm leery of mass surveillance. It might seem egalitarian but there is something to be said for a police officer having the discretion to not enforce a law.
I think I prefer that even if it means some will abuse that power.
> especially an uptick in people believing that property crime should not be prosecuted at all if the perpetrator is any less wealthy than a billionaire.
... and a probably-equal uptick in people who advocate for extrajudicial murder of people accused of (or just suspected of) property crime (look at the way people on the right talk about homeless folks, immigrants etc). the loudest online are not representative of the majority opinion.
It's just the continuation of the same cycle of creating insecurity, dependency on more powerful economic interests, and insuring exploitation starting with the Acts of Enclosure in the 17th and 18th centuries.
It sucked being a feudal peasant, but at least you could eat turnips.
If the identity document mandated to be verified is one that allows not only private businesses but also the government to build profiles and use them against private citizens with no legal recourse in case of misuse (criminal or otherwise) and is trivial to obtain for an adversary, it very much is "surveillance tech". Please look up everything you can about the horrors of the identity scheme called "AADHAAR" in India.
If everything is "surveillance tech" then nothing is.
Certain functions like remote employee clock-in with geolocation (literally the first example company in the article) are perfectly reasonable to record the employee's GPS coordinates, in my opinion. If you're clocking in at the job site, having some record that you were actually at the job site isn't an invasion of privacy.
My location is irrelevant to my employer, in most cases. What do they care if I am at home, at the home of someone else, in a hotel, or camping out in a yurt, so long as I do the work, attend the meetings, and get my job done?
> That has nothing to do with my day-to-day location.
In some US states (and some international jurisdictions, as well) you owe income and possibly other taxes (and your employer may be responsible for withholding and reporting related to those taxes) on income from work done in the jurisdiction even if it is only a single day of work, and even if you are not a tax resident, so, yes, it has something to do with your day-to-day location.
i always think about e911 calling for enterprise VoIP software phones. In order to make sure the calls go the right 911 local call center it is required to have the user enter the address they are using the computer at. It's the law and the fines for routing to the 911 center of last resort aren't cheap. And thats just the tip of iceberg if required employer surveillance just to follow the damn law.
There are two types of people on a campus: people love the freewheeling academic environment and really get the mission, and people who would work in corporate except they aren’t competent enough.
And, I want to be clear—I’ve met a ton of the former. Really, I’m not down on universities at all. They are full of wonderful people fighting against the corporatization and just, like, trying to remain human.
But the latter would absolutely implement corporate style surveillance dystopia at the drop of a hat. Except, again, they’d do it in the dumbest way possible, so it would somehow be even slower and shittier than the bloatware you get on your corporate laptop.
worse, a bright eyed smart guy with a young family gets an offer of a lifetime to lead IT at a world-class University based on long stable performance at a low-profile place. The offers start getting exchanged, housing and schools are looked at with cautious optimism and oh, that new paycheck. But as the meetings get serious and papers get signed, there is a certain requirement.. we are upgrading our networks.. in particular the routers.. and our email system is from the stone age. "We" are looking at these certain routers, the new IT director is informed.. this deal has been in the works for a long time. You will have the first duty to implement this giant change. Yes, the routers do "deep packet" inspection but we have government contracts here, this is National Security... Some departments will complain, you will have to meet with them..
<specific names and dates excluded to protect the guilty>
> I was unpleasantly surprised to see Accenture on the list of bad employers who spy on their employees with AI.
for someone with the username 'cynicalsecurity' this is surprising to hear :) i don't think there are any global for-profit consulting firms who are guided by any kind of strong moral/ethical compass.
In my experience, small businesses are actually the ones that love to spy. There's really no tech oversight so when the owner asks for access, they get it. Whereas if a middle manager in an enterprise company asks to see their reports mailboxes, security will tell them to get fucked.
This. Coming from MSP world, the number of SMBs who harbor such an intense hatred of their own workers to the point of demanding total surveillance is basically all of them; customers refusing surveillance packages are the exception, not the norm.
Irony is that surveillance cuts both ways, and big companies know it. Any data you collect can and will be subpoenaed at some point, and that’ll multiply your damages paid out in the process.
