Episode 174: Transcript
Episode: 174: Some really weird shit you didn’t know about taxes
Transcription by Alexander
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, are your cats helping you to do your taxes?
Annalee: [00:00:05] I mean, ever since they became, you know, cat accountants, they're CPAs, but they're like cat public accountants. Yeah, they've been giving me a lot of feedback, especially on my PUR99s. They're really interested in that and my PUR2 forms. So yeah, like it's it's I feel like I'm getting a lot of really good advice. How about you?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:30] Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I mean, my cat, Marcus Aurelius, who also goes by Dr. Sassy, has been really on top of it. I mean, true facts. The part of how I do this shit is I just make a pile of all the receipts and 1099s on the floor of my apartment so I can sit on the floor and sort them. And basically, Dr. Sassy, my cat, is like, “there's a pile of paper. I'm going to jump into it and throw it everywhere.” And he'll just do that over and over again. And it's his way of trying to help me to organize.
Annalee: [00:00:59] Oh, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:00] And 1099s and like he's like, “I got this. I got this. You don't have to worry about this. I'm going to organize these papers. I'm going to sort them. I'm going to scan them with my butt. I'm going to barf them up instead of the IRS.” Maybe he'll just eventually eat all of my receipts and then, you know, I can just send whatever comes to the IRS.
Annalee: [00:01:18] Wow, that took kind of like a body horror turn somewhere in there.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:22] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:01:23] It's like you're sending cat poop to the government, which is relatable. I mean, very relatable. This is a great way to to deal with taxes.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:33] Oh, my gosh.
Annalee: [00:01:35] Help your cat become more regular because it's like fiber. Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:40] Yeah. We've just been watching a show called Cranford, which is like a historical drama. It's on Britbox. And there's a whole subplot where there's this incredibly nice piece of lace, this lacy collar that someone's trying to like make it all nice and white with by putting it in buttermilk. But then the cat comes and eats the buttermilk and swallows the lacy collar. And they have to like it's the whole thing. And then later on, the character is wearing the lacy collar.
Annalee: [00:02:05] They lean into it. They fully like extract the dirty collar from the cat. But the cat is fine, by the way, which is…
Charlie Jane: [00:02:11] Huge relief.
Annalee: [00:02:12] Which is more than you can say for a lot of the characters in that show who – that show just really loves to kill people. It's really weird.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:17] It was a different time. Anyway, so don't let your cat eat your taxes…
Annalee: [00:02:23] Or your lace collar.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:24] Your cat really is a cat public accountant. So dear listeners, sorry to be taxing your patience, but you're listening to Our Opinions are Correct, a podcast that has a lien on itself. I'm Charlie Jade-Anders. I'm the author of an upcoming book called Lessons in Magic and Disaster.
Annalee: [00:02:42] I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who is also a science fiction writer. And my latest book is nonfiction. It's called Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:56] So today we're going to be talking about taxes in science fiction and fantasy, plus what archaeology tells us about the distant history of taxation. And later in the episode, our new contributing host, Alan Henry, will talk to us about how to survive the new dystopian workplace conditions of 2025, especially if you happen to be a marginalized person.
[00:03:18] And in next week's mini episode for our Patreon supporters, we'll be talking about the ultimate in dystopia, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and how it kind of became a visual shorthand for a kind of creepy bureaucracy that lots and lots of other movies and TV shows tend to dip into. All right, let's get fiscal.
[00:03:37] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Annalee: [00:04:08] Okay, Charlie Jane, what is the quintessential science fiction story about taxes?
Charlie Jane: [00:04:15] I'm going to say the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won the Oscar not that long ago. You know, the whole plot of that movie, I mean, the plot is very hard to summarize, but a huge part of it is that Michelle Yeoh's character is being audited by an IRS agent played by Jamie Lee Curtis. And this kind of becomes like the backstory of like – this kind of plays into the backstory of how Michelle Yeoh's character is a failure, who's being crushed by everyday life. And like the IRS office is where a lot of the action of the movie takes place. And it gets invaded by weird multiverse stuff.
[00:04:50] But also I read an interview with the directors of the movie, the Daniels, where they talked about how they tried to shoot the tax audit in a way that it was like escalating into an action sequence so that things get weirder and weirder and the tension gets ramped up. And hilariously, if you Google the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, you find a ton of like websites of accounting firms, like nitpicking the accuracy of the tax audit in the film and like, “Oh, Jamie Lee Curtis's character wouldn't really do that.”
