Surveillance is a feeling

And since it has no love in it, it doesn’t feel good: a note to employers (and data brokers) in a digital age.

2020: the acceleration of digital surveillance

Ever since COVID when millions of people in knowledge professions went home to work, things rapidly changed about how businesses approached costs and human capital¹. And workers staying home may have seemed a great reason to step up technology use and innovation. And collectively, industry did just that, but the toll it has taken on the humans who work from home has been immense. People who had these types of jobs home lives changed. And not always for the better.

In 2020, people zoomed and reported, shared docs and emails, also did their production work² from their living quarters. Around the same time organizations began stepping up apps and garden variety digital surveillance on their employees too. They did things like track IP addresses, location data, logins, time on devices, keystrokes on shared platforms, screen shares, and similar. “Accountability” it was called. It was considered acceptable because don’t business owners want to get maximum value out of every hour they were paying for? Wouldn’t that be good for commerce?

But surveillance is fundamentally based on mistrust, and cost-cutting greed, and that’s where the problems begin. People don’t like that. People feel that. People like to communicate and relate, and the best employees also like to create –a skill that does not flourish under a watchful eye of stats and surveys.

Trying to ‘get’ maximum value from employee’s time and attention for the sake of a bottom line may be the definition of mechanistic greed. It is not the same as relating, or cooperating, or contracting, or conversing– all of which are adult-style behaviors in homes and society. In short, surveillance is a cheat to actually talking. And surveillance definitely does not belong inside people’s homes³.

I believe time and attention are commodities that humans should control themselves. Because of this, tracking a person’s movements – even if digitally– is tantamount to an invasion of their space: especially if they work from home. Remote work can be tricky in this way. At first it can seem freeing, but in information workers, sometimes it allows presense of “the boss man” into your personal space.

And who can honestly answer the question of who owns the work time? The payer or the producer? What about deliverables? And how does one account for soft deliverables like being a conduit for quality information, innovation, project thinking, transparency and sharing knowledge? What about creative ideas? When were they conceived, and birthed, and who really owns them?

Body states related to surveillance

In my opinion, no one likes to be surveilled, even if they take a dismissive attitude toward it. Some folks may not be conscious of surveillance happening – and privacy laws state that these things need to be disclosed – but their bodies know they are being watched. To be surveilled is a felt sense, which one can identify as being somewhere in the upper back part of head and neck, and it may be accompanied by stuck thoughts about “what would this look like [to others]”?

Who does surveillance support?

The additional level of self-awareness an employee can experience from being watched could be disruptive to fulfilling the tasks of the job too. In the land of influencers, we’ve come to know that performing for the sake of good stats can also be ‘counter productive⁴‘. Also, if surveillancers agenda is unclear (such as they trying to trim costs and play “gotcha,” or are a bad actor surveilling for state secrets, or are they greedy peepers getting ‘tips’ on how to do things), then the problem is an inappropriate invasion of sacred⁵ privacy and space⁶.

Real people cannot live happily under surveillance.

The state of being surveilled ignites a visceral feeling of power imbalance, and can be understood as power-and-resource grab by the surveillant. If a person feels things deeply, and has gifts to bear, they will choose another way to live rather than to submit to a work environment of this kind.

And that’s where talent loss in high-level businesses begins. It’s not rocket science.

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My conclusion is that digitally watched activity with no loving – or spoken – context is tantamount to invasion of privacy, and at best ineffective, and at worst unethical or illegal. But, I’m doing some research on this topic, so perhaps these assertions require more nuance, or there are positive applications in creating a happier humanity. Let’s see.

Next on this: In a future piece, I hope to write about the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the context of employee surveillance and my concerns about surveillance negatively impacting human wellbeing in the workforce and communities.

Contact me if you’d like to partner on, or get advised about, research opportunities in this field.

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1. I find this term kind of awful “human capital,” but I need a few capitalists to read this and protect their people. ↩︎
2. Production work can be anything from research to writing, formatting, teaching, creating timelines and checklists, documenting achievements & deliverables, phone calls, emails and/or tech or design work. These are things that are done typically alone and take time and attention to do well. ↩︎
3. ↩︎
4. Right now I’m working at my kitchen counter, so the term “counter productive” is fun and ironic… did I say fun? ↩︎
5. In this post, I refer to the table as the family hearth, a space of perhaps mythic proportions not to be trifled with. ↩︎
6. A conversation is the civilized way to get the same aims achieved. A straight up conversation between parties – like sovereigns do when discussing matters of state. ↩︎