| November 3, 2013 | Contact | Calendar | The Mix | Archives |
|
Some first impressions of the Bean's call center job. I can tell that we are working on VMs far away that have fast connections to the database. The front end system is adequate. The "web station" app that lets workers see their schedules and trade shifts is ok, but the path to it on the web is through a clunky web app that puts you through Host Checker and runs only on the detested IE browser. What it should do is integrate with Google calendar and push changes out automatically with text msg or email notification. I don't care; I'm glad it's not my job to make it better.
There are a lot of paths for people to get to this job: a few retirees like me, students, second-jobbers, people waiting for a license or another job. Apparently 70% of catalog sales are done through the website; that means that the people ordering over the phone are older or without internet savvy or need more product info than is available online or just like to talk to a human being. So the job is part clerk, part shopping coach, part social worker. It's good. I like helping people. The seasonal job will end just before christmas. I'm reading The Circle by Dave Eggers, a novel about good intentions and the road to hell in our internet culture. One google-like company subsumes all the rest combining search, shopping and all social media and able to track all its members. We will probably be saved from InfoCommunism by the fallibility of human programmers. An error every thousand lines of code--think healthcare.gov--And by the will and skill of hackers: Snowden, Anonymous, et al. I was feeling like the book was shallow and a little trashy, reading it for the technology and tech culture in it which he does a good job with. Then I stumbled on a review of it by Margaret Atwood no less. All better now. Here are some quotes from the book and from the review. |
| Eggers Ty had devised the initial system, the Unified Operating System, which combined everything online that had heretofore been separate and sloppy— users’ social media profiles, their payment systems, their various passwords, their email accounts, user names, preferences, every last tool and manifestation of their interests. The old way— a new transaction, a new system, for every site, for every purchase— it was like getting into a different car to run any one kind of errand. “You shouldn’t have to have eighty-seven different cars,” he’d said, later, after his system had overtaken the web and the world. Instead, he put all of it, all of every user’s needs and tools, into one pot and invented TruYou— one account, one identity, one password, one payment system, per person. There were no more passwords, no multiple identities. Your devices knew who you were, and your one identity— the TruYou, unbendable and unmaskable— was the person paying, signing up, responding, viewing and reviewing, seeing and being seen. You had to use your real name, and this was tied to your credit cards, your bank, and thus paying for anything was simple. One button for the rest of your life online. TruYou changed the internet, in toto, within a year. Though some sites were resistant at first, and free-internet advocates shouted about the right to be anonymous online, the TruYou wave was tidal and crushed all meaningful opposition. It started with the commerce sites. Why would any non-porn site want anonymous users when they could know exactly who had come through the door? Overnight, all comment boards became civil, all posters held accountable. The trolls, who had more or less overtaken the internet, were driven back into the darkness. And those who wanted or needed to track the movements of consumers online had found their Valhalla.
Secrets are lies.
“Yes Mae,” Bailey said, his face still locked into a broad grin of triumph. “Well, I wonder if we couldn’t take this one step further. I mean … Well, actually, I don’t think it—” “No, no. Go on, Mae. You started well. I like the words one step further. That’s how this company was built.” ...“So why not require every voting-age citizen to have a Circle account?” | Atwood The outpouring of ideas is central to The Circle, as it is in part a novel of ideas. What sort of ideas? Ideas about the social construction and deconstruction of privacy, and about the increasing corporate ownership of privacy, and about the effects such ownership may have on the nature of Western democracy. Dissemination of information is power, as the old yellow-journalism newspaper proprietors knew so well. What is withheld can be as potent as what is disclosed, and who can lie publicly and get away with it is determined by gatekeepers: thus, in the Internet age, code-owners have the keys to the kingdom. Why has he not been headhunted by some corporation specializing in new brand names? Better than reality, some of these, and all too plausible. But don’t look to The Circle for Chekhovian nuance or thoroughly rounded characters with many-layered inwardness: it isn’t “literary fiction” of that kind. It’s an entertainment, but a challenging one: it demands that the reader think its positions through in the same way that the characters must. A face with a direct gaze is said to be one of the first images a baby recognizes. It’s a primary pattern. The human gaze, when languorous, is much celebrated in love poetry, but a blank or hostile stare is intimidating at the biological level. Who can look at whom, and at what, informs not only the parental admonition “Don’t stare” and the insulting childhood challenge “Who’re you looking at?” but a wide range of other human behaviors, from the use of mandatory body and head coverings to PG labels on films to Peeping Tom legislation. “Don’t make a spectacle of yourself,” kids used to be told; but in the world of the Circle, people must make spectacles of themselves: to refuse to do so is selfish, or, as Bailey leads Mae to declaim, PRIVACY IS THEFT. Publication on social media is in part a performance, as is everything “social” that human beings do; but what happens when that brightly lit arena expands so much that there is no green room in which the mascara can be removed, no cluttered, imperfect back stage where we can be ‘“ourselves”? What happens to us if we must be “on” all the time? Then we’re in the twenty-four-hour glare of the supervised prison. To live entirely in public is a form of solitary confinement. |