There are already complaints about surveillance of academics and students during lectures in my country by a certain non-American government. Also when it comes to healthcare, there are many companies competing to get in that door as we speak.
Maybe, but the current US administration is doing its best to destroy #1, #2, and #4. So that leaves healthcare, which is probably only "protected" because it has already developed different flavors of dystopia.
Unfortunately this is preying on developing economies with spotty labor regulations and enforcement. I'm curious who's using them: are these domestic firms not trusting their workers or are they mostly foreign firms trying to squeeze out work from overseas shops? Everything I've encountered about South Asian work culture in low cost shops was a widespread low-trust culture which pitted managers and workers against each other, but these were specifically firms oriented around low-trust low-cost hiring.
A lot of AI discussion suffers from an is/ought problem where people think you're attacking their vision of Iain Bank's the Culture while they refuse to see what's in front of their face, IMO.
If we were building The Culture, we’d be using these tools to help identify and treat folks with undiagnosed disorders (e.g., ADHD, ASD, OCD) through their habits instead of firing workers for not meeting arbitrary KPIs or denying them travel rights for being a dissenter.
This is why I can’t get behind current AI bubbles: we’re not remotely using them to help humanity, only to punish the poor, the marginalized, and the undesirables.
Slamming into the limits of growth, all that remains is to either automate it away - or to underpay and than enforce minimal compliance for essentially slavery with surveillance.
If you don't trust your employee, you can fire them. Don't hire people you don't trust. If a company doesn't even know what kind of traffic, output, or variation in work an employee will have in their job then they are a bad business. Business takes on liability of the people they hire, and they should not be shielded from their own ineptitude in hiring and training them.
funny how the same folks preaching innovation are funding tools that stifle autonomy.guess it's only "innovation" when it benefits them.we're building a panopticon, one startup at a time.but who's watching the watchers?
> another startup sells you a mouse jiggler, that makes you 'active' 24/7
The problem with this is the power imbalance. The mouse jiggling is technically fraud. So discovery of this tool’s use confers massive leverage to the employer.
Something to keep in mind when building out any kind of surveillance: you probably don't get to choose who uses it, and how it's used.
Fortunately, recent events have made some of the risks much easier to appreciate.
For example, let's say that your city council and universities have been opposing very recent rogue moves in upper government. Suddenly, the well-regarded local police are getting body cams, which they never needed before, but it seems like a good thing that some community activists ask for.
But... Data fusion means that not only will said rogue elements in upper government soon have access to that general surveillance feed, but (since disregarding the Constitution anyway) will be able to enforce local police complying with rogue directives.
An example first application of that might be due to the local police having a policy of not checking reporting parties for immigration status, to encourage mutual cooperation between police and community. The rogue could automate that away, with fairly simple "AI" monitoring for compliance, already feasible.
Those earlier community activists change their mind about introducing surveillance, but too late.
Then the rogue use cases can get worse from there. First in enforcing general practice compliance like above, and then (if situation and pretense decay further) unconstitutionally more specifically tasking those local police as additional foot resources for the rogue's goals. Thanks to the body cams and other surveillance, a rogue will be able to centrally monitor for compliance all these loose resources in various cities. Maybe using other surveillance to determine who does and doesn't gets tasked for what.
(If this sounds unlikely, think back to how quickly masked officers were tasked to grab off the street someone who did nothing wrong, Soviet secret police style. And other officers were openly circumventing legitimate court orders against extraordinary rendition of grabbed people. Maybe complementary surveillance helps the rogue mass-distinguish "loyalists" from the ones who'd question illegal orders. Plot the arc.)
Body cams is just taking one example of what we might've assumed was a positive, progressive thing for society, and showing how quickly it can be turned against society, by bad elements.
I think the general answer is not to implement surveillance power when you don't have sufficient checks and balances to keep it operating within the interests of the people, both now and in the future.
And don't fool yourself about immediate intent of something you're building. Obviously that employee surveillance software you're developing isn't only for regulatory compliance, or detecting a spy stealing IP. But more frequently will be abused by dim and petty managers, to create dystopian work environments that slowly kill everyone with stress and misery. And occasionally will be used by corporate to try to suppress someone who complains of sexual harassment or accounting irregularities.