Annalee: [00:05:18] Oh, that's what I love about the internet, you know, like, sometimes the internet makes me sad. But like that kind of stuff, like that renews my faith in humanity. Like, yeah, there's like nitpickers out there who have like thoughts about how taxes really work.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:31] Yeah, let's let's just fact check the most bizarre movie of all time. And you know, what I love about that movie is that Jamie Lee Curtis's character is is not demonized. She actually gets a whole arc of her own and she gets to become very sympathetic, which is really nice. It's not a movie that like uses her as a cheap villain or whatever.
Annalee: [00:05:48] No, not at all. She's her own weird character. Yeah, it's so interesting because I hadn't really thought of that as a movie about taxes. But of course, you're right. Like, it's completely focused on that as kind of the main trauma or monetizing event that like sets everything off is that she's being, you know, having to do this audit. So, yeah, how does that fit into other sci-fi stories about taxation? Is that kind of emblematic of what most of them do? Or is there kind of other permutations?
Charlie Jane: [00:06:23] Kind of yes and no. I mean, actually, like taxation is an easy stand in for like the everyday world that we're going to escape from.
Annalee: [00:06:30] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:31] he world of like oppression that we're going to like flee from. But most science fiction and fantasy stories aren't just kind of nuanced about taxation. Often there's a huge libertarian streak running through science fiction and fantasy. We talked previously about Ayn Rand in a previous episode.
Annalee: [00:06:46] Oh, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:47] And you see that, you know, and obviously people who write science fiction, we're all self-employed. We have to pay extra taxes on our income. So, you know, there's a lot of stuff that just sort of treats taxation as kind of this inherently dystopian thing that's scary and terrible.
[00:07:02] I just watched this movie from 2021 called Strawberry Mansion, where the kind of key conceit is that the government has found a way to tax your dreams. And there's this auditor who is reviewing this woman's dreams. And like it's like she dreams of a buffalo and the little thing pops up like “Buffalo: Twenty five cents.” So that's like how much tax she has to pay for having a buffalo in her dream.
[00:07:25] It's really it's a very silly, weird movie. But it's, you know, the kind of underlying thing is that this dystopian, like this already terrible thing becomes worse.
[00:07:35] There's also a novel from Italy from 2015 called Bloodbusters, where you have to pay your taxes in blood and it's illegal to donate blood because that's tax fraud. It's just it gets very silly. Basically, like, I feel like the concept of taxes lends itself to absurdism and weirdness because, A, there's bureaucracy involved and bureaucracy is often a little bit absurd. And also taxes are complicated and you can't escape from them. So it's something that's just it's very easy to kind of turn it to a surreal, weird dystopian thing.
Annalee: [00:08:07] Yeah, I mean, and in many ways, taxes are one of the only ways that most people will ever tangle with government bureaucracy. And so it's something that's onerous. It's annoying. And it's this kind of faceless government taking from you, right? Taking the things that you feel that you've earned, right? So it's a great stand in for like, the actual bad things that governments do, like suppress free speech and disappear people who they don't agree with and you know, all of those things.
[00:08:38] Whereas taxes actually do really good things, you know, like your taxes go toward public education and public infrastructure and mass transit and bridge building and health care and all this stuff that if only when you paid your taxes, you immediately got like instant gratification from all these public services, you would be like, “Wow, I love paying my taxes.”
[00:09:05] But the problem is, like you pay your taxes one day and then like, three years later, you desperately need government support for your health care or like you need to send your kid to school. And suddenly it's like, “Oh, now I have free school that I send my kid to.” So it's harder to see that connection. But you know, I'm one of those people who's actually really in favor of taxation because I like having public services.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:30] It's one of the ways that we as a society can collectively pool our resources to achieve goals that we agree with through our democratic process are worth achieving. And that's…
Annalee: [00:09:41] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:41] We don't think of it that way, because there's just a lack of civics education. But taxes are the common good, except when they're spent on horrible things like wars and, you know, sending weapons to evil regimes.
