Why Should I Worry?
Chapter 2 of a longer story about being watched in the modern workplace, followed by a few recommendations
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Stamper laughed when I told her the story about my hike with my brother (though I didn’t name him, just in case.) “I don’t think it’s quite like that!” she said, and she should know: she’s been there for 10 years, a lifetime by Amazon standards.
I hadn’t spoken to Stamper in years, though we kept up on social media, and it was there I had seen her settle down, find what looked like happiness. I reached out to her because there were parts of what Christopher and Keith told me that just didn’t sit well with me. Clearly, Christopher had been watching too many sci-fi movies and had gotten a little paranoid. The paranoia I think I understood, but Keith’s anger, his intensity: that felt really odd. In a way, I just thought he was being too credulous, too easily accepting of what his upper management was telling him about the “Leadership Principles,” too ready to believe that Amazon possessed that level of surveillance capacity. I’d seen Minority Report and Enemy of the State, and I’d been watching the rise of “machine intelligence” in companies for a while, but I just didn’t think it was anywhere near as advanced as either of these guys believed.
Still, I couldn’t shake how Christopher and Keith echoed some of what I read in Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Were these guys describing a rising tide of “surveillance”? Oh hell, when I put it like that, using words like “surveillance,” I start to feel like I’m being alarmist, or I’m being played by someone with an agenda, or just that I’m reading too much into it.
I mean, what do I have to complain about? Wages are generally high, at least among my type of worker, and my packages all come on time and I can watch what I want, even if I have to pay for too many streaming services. I’m living amidst a kind of abundance that most people throughout history couldn’t even imagine (though, also, Trump, pandemic, Putin, you name it!) Why should I worry if a big company was intent on getting the most out of its employees, just as it got the most out of consumers?
Why should I worry? That was the question I kept coming back to, the thing I was having a hard time explaining to myself. It dug at me.
But I couldn’t deny I saw the traces of it in my world. Not big glaring signs–there were no vans parked outside my house, though they drove through the neighborhood all the time. No, it was just little things, like Spotify getting eerily good at recommending songs for me (so good I was having a hard time breaking out of the Americana ghetto I’d built for myself), Google not just pointing out the things I knew I was interested in, but even nailing those weird little subjects and guilty pleasures I didn’t speak out loud. So I did one search on that striking blue-eyed woman from The White Lotus—that didn’t mean I needed to see an article about her every time I opened a new tab!
And then, of course, there was Amazon: Amazon, who saves me from the pain of shopping at malls on the holidays; Amazon, who delivers good but well-priced coffee to my door on my schedule, never mind my local coffee roaster; Amazon, who brings Dobie pads to my door today at half the price of the local grocery. Amazon probably gets the second biggest share of my consumer spending, right behind the local grocery, and if they ever figure out how to master the grocery business, I’ll probably ditch the local Haggen in their favor, because I’m addicted—ADDICTED—to the price and the convenience. Sure, I’ll miss the kindly folks who work at the grocery store—Torchy and Barney and Jeff and … well, hell, I remember their names when I see them, or maybe the name tags help, but now they slip away from me. The relationships I form with the checkers are a side-benefit, not the reason I go. If I could get it all without the hassle of driving to the store, wandering the aisles, making chit-chat with the baggers, etc., I’d gladly do so. And Amazon knows that.
But I know Amazon (and Google and Spotify and Facebook and Apple and so many others) have gotten weirdly good at knowing what makes me tick because they profit off it. There’s an Amazon van driving by every 30 minutes because Amazon knows how to make money off me, and they’re also smart and big enough to know that even if they aren’t making a ton of money right now with their ubiquitous delivery, even if they’ve made their margins incredibly small, they’ll make it up eventually by hooking me on their price and their speed in such a way that I’ll abandon my local shops and my trips to the store in favor of their sweet, cheap ubiquity. When it comes to winning me as a consumer, Amazon is playing the long game … and they’re winning.
But it didn’t follow that optimizing what they knew about consumers would mean they would spy on their employees–did it? How was I to know for sure? And again, why should I worry? That’s the question I wanted to answer. And I knew just the person to ask.
That person was Kate Stamper, and not just because she’d been at Amazon so long, but because she was one of the brightest, most driven, most level-headed and reasonable people I knew. Kate Stamper was singular, sui generis—her opinions would be hers alone.
And the cool thing was, Kate knew Christopher—we had all overlapped briefly at this small training company where we worked. I once thought Kate and Christopher had something going on, though I later came to understand that I had just misunderstood something about Kate. She was a bit of a puzzle.
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Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I’ve made up the story and the characters in it. While certain businesses, places, and events are used to orient the reader in the real world, the characters and actions described are wholly imaginary and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.
I love how this touches on something I think most people wonder about. Are we living in a utopia or dystopia? It reminds me a little bit of Brave New World. I'm looking forward to the rest.