One of the first things you can do, as a thoughtful tech worker with integrity, is to simply not apply for the questionable-looking jobs. Many of them are obvious, and you'll get an unpleasant gut feel, just by reading their one-sentence startup blurb, or maybe when you look at the job description. Then close the tab without applying, and go soothe your nausea with some /r/aww or the gym. Let the icky company be flooded with the robo-appliers, the lower-skilled, and those who have good tech skills but are less-thoughtful or less-principled. Hey, maybe a company that's a mix of the low-skilled and the shitty will sabotage its own efforts, without you having to be involved.
Smaller companies are way worse to work for, almost always. Everyone knows this.
Starting a successful company is virtually impossible, just looking at failure rate. Poverty is the outcome for whomever doesn't succeed and can't find a return to the workforce.
What a hostile work environment in corporate America is an argument for, actually, is either poor mental health or more Federal Employment. It reads like that's what you want.
A healthy corporate America is the only real antidote to massive dysfunction.
It isn't a coincidence that a healthy corporate America aligns with both a massively healthy GDP and a normal to advantageous labor pool for the average person.
https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/us/palantir-t...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/05/07/doge-gove...
When someone says regulation is stifling innovation, the odds are 90%+ that what they mean is "we want to find loopholes to make money by screwing people over". When a VC firm says that, the odds are 100%.
It’s also wild how firms deploying “technologies that promise to track, manage, and supervise workers” aren’t themselves considered to be adding regulation to their processes.
I don't necessarily agree with him (there is room for improvement, but we made these regulations due to the bubble in the 90s and 2000s), but he's been very open about this for at least 15 years now.
The idea that SOX is what’s keeping SpaceX and OpenAI private should have died after the JOBS Act’s failure. But I guess SPACS were a nice Covid bailout for Wall Street.
But Andressen's contention ain't about OpenAI or SpaceX - it's about money pits like Kong, Envoy, or Illumio that should have IPOed or SPACed in 2019-21 but have founders who chose to remain private because they would have been screwed over by the public market.
From an A16Z leadership perspective, they have a significant roster of 2011-19 vintage startups that they would have preferred to list so they could redeploy capital (and make their carry), but didn't because listing sucks if you're a founder (as Pat pointly elucidated on multiple occasions during 20-22 while raising his growth round). And their valuations are too high so later stage investors push back in board meetings.
As yk, it's business - we're all looking for our own net benefits, but some are more let's say "personalist" about their positions.
And to reiterate, I agree with your stance and point - I'm just trying to voice the other (imo unjustified and greedy) PoV that explains some of the statements and actions coming out of these guys. It's not like I have many places to kvetch without career ending implications - I can only annoying Dan P enough times
Not all funds follow the same strategy.
It's not about making something totally unregulated (in which case there wouldn't be a need for loopholes, as any bad practice would be fine).
More about reducing the more targeted and detailed parts of regulations that prevent loopholes and keeping the "core laws" - that then have gaping holes and blind spots.
What they mean is SOX and regulation around IPOs and SPACs.
This has been a significant sticking point of A16Z's leadership (and other VCs) for 15 years now.
Most startups funded in the 2010s have decided to remain private, take an acquisition, or continue to raise later and later stage rounds (eg. Stripe, Databricks), which has impacted the amount of capital funds like A16Z, Accel, Sequoia, etc can deploy, and tends to benefit traditional IBs like JPM, GS, Barclays, etc.
This is why A16Z and YC backed LTSE, and supported SPACs for the brief window they were opened.
There is a need for compliance, but liquidity is starting to become difficult to realize for early stage investors.
> VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech
Their definition for "surveillance tech" is broad, and includes a significant portion of the Security, Compliance, and Defense startups which are often required by legislators or insurers due to breaches (eg. Snowflake).
Generally speaking, we fund startups if they are solving a problem we have heard about from our peers AND that it has a tangible TAM that can justify later stage participants.
Lots of these laws exist, and they stifle innovation. We're approaching a point where you need a lawyer and document service for a company formation, and these laws prevent small companies from attempting formation and can kill growing companies.