[00:09:53] So, you know, you don't often see science fiction and fantasy grappling with the notion that taxes are necessary or that we actually should be happy to pay them. You know, you see sometimes what happens when there aren't enough taxes, like a book that I love is Jennifer Government by Max Barry, where the world is taken over by corporations. And for most people, their last name is the corporation they work for. And corporations are kind of your identity. They control the world.
[00:10:22] And part of how that happens is we find out that there's no taxes anymore. And so the government is starved of resources and Jennifer Government works for the government, but she's basically just like useless. She can't do anything.
[00:10:35] George RR Martin's like A Song of Ice and Fire books. which became the show Game of Thrones. He gets pretty deep in places into the fiscal problems of Westeros and how Westeros, the government of Westeros is running out of money all the time because it can't collect enough taxes and it has to like borrow money from the Lannisters and from the Iron Bank in Braavos. And so he loves to delve into fiscal policy.
[00:10:58] I feel like rather than science fiction where you really see kind of nitty gritty depictions of taxation and government, they come from these big doorstopper fantasy novels that have like a thousand pages to play with where they can have like epic battles, but also get really deep into how the government works and how people pay their taxes in that world, whether it's through coin or in kind through grain, labor goods, you know, and often these fantasy novels play with like assumptions about the ancient world.
[00:11:29] And actually, Annalee, I wanted to ask you, what do we know about how taxation worked in the ancient world?
Annalee: [00:11:35] Yeah. Well, thank you for asking me because, you know, I always like to have a little detour into archaeology when I can. So taxes play a really interesting role in how archaeologists think about the complexity of a society.
[00:11:50] Things are changing a bit on that front. I mean, now I think we have a diverse understanding of what makes complexity. But for about a hundred years, most archaeologists were going off of this really influential book by V. Gordon Childe called Man Makes Himself. And that's the book where he coins the phrase the “Neolithic Revolution”, which you may have heard in school. You might have been taught about that.
[00:12:16] He also in that book comes up with what he thinks of as the main pillars of what make for an urban society, which is implicitly a complex society. And taxation is one of the ways that you identify a society as being complex, as opposed to, I don't know, basic. And basic would be just like you're in a little village. Or you're a nomadic group.
[00:12:41] And of course, taxes are tied to a bunch of other stuff too. They're tied to governance and hierarchy. Often they're tied to literacy because the way that we know that ancient societies had taxes is because they left written records behind. And oftentimes in, you know, ancient societies from Ur in Mesopotamia or ancient Egypt in the really early kingdoms of ancient Egypt. So we're talking like, you know, 3000, 4000, 5000 years ago in a lot of cases. You know, we do see that people were being taxed and not generally in coin, but in goods, right?
[00:13:20] So farmers would give part of their food or they would give away parts of their family. Like, you know, debt servitude was a big part of how ancient societies function. So for example, you might just give a couple of your children to the government to work as enslaved people or everybody might be enslaved for a couple months a year, you know, so you would the way you would pay your taxes to the government would be you just build pyramids for two months out of the year.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:50] Right.
Annalee: [00:13:50] And we know for sure that that was happening in some of the great cities in Southeast Asia and probably was happening in most of the world at various points and still happens. Of course, you know, we still have basically debt slavery in a lot of ways, but we just don't call it that.
[00:14:09] Yeah, I'll link in the show notes to this great story in archaeology magazine that's like just kind of a compendium of all of the different tax documents that we have from the ancient world, some of which do go all the way back to the Bronze Age.
[00:14:24] And also I wanted to finish by mentioning another article that I'll link to in the show notes by Tatsuya Murakami, who is an archaeologist at Tulane University. And I've been reading a lot of his work because I'm learning about Teotihuacán, which was a city that was really important in Mexico about 2000 years ago. And one of the things about it is that we don't have a lot of written records from it. We don't have any information about their governance system. And so archaeologists are constantly like, well, how did they build? Like they built these amazing pyramids, the Avenue of the Dead. Like it's this famous, famous site that you can visit right outside Mexico City because it's so freaking big, right? They had this enormous city. So how were they taxing people?
[00:15:13] And so one of the things that Murakami points out is that, you know, we think of taxes, you know, as being something that's concrete, right? That we think of power and resources as being like physical stuff, like I give you wheat or I give you cows or whatever. And he's like, but there's lots of intangible ways that we measure wealth and value. And so you could be, for example, donating your labor as taxes. There could be all kinds of ways that people were participating in the state and were giving to the state that wouldn't be left in the kind of physical record.
