Ruse Against the Machine
Designing the critical boundaries to question new management technologies
In November 2020, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) organised air2020, an online event aimed at exploring and questioning desirable futures, the innovations shaping our time, and the ongoing revolutions in the digital world.
For this first edition, the CNIL’s innovation lab gave us free rein to explore the topic of people analytics, also known as the datafication of work. Amid the Covid-19 crisis, the expansion of remote working was accompanied by the accelerated deployment of these new HR tools powered by artificial intelligence, whose promises ranged from benevolence to surveillance. From performance enhancement to personalised employees journey tracking, and the pursuit of a better work-life balance, what ethical questions did – and still do – arise from this data-driven management?
To close the air2020 session, our studio presented a keynote-fiction: a conference-performance featuring a series of design fiction scenarios, immersing a digital professionals’ audience in the possible and sometimes unsettling futures of people analytics.
A fictional pitch transported the audience to the late 2020s, with the introduction of Connivence’s offerings and products – a cooperative of data counterfeiters. The motto of these digital counter-surveillance experts: ‘Ruse against the machine’.
↑ The service packs offered by Connivence to outsmart or hack people analytics technologies.
↑ The testimony of Sonia, a call center operator and user of Connivence happyless service – a set of visual and vocal filters that give the impression of being an always ‘cheerful’ and ‘dynamic’ team member during video conferences and other calls that punctuate our digital lives.
The keynote-fiction thus showcased a range of (fictional) solutions designed to be practical and pragmatic in evading, deceiving, and diverting people analytics technologies. Three major needs were addressed: escaping managerial surveillance, boosting one’s career, and protecting one’s job. The imagined products were aimed at both workers and unions, seeking to counter the threats that people analytics solutions pose to individuals’ privacy.
The objective of this fictional exercise was to question the ethical and legal boundaries of these technologies, anticipating their unintended side effects and possible misuses.
↑ d/double, a service to recruit a ‘double’ who also generates activity data by taking on some of the simple tasks, thereby doubling the activity data to satisfy the employer’s metrics.
↑ panoptiCo, the latest product from Connivence, enabling the sousveillance of company executives’ performance by and for its employees.
Ruse against the Machine sparked strong reactions during the air2020 event, ranging from enthusiasm to outright rejection, to the point where some almost forgot it was fiction. As Régis Chatellier, a foresight study officer at the CNIL, reminded us, “in the digital sector, the line between reality, plausibility, and fiction is often blurred”.
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