> [Updated March 26, 2025]: All entities created in the United States — including those previously known as “domestic reporting companies” — and their beneficial owners are now exempt from the requirement to report beneficial ownership information (BOI) to FinCEN.
It was an anti-money-laundering thing, and money laundering is back in. Once again you can create US companies which are owned blindly by Cayman companies whose beneficial owners are either (a) sanctioned or (b) US nationals who don't want to pay tax.
Source? I thought it’s a best efforts form.
When I last incorporated with stripe atlas they told me I had to do it, although maybe they just wanted an extra fee. Either way I maintain this sort of thing adds complexity and makes it hard for people to start businesses who are experts in things other than incorporation law
That’s not filling it out improperly, it’s forgetting to file. I’m also not familiar with any cases where this fine was unfairly applied. (I agree with you that BOI is as over broad as it’s badly named.)
It’s a quiet law that has potential to explode, and I was quite scared of it when I incorporated.
Andreessen in particular has spent a few years flirting with the literature they send him. It might have been sincere (a lot of this literature is popular among Silicon Valley rightists), but in retrospect it seems like it was just a PR campaign to make him look like one of the “cool” billionaires. Once Andreessen gave the “Little Tech” interview, it became apparent to a lot of people where his true interests were.
Similar things happened with Elon Musk, JD Vance, Blake Masters, Palmer Luckey, and others in that sphere. I think Mark Zuckerberg tried to buy his way in in the last few years, but I’ve never seen any evidence that it worked.
The US basically has none outside of banking and healthcare.
This isn't even remotely true. Heavy regulation is actually one of the reasons why it's so hard to do things like build new housing or get high-speed rail, for two popular examples.
Anyone who has worked in regulatory compliance at software or hardware companies will also roll their eyes at the claim that the United States has basically no regulation.
The number of pages in the federal regulations only grows over time (admin to admin). Construction of any kind, including housing, education and childcare come to mind as things you missed.
I.e. - everything that people complain is really expensive.
Most industries in the US are heavy regulated. The ones that are not so heavily regulated - like software, and/or evade a lot of regulation abroad - like many consumer goods from shirts to cars - are the ones not getting more expensive.
They’re the oligarchs.
Conflating some wealthy people who have, at best, mild influence over the government, with actual oligarchs in an oligarchy is... rhetorical nonsense.
I get how it happened. We started referring to wealthy Russians in the 90s who actually wielded substantial control over government similar to oligarchs and we continued to refer to them as such even after they lost any semblance of political power, but still.
His power is nothing compared to actual oligarchs in real oligarchies in history. The Thirty Tyrants could pass laws, sit in judgement and execute anyone they wanted for any reason (and did). They controlled every aspect of Athens. Musk got some people to retire early, got some people fired (often temporarily), was overruled by the judiciary and the administration regularly and was generally ineffectual.
Calling him an oligarch is extreme hyperbole.
> Latin America, where labor laws are less strictly enforced [...]
> in Mexico, provides identity verification tools that do various checks including biometrics, and also cross-check against government databases and blacklists.
These two issues are closely related. Here in Mexico, a lot of companies share "blacklists" of ex-employees that have gone to labour court, regardless of the reason or the result. Because of this, very few people ever go to labour court against a company here, even if they know that they're legally on the winning side.
Fortunately not all companies are like that, but the chilling effect still remains.
Source in Spanish: https://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/el-preguntario/2023/09/02/qu...
A rank & file VC is essentially a salesman. Their job is to understand everything that's going on in their sector, and have warm intros available so they can sell the founders of the actually-promising startups on having their firm invest. In general, you don't do this in the office. You get out and meet lots of people in the industry.
Likewise, if you're a founder going into fundraising mode, your full-time job is to be a salesman. You go out and meet lots of investors and blow shit up their ass so they all believe you're the next hot thing, and then you play them off against each others so they keep escalating their termsheets. I've had founders tell me that everything you do in the fundraising game is performative - you should treat it like a months-long acting gig where everything you do is designed to elicit the desired emotional reaction to get investors to open their portfolios.
When I was young I worked at a startup where the CEO was out of the office most of the time.