[00:15:52] And so Murakami is like, it's important to remember that wealth is symbolic as well as being connected to material possessions. And like, we have to speculate about like what that symbolic wealth was at Teotihuacán. and kind of extrapolate and say like, “yeah, people might have been serving their temples.” You know, we don't know.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:14] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:16:14] And so I just found that super fascinating.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:17] Yeah. I mean, sometimes things are more informal and less systematized. So, Annalee, in every episode, I have to talk to you about Doctor Who.
Annalee: [00:16:25] Oh, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:25] I'm going to talk to you about a Doctor Who episode that's super fascinating. It's called “The Sun Makers”. And the reason why “The Sun Makers” exists is because the writer of that episode who was also in charge of the scripts of Doctor Who at the time, this guy Robert Holmes, had a really nasty tax audit from the British government.
Annalee: [00:16:46] He had a bone to pick.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:46] He decided to vent his anger over this tax audit by creating this dystopian Doctor Who story. And the thing about “The Sunmakers” is basically it's one of those stories that Doctor Who sometimes does, doesn't do it as much anymore, but one of those stories where the Doctor shows up, finds a society that is unjust and is just like, “screw this” and just overthrows the entire society within like a day. Doctor just shows up, launches a revolution, overthrows the government, and is just like, done, and just leaves.
Annalee: [00:17:17] Amazing.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:18] Yeah. And so in this case, it's like basically people have been moved to Pluto, which at the time we thought was a planet, and these aliens have set up a thing where they've created an artificial sun, which is why it's “The Sun Makers”.
Annalee: [00:17:31] As one does.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:31] And everybody works for this company. There's a thing called The Company, which is basically the government, but is also like a corporation, and you have to pay taxes to the company, and you have to pay taxes for everything. Like if your parent dies, you have to pay a death tax. That's just like a, you know, a funeral tax or whatever.
[00:17:49] And like, there's like taxes for literally everything. There's all these little jabs at the British tax system in it, like various things are like named after British tax entities. And so you could read it as a story that's like about taxes are bad, or you could read it as a story about like having a corporation as a government because your government is bad. It's a story that actually works as like a left-wing parable or a right-wing parable.
Annalee: [00:18:16] Or anti-government or anti-corporate. Yeah. Interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:19] There are parts where the doctor literally kind of like misquotes Karl Marx, like on purpose. Like at one point, somebody says to the Doctor, what do we have to lose? The Doctor says, “You have nothing to lose but your claims,” which is like a misquote from Karl Marx.
Annalee: [00:18:36] I don’t know if that’s so much a misquote as a pun.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:38] It's a pun on Karl Marx. It's intentional. It's intentional that the Doctor is doing a little play on Karl Marx. And there's all these scenes of the workers like having a general strike and rising up and throwing government officials off of rooftops. It's actually very violent in a very cartoony way. And it's like, it's about like rising up against this corporate, these corporate overlords, but also rising up against being overtaxed.
[00:19:02] So I find that really interesting both in how incoherent it is and in how pissed off it is and how much it kind of turns this idea of like a Marxist uprising into like a revolt against taxes. And I actually, I'm going to link this in the show notes.
[00:19:18] Back in the day when we were working on the blog IO9, I wrote a list of science fiction stories featuring anti-tax revolts. And there's actually a lot of them. It's a common term in science fiction.
Annalee: [00:19:29] Wow. It's kind of like the robot uprising. It's just like the recurring theme, except in this case, it's the tax uprising. Yeah. I think it's interesting because revolting against taxes is really like, we see it all over the place, including in Robin Hood, like all of the Robin Hood legends go back to like the kind of precipitating event is that the evil King John or Prince John who becomes King John is impoverishing people by levying more taxes, which is why Robin has to steal from the rich and give to the poor because he's kind of like doing the reverse taxes.
[00:20:08] And then there's of course the Star Wars prequels. People have been talking about this a lot since they deal with tariffs. So there's been all these memes online about like, “ah, George Lucas told us so.” But remember there's all those boring scenes in the Senate in the prequels, but actually it's good to go back and listen to them now because they're all about taxation on trade routes. And Palpatine, who is of course secretly Darth Sidious, he's engineered a backlash against taxation. So kind of like a populist thing in order to spark a war, which is going to destroy the Jedi.
