Surveillance/social media/hiring

Reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickled and Dimed this week, in which she does a grittier version of Undercover Boss, albeit with some middle-class trappings of slumming intact. Ehrenreich is good at charting the psychological conditions of low-wage labor, in particular the real sense that, as she puts it, more and more Americans spend most of their day in a place that allows very little individual expression, and very little privacy. Ehrenreich describes, to give one glaring example, the indignities and inconveniences associated with mandatory drug testing, a procedure which, at least in her reading, seems designed to assert discipline over the employee more than it is to weed out actual substance abuse (though she does posit, at some point, that drug users might also be more likely to rebel against company cultures). So to be a low-wage worker, employed at, say, Wal-Mart, is to live in a kind half-Orwellian world, and the limitations around low income housing take care of the rest. What Ehrenreich describes is roughly biopower: the fruitless, relentless measuring of populations, with the net effect of keeping these populations managed. The data-intensification of recent years is something weirder, where the consuming self, the extension of the subject into the world, becomes immanently public and inextricable from the networks it engages, if it was ever otherwise.

Ehrenreich's book, published early last decade, of course has very little Internet in it; in fact, one wonders if any aspects of the Internet--say, the ability to apply for jobs online at the library--might actually alter the low-wage landscape, at least incrementally. But the potential for surveillance, of course, has only been amplified by the Internet era. From the start, I suppose, those Internet sites wanted a piece of us, and now they have it, handed over willingly. In one of those weird cultural synergies between private reading and public news, this week the AP reported that some employers--scattered prisons, some sheriff's departments, Sears, at least on some level--are requesting, and implicitly requiring, potential employees to give up their Facebook passwords. It strikes me that, like drug tests, this is going to hit low-wage workers the hardest, mostly because they're least equipped--financially, intellectually, and culturally--to resist. It's impossible, of course, to extend the current moment out into the future, and yet the contours of the coming society have begun to clarify: Something like Facebook may well become near-mandatory as a source of personal information, the way credit scores are beginning to operate: not just as a measure of ability to pay back, but of humanity cast more generally, something akin to "potential productivity"--a measure of the estimated future output of that most perfect of machines, the human body. I'm convinced, I suppose, by Shteyngart's imaginary in Super Sad True Love Story, in which smartphone, FBI file, social media profile, and shopping history converge.

The smart people are telling us, over and over: Facebook is what we were always warned about, but always imagined would be imposed--a permanent record. Of course, though, it's an idealized, performative self, but a self with real connections to real people, whose own backgrounds will likely enable more and more sophisticated profiling. How will anyone unionize when Wal-Mart essentially owns your data? I'm guessing that the data tracked by smartphones, DVRs, social media, rewards cards has only begun to be tapped, and most, all of us, are only dimly, faintly aware of the potential consequences, particularly as the world grows increasingly stratified, and therefore increasingly violent and crime-ridden.