One of my coworkers was irate about how he had to work hard, while the CEO was out there doing who knows what. Being young and impressionable it started to rub me the wrong way, too.
Eventually one of the older guys informed me that the CEO was going out on sales trips to potential customers, meeting with investors, and doing a number of other in-person things that the company needed. That's why he wasn't in the office.
I felt foolish for thinking that his job and my job should look the same and occur in the office.
The disgruntled coworker didn't care, though. He wanted the CEO to be butts-in-seats and staring at a monitor because that's the only type of work he understood. I get the same vibes when people sneer at VCs for stuff like "meeting people all day". That's their job.
Sure is convenient while they chafe at the actual laborers for taking too many bathroom breaks.
VCs’ job is to raise money. Sexy founders and past returns help with that. But the money is essentially booked when an LP signs a commitment.
You’re describing influencers who also happen to be VCs. Plenty of—perhaps most—successful VCs have no public profile.
Their job is to travel around, meet people, find new opportunities and network.
Go to Disney? Make sure to book the Grand Floridian or Four Seasons (not hardware store) and make sure to let all your contacts know you are in town.
Probably won't even go to the parks, just spend your time meeting with other ultra high wealth individuals.
Going to a conference? Make sure you have 3-5 other meet and greets planned such that you are always going from person to person.
Its a job that most people on this forum cannot even imagine.
By it's very nature it has to be excessive, because the ultra wealthy live a life of excess.
Not saying its hard, it is just different.
This describes anyone at the top of their field. A star engineer or academic can spend their time however they please. (And giving them that freedom is generally a profitable bet.)
> By it's very nature it has to be excessive, because the ultra wealthy live a life of excess
It really doesn’t. It just glances with excess. You can pitch your company at Cannes or the Super Bowl without buying tickets to the events.
Lots of drugs.
Our modern rich were raised in a more religious time and our understanding of neuroscience today makes it pretty obvious they're still just patronizing geezers who think we owe validation of their story.
When by the numbers every billionaire could not wake up tomorrow and we'd barely notice. It's not even a school shootings worth of victims.
All their "be metrics driven" gibberish did not work out the way they'd hoped. Just a handful of morons humanity will carry on without some day.
* Opposition to surveilance? Check
* Stereotyping and hating on management types? Check
* Cynical flippant comment? Check
* Small jab at X? Check
I think worker surveillance is pretty awful myself but I just don't think this comment will lead to high quality replies. There's very little light and mostly heat in this comment but it will jive with the community culture strong enough to generate a bunch of grievance-oriented replies. The purpose of this comment is mostly to remind readers that we can strongly dislike something without reaching for low-effort ragebait to criticize it. Honestly, worker surveillance is so dumb it should be simple to dump on it factually.
You vaguely gesture at this being somehow negative. We can strongly dislike something while recognizing the forces behind that something as well. Employee surveillance does not exist in a vacuum, it exists in the same continuum of RTO, of mass layoffs while corporations make record profits, etc and so forth.
The only reason I made this comment is because as HN has been getting a lot bigger post-2022 Reddit API changes, I've been noticing a lot more low effort rage/engagement bait in the comments. The mods here have added the "Don't be curmudgeonly" guideline recently to combat this trend but I think the bait is really degrading the quality of conversation here to the point where this might as well just be any old generic comments section on the net. At some point HN falls into the same problem that every newspaper comments section, Reddit, and Nextdoor fell into: farming ragebait for approval removes the incentives needed for quality discourse and crowds non-ragebait out. I think some of this too is that the right now HN is growing faster than the mod team can deal with the comments.
I think it's largely a losing battle, but I'll try because I've spent too much on this site to not try. But I will be honest I am spending a lot less time here because of this decrease in quality.
(I'm also cognizant that I broke an HN guideline, namely "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.")
Alas, communities are what people make of them, and they change as people enter and leave those communities.
You should consider contributing to the discussion instead of making off-topic, passive-aggressive comments policing what people are allowed to like, discussing stereotypes while directly stereotyping OP and this community in general.
Sure. But it’s appropriate to point out that it’s low cognitive effort venting.