[00:20:44] But Darth Sidious is a major sponsor of the bill that raises taxes on the trade routes. And then of course he turns around and convinces the Trade Federation to rise up against it. So it's kind of this like, well, it feels very on the nose now, but it's kind of like a parable about how people are manipulated with, you know, this anti-tax feeling into bringing down a system that's actually good for them, right? So it's like a great little moment that we all hated at the time that turned out to be very prescient science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:21] Yeah. I mean, you know, the prequels, I will never believe that the prequels are great storytelling, but they're great allegory. They're like one of the best allegories we have as pure allegory. And like, as Yoda says, “Taxes lead to services. Services lead to public welfare. Public welfare leads to more taxes.” So, you know, it's all it's a virtuous cycle, according to Yoda.
Annalee: [00:21:45] Yeah. Yoda was always pro-tax. You know, so my final thought is that a story about taxation is always a story about the legitimacy of governments and whether we consider a government just or unjust, because, you know, if a government is just taxing you too much or taxing you cruelly or using your tax money to pay for horrible things, that's an easy simple signifier of dystopia. And, you know, if we don't want to pay our taxes, in some sense, we're saying that the government doesn't have a right to exist or to govern us.
[00:22:17] You know, but that's the conundrum of taxes is that we want the things that taxes pay for, but we don't want to be the ones to pay for it. And of course, we know that the wealthy are never going to pay their fair share of taxes. So it's unfair. It's inherently unjust as long as we have those those loopholes for the rich.
Annalee: [00:22:33] Yeah, that is really true. I think it's the classic example of kind of picking a symbol that we all recognize taxes, we all hate taxes. And it distracts us from the real problem, which is wealth inequality and the fact that, you know, the wealthy have the ability to get wealthier by hiring people who help them hide their wealth so they don't have to pay taxes on it. And the real source of resentment should be the system that protects people who are rich and instead we wind up shooting ourselves in the foot by saying, well, what we really hate is a system that, you know, taxes us.
[00:23:15] The problem isn't the taxing. The problem is the unequal taxation. So, yeah, I don't know. Like, there's got to be a way to have a science fiction story or fantasy story that's a really action packed tale of a tax collector who's actually out for social justice. They're collecting taxes from the wealthy.
[00:23:40] Like, I want to see a John Wick style story about tax collecting from some billionaire who's, like, hidden all of their money somewhere and, like, our hero has to track down the money and track down the billionaire and the money comes into the government. And then we immediately see, now that that money is in the government, we see, like, all these happy smiling children who have free lunches at school and, like, the roads are being rebuilt. And, like, it's like the end of The Wizard of Oz where, like, everything is green again, except it's like, “Everything is repaired again. Our infrastructure works. We have clean water and, like, public transit for all.”
Charlie Jane: [00:24:19] Oh, my God.
Annalee: [00:24:20] Just because we caught this one billionaire and got him to pay his taxes.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:24] I would love that.
Annalee: [00:24:25] Thanks, John Wick: tax collector.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:27] I feel like that could be a fun cyberpunk adventure where you're, like, tracking him down and fighting his dirty dealings. You know, I want a science fiction version of this Japanese movie from back in the day called A Taxing Woman.
[00:24:38] So it's from the director of Tampopo and it's just about this heroic tax collector who goes around and that's what we need. That's the energy we need.
Annalee: [00:24:45] Yes. It should just be called “The Tax Collector”. And, yeah, give it to us now.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:52] Hollywood make this now. OK, so we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to hear from contributing host Alan Henry about workplace surveillance and how marginalized people can deal with it.
[00:25:03] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:25:06] And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and funded by you, our listeners, through Patreon? Oh, my God. You didn't even have to pay taxes. You just give it right to us.
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[00:26:01] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:26:04] And now, we’re welcoming back Alan Henry, who you've heard on the pod before when he came on to talk about his book Seen, Heard and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized. Alan is the managing editor of PCMag and formerly he was at Wired, The New York Times and the awesome blog Lifehacker. Alan is joining us today as a contributing host to talk about workplace surveillance. So Alan, tell us the story.
