OUR HUMANITY IS AN INCONVENIENCE TO THE SYSTEM

The weird creepiness of the Worker Productivity Score

Gremlin

I’m disturbed by our newest step in the march toward social dystopia: the Worker Productivity Score. The WPS is an employee monitoring system tracking literally every minute a worker is working, but only at what the company itself defines as work. The company pays only for the work it defines as “productive.”

Let’s say I’ve been at the computer for the last hour emailing with colleagues. Then - because I’m human - I close my computer and sit looking out the window for a few minutes, allowing my brain to integrate the conversations I just had. I might even think I need a rest from it for a few minutes and choose to walk around. Every bit of scientific evidence suggests that my brain will create more new ideas, solutions, and breakthrough possibilities if I do.

But no! “You will not be paid for just sitting there or looking out the window or taking a 2-minute walk, Ms. Williamson! You must be working!”

Are you kidding me? No surveillance camera can monitor how my brain is working or what I’m thinking.

Yet that’s the basis of the Worker Productivity Score. We’re quickly adopting an economic, political, and social paradigm that sees our actual humanity as an inconvenience. The system wonders why we can’t be more like machines, just plug us in and we start doing what we’re programmed to do! Why should it constantly be distracted by our needs, our emotions, our desires? Can’t we work better than that?

Years ago, for one year and one year only because I was similarly creeped out about it for the same reason that I’m creeped out by the Worker Productivity Score, my young daughter went to a school whose response to negative socialization among children was to forbid all socialization, period. The children were told they were not allowed to speak to each other as they walked through the halls between classes. Passing notes in class was forbidden, even punished harshly. And recess would no longer occur at that school because it was a time when kids might actually talk to each other, and well, of course that’s dangerous. And this was not a school for kids with behavioral problems, mind you. It was even a school that bragged about being the best of the best.

To me, all that is the worst of the worst. Clamping down on our humanity is not the answer to society’s problems, socially, economically, or in any other way.

I remember telling the principal of the school that during my own work day there were times when I needed to leave my desk, walk into the kitchen or the backyard for a while, gather my resources and then walk back to my desk. You know. Refresh. It seemed to me that children would similarly need such a time to rest, to blow it out, if anything even more than adults. How was it reasonable to expect children to just line up in an academic assembly line from 9 to 3 each day with no break?

I argued that the response to negative socialization should not be to forbid all socialization, but rather to promote positive socialization. She clearly didn’t care what I thought, and I didn’t care what she thought either except that I was afraid, and rightfully so, that this would be a new trend in America. I feared it was a gathering storm and I was right. Who needs the laws of nature, or socializing, or community? Now the system has come up with a brilliant new answer to the way those pesky human beings keep wanting to be themselves: just don’t allow them to do it.

With the Worker Productivity Score, our authentic humanity is under assault by a utilitarian worldview that makes the human experience second to economic gain. And a worldview that recognizes no higher purpose than one’s value to an established economic system is pathological. It weaponizes the economy against the very people it should serve. An economic system should serve the people, and not the other way around.

Yet that inversion is what has occurred.

The brilliant quote below is from The Demoralized Mind, by John Schumaker:

Human culture has mutated into a sociopathic marketing machine dominated by economic priorities and psychological manipulation. Never before has a cultural system inculcated its followers to suppress so much of their humanity. Leading this hostile takeover of the collective psyche are increasingly sophisticated propaganda and misinformation industries that traffic the illusion of consumer happiness by wildly amplifying our expectations of the material world. Today’s consumers are by far the most propagandized people in history. The relentless and repetitive effect is highly hypnotic, diminishing critical faculties, reducing one’s sense of self, and transforming commercial unreality into a surrogate for meaning and purpose.”

I’m kind of stunned by those words, feeling they encapsulate this moment more astutely than anything I’ve seen. I read it allowed in a coaching class I teach and one of my students said, “That’s exactly how I feel.”

I told her, “That’s how everyone feels!”

Our humanity itself is now an inconvenience to the system. Our quirks, our dreams, our yearnings, our art, our reflection, our love, our silly moments, our need for rest and relaxation, our desire for play, our need for freedom, our sense of justice, all are left off the ledger sheet and increasingly peripheralized by a system that cannot gain from them. And it is up to us, each one of us, to push back. Hell no, don’t work at a place where there is a Worker Productivity Score. Raise hell, talk to others, organize against it. Rage against the machine because the machine is coming after you.

And if we allow it to, it will suck the very soul out of us. In many ways it already has. Yet more and more people are waking up to the craziness. We’re no longer acquiescing to the insanity of systems that do not honor that which is most beautiful about us. At a certain point, you just say no. You draw a line. You refuse to go along.

The monster has no name because it isn’t a single entity. But its tentacles are everywhere and it’s time to cut them off.