The tyranny of optimization

Just as the passive-aggressive bureaucrat has always had his defenders among a certain segment of the class of persons from whom he tends to be drawn, so too does the tyranny of data-driven optimization find a readymade cadre of defenders in the wider tech industry. For years now tech companies have been experimenting with the possibility of implanting computers chips in the hands of their employees, devices that can be used for everything from entering a secured area of a building to ordering snacks from a vending machine to — naturally — recording the amount of time someone spends at a work-issued computer. To the meliorist nerds of online startups, no doubt the whole thing sounds very cool, like being a neat robot in a video game but, like, in real life. Among ordinary working people the whole business will be seen for what it is: a needless intrusion into their lives that brings a negligible value to their employer at the expense of their human dignity, another vicious attempt by capital to put labor in its place.

To say something like 30 seconds wasted in a day adds up to 125 misspent minutes over the course of a work year and to an untold number of weeks or even months of vanished productivity when multiplied across thousands of employees is nonsense. Human activity doesn’t work that way. One person’s action or inaction is not an undifferentiated input that combines coolly and mechanically with identical inputs from hundreds of others. We are all different people doing different things at different times. The fact that we are able to coordinate our actions in order to accomplish the infinite number of things our bizarre species gets up to is remarkable enough.