Alan: [00:26:35] Yeah. So, in my book, I set out to document my experiences being discriminated against at work. And, to talk about what I wish I knew and some tips to help anyone at any stage of their career protect themselves. Because, I like to tell everyone marginalization at work comes for everyone, whether it is because of age, disability, race, gender or gender identity or sexuality. So I've been surveilled before and I pushed back against it. It works sometimes, but here's what you need to know.
[00:27:05] Ever since computers started turning up in offices, companies have gone to exceptional lengths to make sure you don't use one for anything except making your employer money. When I worked at a three letter agency a very long time ago, the computers in our office were all networked. They were all monitored and they all had no external access to the Internet. In fact, if you wanted to do anything more than edit documents and check your internal only email, you had to go to one of the two – only two – old PCs set up in a public area to access the wider Internet.
[00:27:36] Some of those precautions make sense, right? The weakest link in any organization is the individual user. Computers generally do what you ask them to, but people are a wild card. I've also done some security testing for some of the organizations I worked for. And I know that a little more than a polite smile will get you complete physical access to an employee's computer. Meaning I could make off with not just their company's data, but their personal information as well.
[00:28:00] But over the past decade, employer surveillance has changed from protective designed to keep you away from the threats of the Internet to abusive designed to enforce unrealistic productivity standards, punish employees just for being human, and demoralize entire teams. Especially at risk are the employees who are already marginalized at work, like disabled workers, workers of color, neurodivergent workers.
[00:28:24] So what happened and why did it get this bad? Predictably, some of this story starts in 2020. But to understand that, we have to go back a little further. In the early 2010s, a number of retail companies scrambling for ways to save box footprints all started experimenting with technology designed to quietly watch customers when they enter their stores. They wanted to see where they went when you shopped and how long you lingered in different departments and what, if anything, you left with.
[00:28:50] If you have a long memory like I do, you might remember. Naturally, people didn't like being watched. Nordstrom, for example, is one of the biggest offenders with The New York Times headline about the Nordstrom situation called “Attention Shoppers: Stores are Tracking Your Cell”. In short, the tech would use your phone's built-in passive search for nearby Wi-Fi networks as a way to identify and track your device. That way, the company could track your movements in the store and even identify when you came back or when you went to a different branch of the same store.
[00:29:20] After the inevitable backlash, the retailers apologized. They made pain statements about how much they value their customers and said the tech would be discontinued. Except it wasn't. As Esperanza Fonseca wrote for Truthout back in 2020, the retailers using the tech had just been using it to track their employees for years before attempting it on the public, and they never stopped.
[00:29:42] The companies behind the tech, who all promised their clients that their tech would make employees more productive and give managers more information on business intelligence, kept building and marketing it to anyone who would sign a contract. So slowly, everyone from brick and mortar retailers like Nordstrom to online retailers like Amazon started contracting companies like Euclid Analytics. That's a company that worked for Nordstrom that got bought by WeWork in 2019. RetailNext, who works with everyone from Sephora to the Disney Store, and Palantir to deploy surveillance tech to keep an eye on anyone they choose to, especially their lowest wage employees.
[00:30:18] Fonseca pointed out in her article that the roots of the surveillance has always been in racism, going all the way back to chattel slavery. There's this persistent belief by white managers that low wage workers, and especially workers of color, are lazy, eager to avoid work, and universally guilty of time theft and some other insert lazy, provably false stereotype here.
[00:30:39] Of course, the mantra from HR departments is, you're using company equipment. It's their property. They can do whatever they want. And that's largely true. Most workers, even in states and cities with robust worker protections, have no legal right or even expectation to know that they're being watched at work, how invasive that surveillance is, or where it stops.
[00:30:59] So let's come back to the present. The COVID-19 pandemic combined with the Black Lives Matter protests changed everything. And that's not an understatement. On the one hand, a global pandemic and lockdown meant that every company that had internet access scrambled to embrace remote work. Companies flocked to Zoom and Microsoft Teams so employees could work remotely.
[00:31:19] Meanwhile, the murder of George Floyd sparked the Black Lives Matter protests and set more people into the street to clap back at the powers that be than had been seen in years. Now, in an empathetic world, all of this would be a good thing. Companies could save money on expensive corporate real estate. They could invest in simple technology solutions that allow people to work anywhere and improve their work-life balance, rather than in cars or in trains, commuting for hours or sitting in stifling offices waiting for a middle manager to stroll up to their desk to pick their brain.
