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Comment by laurex | Hacker News Reader

People often underestimate the effects of losing privacy. A lot of comments here seem to reflect the idea that “If I’m employed by CompanyY then I’m owned by them.” We are spending a majority of our waking hours working, often, and being trained to believe that an authority’s ownership of technical systems means that not only everything we do with other people via those systems belongs to an employer, but that our inadvertent inclusion of ourselves as humans and not simply task performers is “our own fault.” As humans, our psychological wellbeing rests on a sense of autonomy and these systems directly suppress that.

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In some ways, these businesses are akin to the CCCP: they want to own our hearts and minds.

They want our whole selves. They want every drop of what they can get out of us.

This is so often what they mean when they say that they want people who are "passionate" about the work. They want us obsessed and fixated.

So they want to more than own us.

This isn't all businesses but increasingly this is becoming normalized.

This only happens because people allow it.

If these same businesses all decided they were going to take your first born as collateral, I suspect a lot of CEOs and chairmen would be swinging from lamp posts (as they should) within a week.

Personally, I would do far worse to such scumbags -- things that are not only (somehow) illegal to describe, but would likely get plenty of downvotes by the most milquetoast and pathetic. Things that up until the last 100 years, would have been regarded as normal for the entirety of recorded human history.

Sure. Now.

It's an Overton Window. Business executives and their big investors are the feudal overlords who are decreasingly benevolent liege lords.

What is abhorrent now slowly becomes normalized. Look at CEOs who said, shortly after some of the more brutal start opining about how everyone needs to RTO or GTFO At least one of those CEOs said they needed a bit more Elon in them. They meant his ruthlessness with his employees.

And the window moves.

> Sure. Now. > > It's an Overton Window. Business executives and their big investors are the feudal overlords who are decreasingly benevolent liege lords. > > What is abhorrent now slowly becomes normalized. Look at CEOs who said, shortly after some of the more brutal start opining about how everyone needs to RTO or GTFO At least one of those CEOs said they needed a bit more Elon in them. They meant his ruthlessness with his employees. > > And the window moves.

Exactly. I was browsing LinkedIn this week when I stumbled in this gem: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/samfjacobs_last-month-i-was-a...

So what he's saying is that he got together with 130+ other CEOs, who combined will probably make millions if not billions, bitching that the people who do the actual grunt work (and make a couple of thousand a month) aren't putting in extra hours or looking at their work mail on weekends.

This is so far from reality it's staggering. I work with, and among young developers every day. I'm in my forties and I've done so for most of ny career. Beyond a healthy work life balance they are just sick of working without a fair share of the benefits.

These people aren't less prone to work hard, they just don't want to work hard to make extremely wealthy people more wealthy.

Some are working less for their employer, and in the meantime are working for themselves to create new disruptive startups.

The article says CEOs are "worried", but it also states that these workers should fear for their jobs because they are going to be made obsolete by AI.

The reality is that small companies can get much more work done in less time than big ones, I have worked for both. The bigger a company gets, the slower it becomes.

I blame a lot of it on the mass adoption of stock-based investment and retirement plans.

With defined-benefit pensions and even traditional bond-based investments, the narrative is "The company has an obligation to me for very specific deliverables, even if that means reduced investor return." There's an appropriately adversarial relationship there, which keeps everyone behaving better.

With stock investments, people conclude "my personal success- even survival- is inextricably linked with how good the company looks to Wall Street." This incentivizes sycophantism.

I think that's a very tech-centric (and specifically FAANG-centric) mindset, most people are not getting RSOs or options and aren't under any impression their fate is entwined with the stock price.

on the other hand you are right that the idea of corporations as independent, self-directed profit-seeking entities with no other social responsibilities or responsibilities to their employees etc has finally subsumed us totally. Corporations are living entities, they are are social organisms. Just like a single bee is not (itself) a living organism (cannot reproduce or shelter itself, etc), but rather the bee colony is the life-form there. Corporations are living systems of rules and incentives - memeplexes.

Paperclip maximizers already exist, and the outcome we have given them is "stock price goes up". Until something is changed about allowing the existence of unrestrained paperclip maximizers, they will continue to maximize and do their best to eat society and turn it into paperclips.

I don't know what you and others are on about. Work systems have no expectation of privacy. Just how it is.

If there was a law where certain types of communication had expectation of privacy, similar to how toilets at work have an expectation of privacy, that'd be nice. Some countries like Germany do have this, it's not always a good thing but if that's what you want then have your state's lawmakers pass that law.

I worked in environments where hot mic's and cameras are being used to monitor what we say and do in addition to screen recording, chat monitoring (slack,teams,etc... all have a feature), browser monitoring,etc... and that's just the tip of the ice berg, the layers of shady shit they do, because in their messed up heads employee and slave are not all that different, is endless. Is it illegal? That's the wrong question, the right question is obviously most people don't want any of this because it is against their advantage, but can the government which derives it's power and authority from most people represent them and legislate to begin with? The answer is no it cannot.

Can my employer record conversations and video using my work laptop in my home, I mean just petty managers not even for a legitimate inquiry? Yes, they can get away with that. Why is there no law to govern this? Because legislation does not follow the will of the people, it follows the will of fund raisers.

Companies are people too but with bigger political contributions. "For the people, by the people, of the people", people in that context now means mostly corporate persons and their interest trumps the individuals'.

> Can my employer record conversations and video using my work laptop in my home, I mean just petty managers not even for a legitimate inquiry? Yes, they can get away with that.

Also using your work cellphone? Which country is this? Any experts on law have an opinion on this?

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