OP could have done that with more tact, and more constructively. But it’s ironic that turning this into a “what have VCs done for you lately” rant plays into their advantage by turning a system that involves certain skills and differentiated abilities into an ersatz caste system, where apparently the idea of taking a client to dinner is somehow unfathomable for mere engineers.
> If your bottom line is actually affected by a change in employee performance that needs automated surveillance to be noticed, are you just not running a profitable buisness?
This website is called "Rest Of World" because it focuses on countries outside of places like the US and Canada, where small businesses aren't operating with the fat profit margins of a SaaS company. Employee productivity and timeclock fraud can completely change the nature of a small business running on razor-thin profits in a developing country. It's a completely different ballgame than some software developers scrolling Reddit for a couple hours every day at a SaaS company.
In the world of hourly workers where turnover is high, timeclock fraud will run rampant in a non-trivial portion of your workforce if people realize it's not being monitored closely. The subset of people abusing it also changes over time. Some employees start out operating by the book and then start pushing the limit to see how much they can get away with.
The article doesn't really do the topic justice by blurring the lines between "app that lets workers clock in at remote jobsites" and "AI tool to surveil employees". I think a lot of comments are assuming it's all the latter.
Edit0: after reviewing the article, it's very amusing to me that as an employee I had an app for my last desk job that demanded all those except possibly (not certain) for GPS, it might just have identified my location from the wifi connection I was using, as punching would only work on work wifi. And I work in Canada!
Actually many service-industry jobs that go on site: Cleaning crews might be hourly, plumbers, etc.
I think what everyone is talking about is supremely relevant, because often it starts with some arguably legitimate use case then over time morphs into the thing everyone didn't want.
I believe trust and respect should go both ways, and there should be no need to invade an employee’s personal space with constant surveillance.
I agree, and the metric for productivity should be clear, and measured, rather than recording and monitoring the process of work. The reason employers want to monitor process is because they cannot find a good metric for productivity, for which they feel cannot be gamed - esp. knowledge workers; you don't measure by lines of code written, bugs fixed or features delivered, as they are all surely game-able.
This tech is basically not allowed or relevant there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)
Unless you're your own boss.
It’s also everywhere:
* Academia has seen a glut of sensors and tech to surveil labs, classrooms, students, and faculty
* Retail and service workers are tracked via camera or phone and yelled at remotely by the boss if they’re not appropriately productive in any given moment
* Small businesses often leave telemetry and default data collection policies in place, letting private companies monitor their staff and business
The only tools available to us at this point are sabotage, awareness, and resistance. We need to build a society where people trust each other by default again, instead of assuming harm until proven otherwise. We also need governance and regulations at every level stating that surveillance of any sort must be as narrowly scoped as possible, that data retention is limited to as little as practicable, and that sharing of surveillance data with any party other than those compelled by law and warrant is illegal.
We’re in an era of peak productivity and flat wages, with the largest wealth pumps in human history funneling more money into fewer hands. This kind of surveillance isn’t just offensive or unacceptable, it’s grotesque in its treatment of our fellow humans.
Traditional workplace governance relied upon internalized behavioral standards eg duty, shame, professional integrity, functioning as self-regulating mechanisms. The systematic erosion of these cultural guardrails necessitated external monitoring systems substituting for previously internalized accountability.
The “trust but verify” approach emerged from practical necessity of maintaining organizational functionality within a workforce increasingly disconnected from traditional concepts of professional duty and self-accountability.
This sticks out in my head as completely divorced from the practical reality of the modern workplace circa the past fifty years. Every single KPI has gone up: productivity, imports, exports, revenues, share price, deliverables, margins, you name it.
The counter-culture cited to justify these sorts of highly invasive spyware deployments is merely the reaction of a workforce to stagnant wages and deteriorating standards of living in the face of an economy that has left them behind, a monied class that loathes their existence, and governments who can’t be bothered to listen to their grievances over the sound of a $25k-per-plate fundraising dinner. Workers aren’t the problem, here, and surveillance does nothing to actually improve things for the majority of society.
