Friction
Chapter 19 in my ongoing story about workplace surveillance.
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The night after their meeting with Cascade, Keith had a dream. He was under water, deep enough for it to be dark around him, and he had to get to the surface. He kicked and thrashed, struggling to get to the surface, but it seemed like he couldn’t get any closer to the light overhead. It was like he couldn’t get any purchase on the water around him.
“Keith, Keith, it’s okay,” said Lori, stroking his head.
“I can’t reach it,” said Keith, confused and groggy. “I can’t get there.”
“Where Keith?” said Lori softly. “It’s just a dream honey.”
“Oh, god, I couldn’t move, couldn’t get to the surface ...” The dream was starting to fade, it didn’t make any sense. “Oh shit, that was weird.”
“What was weird babe? Is something bugging you?” She sometimes wondered if his work was more stressful than he let on.
“I don’t know, I just have a lot of data I have to churn, got to feed reports to Cascade,” Keith replied, sounding more and more like himself.
“Who’s Cascade?” asked Lori.
“Just a top boss at work. No big deal, just normal stuff,” Keith replied. “Go back to sleep babe; sorry I woke you.” Keith turned over.
In the days that followed, Keith drowned himself in the data: he grabbed hold of every data stream he could find, and tried to lay disparate data strings alongside each other, to see if he could see trends, correlations, anomalies—anything that would help make better sense of what was going on over in Christopher’s org, but also, in subtle ways, in other orgs across the company.
There was just so damn much data: not just the tap logs, where he could see who had been tapped and for what reason, but also the meeting and chat logs, full records of conversations and reactions. He could ask their AI crawler to identify “hot spots” of resistance in this sea of words, and he could do searches on some of the key terms he had identified as signaling a reluctance of people to accept the direction, and then map that against other data ... but it was complicated and he didn’t know if he could defend or explain some of what he was seeing.
He thought he could see trends emerging: it seemed that one or two people in a group or team led the way in resisting taps ... but was he really ready to call it resisting? He remembered as a boy when he tried to put a bit in the mouth of a horse, the horse chomped and puckered and chewed around the sudden intrusion of metal in its mouth, uncomfortable with this sudden attempt to dictate direction. But then they got used to the feel of the bit in their mouth and it all worked out. There seemed to be a similar ... chafing against the direction provided by their system, and it took the form of exasperation, frustration, reluctant acquiescence ... a whole bunch of soft words that he could never quite figure out how to put on a graph.
What he needed, he thought, was a way of directly assessing what all these vague forms of resistance meant. He needed to be able to ask questions, direct questions, about what people were thinking when they got taps, or when those taps escalated, or when they were required to actually take some training as a result of those taps ... there was a lot! But he couldn’t insert these questions into the Pulse stream without drawing Cascade’s ire.
He was trapped, and he couldn’t get out. He needed help, but he wasn’t ready to go to Stamper. Perhaps he could talk to his brother. Dan seemed to kind of enjoy this kind of uncertainty. Weirdo.
“You want to talk about work?” Dan said incredulously. Keith never wanted to talk about work.
“I know, I know,” said Keith. “This may be your kind of thing though. Meet me at The Bine at 5:00.”
After they’d ordered their beers—lager for Keith, double IPA for Dan—Keith caught Dan up on the “friendship” he was forming with Stamper, his “encounters” with Christopher, and his perspective on the battering ram that was Mitch Cascade.
Keith expected it would all be new to Dan, but it wasn’t, not all of it anyway. As Dan cued him to what he already knew from his hikes with Stamper and his infrequent chats with Christopher, Keith grew even more comfortable being fairly open with what he was seeing.
“Here’s where I’m stuck Dan,” he said. “I can see that there’s something brewing under all these reactions to our taps, but I just don’t know how to quantify it. I need something hard to say about it!”
“Why do you have to quantify it?” I asked.
“Because that’s all that matters at Amazon: is there data?”
“But Keith, there’s more there than data ... even you, Mr. Datahead, can feel it!”
“I know, but how do I get to it?”
“You feel it man! It’s not that hard.”
“Honestly, Dan, I don’t even know how to do that!”
“Keith, have you ever been tapped?”
“Well yeah, sure ... but just the all-hands taps, you know, the stuff everybody gets.”
“How did it feel?”
“I mean, fine, right, I know everybody is getting it.”
“But not good?” Dan asked.
“Well, you usually get them when you’re in the middle of something ...” replied Keith.
“And you don’t like to be interrupted?”
“Right. But it’s just a nuisance.”
“So how do you think you’d feel if you got a corrective tap?”
“I don’t get corrective taps!” Keith replied, a tiny bit indignantly.
“That’s because you’re such a company man, you dork!” Dan kidded him. “But let’s just say you’re working away on your data analysis, and you get a tap that says, oh, I don’t know, like: ‘It’s time to work on monthly business review now, Dan. Remember, it’s important to ‘Deliver Results.’”
“Are you kidding me? I’d be pissed. I know how to prioritize my work!”
“So what would you do if you got that tap?”
“Well, I’d probably ignore it. Like, I’d hit Defer, and get to it later.”
“But you could only do that once or twice and the system would force your hand, right? That’s how you guys have set it up?”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t get tapped twice!” said Keith.
“Let’s say you did.”
“Okay, yeah, well, I’d be pissed. I guess I’d have to do it, but I wouldn’t like it.”
“So Keith, what you’re having here are feelings, and you have to know that everyone who is getting taps is having these feelings, and some of them are going to be a lot stronger than yours. I mean, the thing that’s always bothered me about Stamper’s system is that people just don’t like to be monitored and they don’t like to be constrained in how they can make decisions.”
“But it’s for the good of the company! We have lots of data to show how much more productive and efficient ...”
“Give me a fucking break. I get that’s the party line, but that’s just not how most people think or work. That’s what this data is telling you! It’s telling you that people don’t like these intrusions! They don’t like to be watched and they don’t like to be told what to do.”
“So, as usual, my smart big brother can easily see what we’re doing wrong! Typical! I don’t even know why I wanted to talk to you,” harrumphed Keith.
“Dude, I’m not trying to be mister know-it-all, I swear,” Dan replied. “It just seems to me that you guys may be pushing up against the limits of what people will tolerate, and they’re telling you in the only way they know how—by grumbling and chafing and mis-directing and resisting. All that weird data you’re seeing, that you can’t quite get your finger on? That’s friction man, that’s human beings being human beings, not machines.”
Keith looked at me long and hard. He wrapped both hands around his beer glass and squeezed it hard—I could see the edges of his fingers turning white with the pressure. “You called it friction,” he said, almost under his breath. “That’s good”
“I don’t get it,” said Dan.
“I’ve been thinking of it as resistance, but if I call it resistance, Cascade will hit the roof,” said Keith. “‘We can’t tolerate resistance!’ he’ll say. But friction—that is something I can work with!”
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