This:
The Asshole Factory
is an interesting look at how the modern work environment, especially in retail and other service jobs, are geared toward mico-managment, and the general devaluing of human beings as human beings. It highlights how certain retailers attempt to control their employees every interaction with customers, leveraging modern technology to implement the MBA inspired dream of employees that do nothing other than what the employee handbook and sales rules allow. Any one familiar with service work will recognize how soul deadening it is, and anything that makes it easier to turn an employee into a policy driven robot and only a policy driven robot, will recognize the corrosive nature this has on ones personality.
Too bad the solution is terrible.
As the author points out:
What happens to Mara when she’s “doing her job”? Think about it for a second. She turns into precisely the kind of asshole that the heartless dweebs who thought up this infernal torture-machine no doubt already are. Not because she wants to. But because she has to.
This is undeniably true, and not just the realm of retail stores.
Amazon, for example, does its best to treat human as if they were flesh robots, tagging them with personal navigation devices and dictating the routes through their fulfillment centers. This is a serious, systematic problem in the modern world. Unfortunately, and at the risk of souding like an asshole, the author’s solution is stupid:
We’re obedient constructivists. Pragmatists. Rationalists. So you probably want to know: what can we do about it?
It’s pretty simple.
Don’t be an asshole.
…
So let me say it again. Don’t be an asshole. Be yourself. The miracle of being that you were meant to be.
Thats the answer: don’t be an asshole. Just don’t. Choose to overcome, all by your lonesome, the system that the author has just spent a lot of pixels convincing us creates assholes by its very nature. The problem, by the author’s own admission, is not the people who are the victims of these systems, but rather the systems themselves. And yet the solution he offers in entirely in the hands of the victims of that system.
I am a programmer by nature and by trade. Perhaps one day I am involved with a system that causes all blondes who use it to have their hair catch on fire. It is possible that one solution to that problem is to instruct all the blondes to dye their hair another color and hope that the system doesn’t notice that their natural hair color is blonde. This would, of course, be monumentally stupid. The actual solution would be to fix the system. This author, however, is telling blondes to buy a bottle of hair dye and pray for the best.
Because what happens to blondes who use a system designed to incinerate them? They usually end up ash. What happens to those people who can overcome the system designed to turn them into assholes? What happens when those people consistently ignore the instructions of their bosses? They get fired.
When the system is the problem, fix the system. When your program causes blondes to catch fire, rewrite the program. When your labor system turns people into assholes, organize and vote to remake the labor system.
This, of course, is hard. It is not a good time to work for a living in the US, outside a few domains. Wages have been stagnant for my entire adult life, except for the 90s, and the balance of power has most decidedly shifted to the capital side of the labor/capital divide. But pretending that individuals acting alone and isolated can overcome a systematic problem is just washing your hands of the problem. It doesn’t work, doesn’t do any good, and leaves you wondering how you managed to end up surrounded by all these assholes.