[00:31:48] Study after study explained that this change was good for workers of all types. Of course, if you're listening to this now, you know that's not what happened. Protests were met with state-sanctioned violence, and even the most progressive states and localities pushed through new laws designed to curtail the rights of protesters to gather and reduce instead of expand, police accountability.
[00:32:10] Companies did sell off their expensive real estate, and they did move into smaller spaces, but they did that at the same time they demanded their employees return to the office. Even in my own experience, a company that I recently worked for was proudly remote during the pandemic, but suddenly demanded everyone start coming to the office at least three days a week after they downsized the office space so there wouldn't be enough room for everyone to work.
[00:32:30] Hot desking became the buzzword du jour, where workers would have to sign up for a seat at their own office, essentially turning in-office mandates into a first-come, first-serve battle royale for a place to sit. Companies treated their office space like airlines treat seats on an aircraft, and everyone loves airline seating, right?
[00:32:49] But then the demands got worse. HR will be tracking your badge swipes to make sure you're not working from home just because your manager allowed you to. Time in and out of the office would be monitored. Of course, this means that employees already marginalized because of their identities face more repercussions than others. A disabled employee who's requested reasonable accommodations from their employer through the Americans with Disability Act suddenly has to face questions about why they need a regular workstation that can accommodate their needs as opposed to hot desking like everyone else. A worker of color who's statistically likely to have a longer commute or live in an area less served by transit is harassed by HR for not badging in at the same time every day, despite their manager not caring.
[00:33:30] Sophie Charro wrote a story for Wired in February of this year, and she explained that a combination of a floundering economy, which led companies to hire less, and hype for artificial intelligence, leading companies to spend more there, have led to a management obsession with worker productivity that sends them back into the arms of the same companies eager to profit off your manager knowing when you take a bathroom break and for how long.
[00:33:52] In a similar story for Business Insider, also published in February, Jennifer Sor spoke to leaders at several companies that sell surveillance tech, and she found that overall interest in employee monitoring has skyrocketed more than 54% just between 2020 and 2023.
[00:34:07] So that means the worst of the worst warehouse surveillance tech is being deployed against a corporate landscape. Technology that Amazon workers are trying to unionize against, that has also been used to track their movement and gatherings to try and union bust, is now commonplace at companies like JP Morgan Chase.
[00:34:25] Even the federal government is in the mix, with President Trump just demanding all federal agencies eliminate remote work entirely and force all employees to return in office five days a week.
[00:34:34] Okay, that's a lot of history. Still, it's important to remember that regardless of who you are, invasive surveillance is coming to your workplace if it's not already a reality. My take is that if a company doesn't care enough to make sure that there's a place for you to sit when you come to work, that's not a company that cares about you in the slightest. That's the sentiment that is, rightfully, growing among workers at all levels and at all industries.
[00:34:55] So what can you do about it? Well, it's important to remember that you as an employee, your biggest strength is your numbers and your labor. That means unionizing, while by no means a perfect solution is one way to ensure managers at least hear and take your concerns about invasive surveillance seriously.
[00:35:13] Remember, though, HR is not your friend, and complaining to them alone about company policy is a little more than a way to get yourself in trouble. Another company I'm familiar with has an active union, and they manage to negotiate a remote-first working policy for the entire global organization in their union contract. And subsequently, that company has won several Best Place to Work awards.
[00:35:35] Aside from organizing and using your numbers as leverage, there are plenty of things you can do, especially if you're a marginalized worker, to protect yourself.
[00:35:43] First of all, review your employee manual or employee handbook or whatever they gave you on your first day. You can stroll up to your boss and ask, “So what does the company do to keep tabs on me at work?” But don't expect a straightforward answer. If your boss even knows, and many managers don't know the extent of the surveillance at their companies, they may not even be allowed to tell you. Instead, look at the company documentation you've been provided about IT policies and policies. It's usually buried in there, and it's likely framed in terms of protecting the company against bad employees, not all employees.
[00:36:16] Once you're armed with that information, if you have the psychological safety to do so, talk to your manager about it. They likely won't be in a position to change company policy or anything, but they may be less likely to enforce it if you two can come to an agreement. Just remember that pressure on workers always comes from the top and threatens people below. That means that if your manager turns on you, it's likely their manager or someone higher making the demands. And that's when you and your manager may be able to talk to HR or even a more senior manager about that.