To suggest “counter-culture” is the issue is akin to suggesting queer people are responsible for military overspending as opposed to unaccountable defense contractors and PMCs, or that the National Debt is the fault of immigrants as opposed to a government apparatus that fails elementary school maths. There is no “counter-culture” causing a problem in the workplace requiring surveillance, it’s a handful of people at the top of the organization trying to keep as much for themselves as possible demanding said surveillance to protect their own positions and interests - which conveniently happen to be directly opposed to the needs and demands of their workers.
This shift in workforce attitudes is because companies have shifted their view of labor. Labor is now fungible, and labor is not an investment, it's a necessary evil.
In order to have self-motivated employees you need to reward loyalty and build incentives where employees do their best because that ends up being what's best for them. Companies, pretty much all of them, decided this was both too much work and too expensive. So they gave up.
The reality is that workers don't give a flying fuck because not caring is the best way to progress your career. Job hopping, resume building, lying - these strategies work. Being a leader, shaking things up, even being honest - these backfire.
Companies don't want good workers. They want yes men, warm bodies, people who don't think too much. And they got that. So, everyone should be happy.
Agreed. In the end, the public’s revealed preference for “cheap” made it hard for companies to justify the cost of investing in employee motivation.
> disconnected from traditional concepts of professional duty and self-accountability
I wonder what world you think used to exist.
"I don't want to X, but this time it's different and my hand is forced." That's a millenniums-old cope for doing shit you always wanted to do, but needed a way to not feel bad about.
In the early 80s, I remember mass layoffs in the headlines every day. Often older, long term employees, who were more expensive. And company share prices would go up on those announcements.
When I started my professional career in 1986, I was fully aware I was an expendable cog. It didn't make me less professional, but it did make me less loyal. I wasn't planning to work for the same company for 40 years.
Sure enough, 5 years later, the company was acquired and virtually every employee fired. 2000 people. Many of whom had given 20 years to the company.
The acquirer just wanted our customers.
And trade in the derivatives.
The latter half of your statement does reflect a sort of ignorance of reality: when we push for lowered persecution of, say, shoplifting under a given amount or of necessities, it’s because we understand those are often crimes of desperation better solved through social programs, food banks, or job guarantees. I’d love to see cops get off their ass and go after the actual shoplifting gangs and train raiders instead of tasering someone to the ground for stealing a couple bucks of food, but they won’t unless prosecutors are given public mandates of what they should be prioritizing (say, home invasions and vehicle break-ins instead of speeding tickets). Start with the big items and work down, as opposed to the disproven “broken windows” policing style of the NYPD.
With that said, I'm leery of mass surveillance. It might seem egalitarian but there is something to be said for a police officer having the discretion to not enforce a law.
I think I prefer that even if it means some will abuse that power.
... and a probably-equal uptick in people who advocate for extrajudicial murder of people accused of (or just suspected of) property crime (look at the way people on the right talk about homeless folks, immigrants etc). the loudest online are not representative of the majority opinion.
Really? Do you have evidence??
It sucked being a feudal peasant, but at least you could eat turnips.
Certain functions like remote employee clock-in with geolocation (literally the first example company in the article) are perfectly reasonable to record the employee's GPS coordinates, in my opinion. If you're clocking in at the job site, having some record that you were actually at the job site isn't an invasion of privacy.
In some US states (and some international jurisdictions, as well) you owe income and possibly other taxes (and your employer may be responsible for withholding and reporting related to those taxes) on income from work done in the jurisdiction even if it is only a single day of work, and even if you are not a tax resident, so, yes, it has something to do with your day-to-day location.
https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/voip_and_911_service...
[0] https://www.odditycentral.com/news/company-installs-cameras-...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/vx6pp0/a_chinese_com...
[2] https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1003759
I was unpleasantly surprised to see Accenture on the list of bad employers who spy on their employees with AI.
And, I want to be clear—I’ve met a ton of the former. Really, I’m not down on universities at all. They are full of wonderful people fighting against the corporatization and just, like, trying to remain human.
But the latter would absolutely implement corporate style surveillance dystopia at the drop of a hat. Except, again, they’d do it in the dumbest way possible, so it would somehow be even slower and shittier than the bloatware you get on your corporate laptop.
<specific names and dates excluded to protect the guilty>
for someone with the username 'cynicalsecurity' this is surprising to hear :) i don't think there are any global for-profit consulting firms who are guided by any kind of strong moral/ethical compass.
