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Charlotte Dune's avatar

Found the beginning! Love this topic and love that you went all out and just made the company Amazon! Haha.

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Tom Pendergast's avatar

I felt like that would make it something that absolutely everybody knew and had a relationship with. Also, their “Leadership Principles” (which play a key part in the book) were perfect for my purposes. But it’s not really ABOUT Amazon, so much as about the way tech companies use technology without much regard for human impacts.

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Charlotte Dune's avatar

Awesome! And your navigation seems to be working well once I found the beginning. Going to add your chapter 1 to my post on serial fiction as an example of a navigable work!

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Tom Pendergast's avatar

And I’m going to go fix it today so that the Plot Summary works with links and that every chapter has the right headers. Not exactly the “glamorous” part of a Substack writer’s life!

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Charlotte Dune's avatar

No glamour, but very helpful to readers!

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Tom Pendergast's avatar

I've got the plot summary all fixed and all of the chapter linking at top complete. I'm also adding those chapter links at the end as well. Hoping to make this really easy. Your essay really helped spur me on. Thanks a lot.

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Charlotte Dune's avatar

Awesome! I’m glad it helped. Your story is cool!

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Nick Mayo's avatar

This is why you must have your work PC and your personal machine.

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Tom Pendergast's avatar

What if that’s not enough? What if the tentacles go deeper—I mean, there’s a guy in a van, and who knows what he can hear …

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Kerri Davis's avatar

The minute Microsoft released its "Delve" workplace tracking tools all us privacy managers couldn't turn it off fast enough.

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Tom Pendergast's avatar

Oh yeah, these things creep me out! (Obviously)

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JennW's avatar

Gulp! I'm paranoid enough to believe Alexa is listening to everything. I can't even imagine working there and ... money may be good, but no thank you.

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Tom Pendergast's avatar

The funny thing is, the kernel of this story was written before I joined Amazon, and I have to say that nothing of this sort really happened there—at least that I was aware of. But there are enough strands of this all over the place that some of this is absolutely happening somewhere …

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