[00:36:46] Next, data is power, and power is money. That's actually the name of a chapter in my book. And what it really means is that companies love to use data to drive their decisions, but they also have a hard time refuting that data when it's presented back to them. So keep a work diary. It can be a Google doc. It can be a fancy notebook. If your managers get on your case because you spent too long with a patient or took too long to close a case on a call center, make sure to track how many patients you see for yourself or how many calls you take, how many cases you close.
[00:37:18] Also, make note of the things that your boss's surveillance software wouldn't notice that that patient that you spent all day with was terrified and needed your help to calm them down. Or the caller was elderly and had difficulty following instructions.
[00:37:35] If you have a disability and you take more bathroom breaks than your boss thinks you should, explain why you do so. You may not be able to head off their wrath, but you do have ammunition in case the company tries to treat you unfairly, or if you want to get local or federal equal employment opportunity agencies involved.
[00:37:48] Next, consider joining an ERG or some other kind of external career group. ERGs stand for Employee Resource Groups. Some companies call them affinity groups. All of those groups are under attack right now. The current administration's crusade against so-called DEI is shorthand for rolling back worker protections and making it easier for companies to exploit employees and, of course, making it easier for already marginalized employees to be abused by their employers on the basis of race, gender, gender identity, sexuality, age, disability. The list is long.
[00:38:19] And make no mistake, anything targeting one group of people will eventually be used to target everyone. So joining these groups while they still exist, if they exist in your organization, is another way to leverage your strength in numbers. You're more likely to affect change in an organization if, for example, the disabled employee ERG points out to management that timing bathroom breaks isn't just inhumane but actively discriminates against employees whose disabilities require them to take more breaks or longer breaks, and to boot that the company should just stop monitoring them entirely, not just extend special protections to you.
[00:38:52] If your company is one that's rolled over and eliminated its DEI programs or ERGs or other employee groups, all isn't lost. Look around for local groups to get involved with that aren't associated with any particular company. For example, a long time ago, I was a project manager. And while the Project Management Institute is the global organization for project managers, local chapters can introduce you to people who work at other companies that have different policies and people who've successfully pushed back against invasive surveillance. They may even be able to give you a lead on jobs that fit your skills and at a company that doesn't abuse its employees.
[00:39:27] If you're marginalized because of your identity, the best thing you can do is find an organization that has roots in your identity. Remember, companies want their workers to feel isolated and alone. Managing people is easier when they're demoralized and compliant. So instead of just joining the PMI, for example, consider joining a group of black project managers in your city or even starting one yourself.
[00:39:50] As a journalist, I'm a member of several groups dedicated to the unique challenges and perspectives of journalists of color. And together we share information about the good and bad places to work, managers and executives to look out for and companies that respect their employees versus the ones that treat them like disposables. Whisper networks work. Join one. And protect yourself. And protect the group, for that matter.
[00:40:11] The next few years is fairly bleak for workers' rights. At the federal level, the National Labor Relations Board is being stripped of its authority and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been instructed to stop all enforcement and investigation activities. At least for the next few years, the government has the backs of CEOs before it has your back. That may or may not be the case at your local or state level, but look into it regardless.
[00:40:33] But the big takeaway is, and always has been, that we, you and me, and those people like us who just want to do good work, live our lives in health, safety and security, and then go home at the end of the day, are the only ones who can really look out for each other. We have each other's backs. And that's all that really matters.
[00:40:50] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:54] Alright. You’ve been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. If you just somehow stumbled on us, you can find us wherever you find your podcasts, and we’d really appreciate it if you subscribe. Also, if you like us, please leave a review; it really helps a lot. And, you know, you can also find us on social media. We’re on Mastadon. We’re on Patreon. We’re on Instagram. We’re generally either OurOpinions or OurOpinionsAreCorrect in all those places. We have a Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect, and your support is just massively appreciated.
[00:41:28] Thanks so much to our brilliant producer and audio engineer, the wonderful Niah Harmon. Thanks to the intrepid Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez-Nichols for our music. And thanks again for listening. We’ll be back in two weeks with another episode, but if you're a patron, we'll give you a mini episode next week and we'll be seeing you in Discord.
Both: [00:41:44] Bye!
[00:41:45] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]