TECHNOLOGY WAR: LiveJournal sexual censorship, emotion-tracking employee wristband, and a funny Twitter article

Haha – Twittering the Twitter Revolution. Funny article, written in “twitter-speak”, about a journalist who tried to wirte about how un-compelling twitter was, but ended up getting sucked in to it for over an hour. I love how the twitter t-shirt says “wearing a twitter shirt”. TECHNOLOGY WAR: Social Control: Emotion-Tracking Wearable Device Lets Your Boss Monitor Your Feelings. I covered this on my blog before, when Microsoft announced the patent for a similar device. Well, HERE IT IS. You wear this, and you think happy thoughts while wearing this, or you get fired. This is the corporate future of slavery. It is best to REFUSE AND RESIST. Better to be homeless and free, than wage-enslaved with a wristband. LIVEJOURNAL: Six Apart/SUP Erases Porn, Sex… and Fandom from LiveJournal popular interests. People are still around, but only in the shadows. This is what you get for adopting a corporate blogging platform. Had you self-hosted your blog with open-source software, nobody would have been able to censor you or make you hide. This is why people need to find solutions for themselves, instead of depending on corporate offerings for everything. Back in 1995, the only webpages were personal webpages in personal spaces. Today, almost everyone’s space — even my own — takes place under a corporate umbrella. We are trading freedom for convenience (and I have too). This is bad.

parthena Says:

March 16, 2008 at 7:54 PM

Regarding the emotion-tracking device–I totally agree that that is a frightening thing. However, I don’t see how they could legally get away with firing someone for feeling “inappropriate emotions.” How would that not be discrimination? If the person is doing their job correctly but is feeling a negative emotion, what justification could they have for firing them?) Couldn’t the employee, in theory, run to HR and claim wrongful termination?

I don’t think most people would submit to even wearing one of those (at least, I would hope not?)

Clint Says:

March 16, 2008 at 8:20 PM

Discrimination laws only protect specifically defined groups. An employer currently definitely has the right to fire you simply based on how you feel — They don’t need any reason to fire you at all in most places (like Virginia).

It’s up to the people to say no. And dangle enough dollars in front of them, with few enough other alternatives, and they will say yes.

Sucks.

Chriggy Says:

March 16, 2008 at 9:53 PM

Twitter:
Hahahahaha! My sentiments exactly :)

Emotion Tracking device:
Clint is right. Unless you have a contract, most employment is considered “at will” meaning they don’t need a reason to fire you.

However, I don’t think this will become mainstream. While a company could technically fire someone for not agreeing to wear that device, the company would probably suffer just as badly by people being fired/leaving because of it. So it would kind of be unrealistic for anyone to actually implement.

Then again, a precedent has been set by drug testing.

spugbrap Says:

March 20, 2008 at 11:25 PM

Clint, I think you mean:
We are trading freedom for convenience

Personally, I don’t have a lot of convenience to offer, but I do have freedom. I’m still fighting this one every day.

I post my photos on my home web server, despite the fact that it lacks fancy indexing/tagging mechanisms, has very little bandwidth, etc. I’m slowly putting more of my photos up on sites like flickr and picasaweb, but for now it’s limited to specific types or groups of photos.

My blog is hosted on my home machine, too, because it feels more like running my old BBS. I can mod it and do what I want with it. It wasn’t the best BBS around; it only had one phone line (which was also my dial-out phone line), limited file space, and lots of other downsides. However, people still called it, and I had fun modding the hell out of it. That’s where I’m at now with my blog, but I’m no longer a teenager living at home, so I don’t have much time to work on that kind of stuff anymore.

March 21, 2008 at 2:18 AM

Spugbrap:
Yes, that’s precisely the problem. No time. If I didn’t have a job when I decided to start my blog, I could have spent a month or two working on that code instead. But instead I got stuck here at wordpress.com, and locked in with various decisions — like not being able to run google adsense, which would undoubtedly make me a bit of money.

I did actually try the photo thing, and after months of effort… I had something that was full of functions, but incredibly clunky. Not to mention screen-full SQL code that took multiple screens of perl code to generate. Ugh. Flickr worked out much better, at $2 a month.

BBSes were not only more possible because we had more time, but software simply did less back then … Oooh, we wanted to post MESSAGES and BINARY FILES. We didn’t even have digital cameras back then — just a few crappy GIFs. So it’s not like we ever had to spend time writing code to, say, generate thumbnails, or resize images. We could put something up that was as good as anything else out there — without having to solve as many problems as we would need to solve today to achieve the same thing.

Once the actual Renaissance was over, there was no longer a such thing as a Renaissance man. I fear the same thing has happened (or is happening) with computers.

P.S. Yes, I had inverted freedom and convenience. Now fixed. Thanks:)

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