This will be a necessarily shorter-than-usual effort because we have to meet a friend for a good jolt of heart-healthy coffee.1
Yesterday we touched on the unnerving ubiquity of workplace surveillance, and today we’re back for more. These striking images by painter Jeff Bartels2 reflect the degree to which remaining private in public has become increasingly difficult.
“I’m not sure it’s possible to walk down a city street these days and not be caught on a camera somewhere, either by choice or not even knowing about it.” This idea grounds Surveillance, a series of uncanny paintings in oil by Canadian artist Jeff Bartels. Situated in urban settings with a distinctly retro flair, the works nestle vintage cameras among architecture and infrastructural elements. Oversized lenses, knobs, and levers echo the shapes of windows and doorways with branding imitating signs for shops and restaurants.
Bartels’s art is showcased at Colossal, an online art gallery/criticism/education site. The incorporation of gorgeous giant cameras into the cityscapes he paints make the works especially fascinating for photographers, if you know any.
China is the most surveilled country in the world, going by the number of CCTV cameras per 10,000 citizens (where citizens = residents, we think) and the number of government attempts to requisition data from Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter. The country scores relatively low on the latter, according to those companies, but has about one camera for each citizen.3
Second is the United States, with more than 2,000 cameras per 10,000 residents and a whopping 800,000 data requests—24 requests per 10,000 citizens, as opposed to one for China and 18 for the U.K. Among developed countries, only fourth-ranked Singapore tops the U.S. in that category, with 26 requests per 10,000 citizens. Many countries are in the single digits.
The cameras will include privately-maintained ones along with state, local and federal contributions, while the government requests are, well, government requests. And this is all exclusive of data, location and workplace surveillance by corporate entities.
None of the Nordic states make the top 20. These countries tend to have powerful unions and stronger privacy protections than most.
Returning to the Financial Times story we remarked yesterday,4 about workplace surveillance in China, where we assume many of those CCTV cameras are located: companies which commit surveillance atrocities are encouraged by investors happy about increased efficiency.
While such aggressive practices triggered fierce criticism from the public and complaints from employees, they have had little impact on investor sentiment. Pinduoduo’s share price recovered quickly from the news of the 22-year-old employee’s death, surging 12 per cent the next day following an initial drop of 6 per cent the day the news was released.
Investors were encouraged by the company’s improving results and efficiency. Pinduoduo achieved its first quarterly profit in the third quarter of last year, and held the leading share in China’s brutally competitive online grocery market.
A little blood is good for business. The Pinduoduo death at issue was a young lad taking a header off the company’s roof. A decade or so ago the Chinese company Foxconn, the primary manufacturer for a host of American electronics companies, gained instant notoriety for a rash of suicides among migrant workers broken by the conditions and pressure they were working under.
Apple, then run by Steve Jobs, and Foxconn’s biggest customer at the time, expressed concern about conditions in the factories but it wasn’t until two years later, when “150 employees lined up on another roof and threatened to jump en masse unless their demands for better working conditions were met” that Foxconn reformed its practices. Meanwhile, the company continued to pump out iPhones and other products for U.S. consumption.
That story is central to a 2018 Washington Post review5 of “Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World” by labor historian Joshua Freeman.
On its surface, “Behemoth” is a chronological tour of five distinct phases in the development of factories, delivered through a sequence of case studies: textiles in England, steel and then automobiles in America, tractors and other machinery in Russia, and sneakers and electronic devices in China. But inside that story is another one, much less academic, and crowded with ideological imperatives, aesthetic rapture and bare-knuckle class warfare.
Freeman shows how factories have had an overwhelming influence on the way we work, think, move, play and fight. Capitalists, communists, democrats, socialists, philosophers, photographers, painters, engineers, accountants: All have caught the factory bug since the 1720s, when the Derby Silk Mill on the River Derwent in England produced its first crop of textiles. Henry Ford sought to use the principles of scientific management to build “one huge, integrated machine” dedicated to making money as fast as possible, while Soviet leaders embraced giant factories as “instruments of culturalization, which would create men and women capable of operating these behemoths and building socialism.”
Surveillance, not incidentally, has been a factor of manufactory work from the beginning, from taskmasters looking over workers’ shoulders to Henry Ford’s more invasive practice of inspecting his workers’ homes to see that they were living in accordance with his principles.6
The Sociological Department established a system of rules and codes of behavior for Ford employees that they had to meet, in order to qualify for the $5 day pay rate. The Sociological Department monitored employees at home, as well as on the job. Investigators made unannounced visits to employees' homes and evaluated the cleanliness of the home, noted if the family had renters, checked with school attendance offices to determine if children were attending school and monitored bank records to verify that employees made regular deposits. Sociological Department investigators also assisted workers' families by teaching wives about home care, cooking and hygiene.
That seems a bit outré, but remember that many jobs in the modern day require credit checks. Dress codes aimed at acculturation are routine, and supervisors can check out conditions in the homes of their work-at-home employees by monitoring on-camera meetings and even, in at least one case, requiring cameras in the home.7
A Colombia-based call center workers who provide outsourced customer service to some of the nation’s largest companies are being pressured to sign a contract that lets their employer install cameras in their homes to monitor work performance, an NBC News investigation has found.
“The contract allows constant monitoring of what we are doing, but also our family,” said a Bogota-based worker on the Apple account who was not authorized to speak to the news media. “I think it’s really bad. We don’t work in an office. I work in my bedroom. I don’t want to have a camera in my bedroom.”
The worker said that she signed the contract, a copy of which NBC News has reviewed, because she feared losing her job. She said that she was told by her supervisor that she would be moved off the Apple account if she refused to sign the document.
Naturally Uber, a company which must die, is all in on this. But only, a company spokesperson says, when necessary.
We know this all seems very bleak, but we had fun writing it and we hope you found a way to enjoy reading it.
About goddamn time!8
Can we interest you in some socialism?9
We’re listening to Bill Frisell on guitar with Dave Holland on bass and Elvin Jones on drums again, and we’ll keep listening for as many repeats as it takes to get ‘er done.
That’s all we got, comrades. Take care, be well.