Irony is that surveillance cuts both ways, and big companies know it. Any data you collect can and will be subpoenaed at some point, and that’ll multiply your damages paid out in the process.
This is why I can’t get behind current AI bubbles: we’re not remotely using them to help humanity, only to punish the poor, the marginalized, and the undesirables.
AI + Socialism = Post-scarcity
AI + Capitalism = Techno-feudalism.
http://youtube.com/post/UgkxESSrScXEiQoJ8WNbUb6LjPVv0f7ZVSFW...
https://youtu.be/0MOZubzNO6c?si=mt2fRL05WMV5fjn_
https://x.com/trbdrk/status/1894197711454285983
Don't waste your money and everyone's time by spying on them.
The problem with this is the power imbalance. The mouse jiggling is technically fraud. So discovery of this tool’s use confers massive leverage to the employer.
Sure. But usually not enough to refer you criminally or, if you’re in a regulated industry, potentially end your career unilaterally.
Fortunately, recent events have made some of the risks much easier to appreciate.
For example, let's say that your city council and universities have been opposing very recent rogue moves in upper government. Suddenly, the well-regarded local police are getting body cams, which they never needed before, but it seems like a good thing that some community activists ask for.
But... Data fusion means that not only will said rogue elements in upper government soon have access to that general surveillance feed, but (since disregarding the Constitution anyway) will be able to enforce local police complying with rogue directives.
An example first application of that might be due to the local police having a policy of not checking reporting parties for immigration status, to encourage mutual cooperation between police and community. The rogue could automate that away, with fairly simple "AI" monitoring for compliance, already feasible.
Those earlier community activists change their mind about introducing surveillance, but too late.
Then the rogue use cases can get worse from there. First in enforcing general practice compliance like above, and then (if situation and pretense decay further) unconstitutionally more specifically tasking those local police as additional foot resources for the rogue's goals. Thanks to the body cams and other surveillance, a rogue will be able to centrally monitor for compliance all these loose resources in various cities. Maybe using other surveillance to determine who does and doesn't gets tasked for what.
(If this sounds unlikely, think back to how quickly masked officers were tasked to grab off the street someone who did nothing wrong, Soviet secret police style. And other officers were openly circumventing legitimate court orders against extraordinary rendition of grabbed people. Maybe complementary surveillance helps the rogue mass-distinguish "loyalists" from the ones who'd question illegal orders. Plot the arc.)
Body cams is just taking one example of what we might've assumed was a positive, progressive thing for society, and showing how quickly it can be turned against society, by bad elements.
I think the general answer is not to implement surveillance power when you don't have sufficient checks and balances to keep it operating within the interests of the people, both now and in the future.
And don't fool yourself about immediate intent of something you're building. Obviously that employee surveillance software you're developing isn't only for regulatory compliance, or detecting a spy stealing IP. But more frequently will be abused by dim and petty managers, to create dystopian work environments that slowly kill everyone with stress and misery. And occasionally will be used by corporate to try to suppress someone who complains of sexual harassment or accounting irregularities.
One of the first things you can do, as a thoughtful tech worker with integrity, is to simply not apply for the questionable-looking jobs. Many of them are obvious, and you'll get an unpleasant gut feel, just by reading their one-sentence startup blurb, or maybe when you look at the job description. Then close the tab without applying, and go soothe your nausea with some /r/aww or the gym. Let the icky company be flooded with the robo-appliers, the lower-skilled, and those who have good tech skills but are less-thoughtful or less-principled. Hey, maybe a company that's a mix of the low-skilled and the shitty will sabotage its own efforts, without you having to be involved.
im afriad thats a harsh truth not going to change any time soon
Starting a successful company is virtually impossible, just looking at failure rate. Poverty is the outcome for whomever doesn't succeed and can't find a return to the workforce.
What a hostile work environment in corporate America is an argument for, actually, is either poor mental health or more Federal Employment. It reads like that's what you want.
A healthy corporate America is the only real antidote to massive dysfunction.
It isn't a coincidence that a healthy corporate America aligns with both a massively healthy GDP and a normal to advantageous labor pool for the average person.