updated since yesterday
It's cold tonight in Manhattan. Not short-sleeves weather. What happened to summer? I find myself missing the humidity.
I'm not liking the age of twenty-three. It's awkward. I wish I was older. My superiors at work are so into the idea that I need to be educated to the working world that they condescend to me at any opportunity. They see any initiative I take as either cute or threatening. A higher-up actually snapped at me the other day that she "didn't need a lecture from me on civil liberties." I tell you, it is particularly annoying to be an activist and younger than Baby Boomers. They're so fscking in love with the idea that they invented rebellion. Anything we do is cute, but it could never live up to the greatness of the Haight.
Old men in the social dance community of New York enjoy me too much at this age. I don't really want to be impolite and say, "Sorry, you're just too dessicated for an enjoyable Shag; you remind me of Grandpa;" so they take up all my time on the dance floor. Meanwhile, I feel compelled to be on the hunt myself, but I don't care enough about makeup or clothes to attract the attention of anyone young enough to have intentions nobler than just snagging the least saggy package of flesh on the floor.
I'm young enough that all these old people coochie-coo or drool after me, and yet old enough that I know better than to be rude to them. Old enough, too, that I do my own dishes and get no summer vacation despite everyone's insistence that I'm still just a baby. I hate this. Can't I just get to the Intimacy vs. Isolation part of my life? This whole Identity vs. Role Confusion thing is way old by now.
So a lot of you havent heard from me lately, and youre probably wondering, Whats Gus up to? Well, Ive been re-evaluating my feelings about porn and free speech (which I already had to do once this year when Hampshire College declared jihad on Jacob for drawing and posting this.) Ive also been dusting off what I know about workplace monitoring practices, and digging up some ideas about the Internet Ive been deliberately trying to forget since I decided my Div III was embarassing.
Why? I was accused the other day of downloading porn at work. I did not ever intentionally download porn at work. I did hit a site by accident; if you have ever used a search engine, youve probably done the same. It was one of those links whose content is not immediately obvious-- its URL didn't leap out and scream HOT BISEXUAL FORMER CHILD ACTORS CAUGHT IN COMPROMISING AUTO-EROTIC-ASPHYXIATION SCENARIOS WITH EXXXCEEDINGLY ATTRACTIVE ENDANGERED BOLIVIAN NARWHALS IN LEATHER TOURNIQUETS AND FARM MACHINERY AND STUFF!!!, or anything like that. I didnt even get enough of a look at it to see what the nature of the porn was. I hit the back button immediately.
But the computer does not care what your intentions were. Internet Explorer will eagerly direct any user to a location already visited. The network logs will record where you went without remembering that you also jumped reflexively, muttered shit!, and knocked over a glass of water in your haste to click on the back arrow.
I knew that my workplace monitored computer use. It was mentioned in the staff handbook and the contract I signed when I started work. Monitoring has been one of the biggest reasons I feel uncomfortable working there. I was tempted to make a fuss about it before I signed the contract, but seeing as I had just come out of a fracas with the government agency sponsoring my internship about signing an oath to uphold the Constitution (which in the end I realized I had no qualms with; its an oath to the government I wont take) and everyone was telling me I should pick my battles, I didnt say anything about it.
My decision to keep quiet came back to bite me in the ass. It seems another user accidentally loaded the link again (thanks to Explorers helpful tendency to recommend sites as you type in a URLMicrosoftware tattles like a nine-year-old teachers pet!), and told the boss-boss I had been accessing porn. The Techfuhrer was called to check the logs, and in doing so, he saw a pattern in other computers which had been used to access porn--all of them were machines I used occasionally, though none were logged into my account when the porn was accessed. This is why I got called the other day by the powers that be.
Over and over the boss-boss (you know, my bosss boss, il capo di tutti capi, I figure I should remain vague for reasons of covering my already-bitten ass) told me monitoring was inevitable. In our case, were responsible to the government and other bodies which give our organization funds, and we get audited for how our time is used.
Im sympathetic about that. I see what this auditing is all about: my co-workers have to keep multiple, time-consuming logs of their work, and they hate it. Weve even been asked at some point to get employees to pee in cups for drug tests; admirably, the boss-boss and her peers fended off this demand. I dont envy them for having to stand up to the people who ask us to do these demeaning things. At the same time, I know that the porn site I hit would have gone unnoticed if a co-worker hadnt complained, so Im not convinced that it would have registered on an audit, either.
Anywhere I went, the boss-boss continued, my employer was bound to be keeping network logs. Its just the way a network works, the boss-boss said, as if she was explaining Mr. Hoopers sudden disappearance from Sesame Street to a five-year-old. As in, Is will of God, girlchik; and God is so great.
Shes wrong, though I was too busy bowing and scraping to realize it at the time. If I recall correctly from my Div III, theres nothing inherent in a network that mandates that it keep track of users activities. Isnt that why Clifford Stoll is famous? Didnt people make a conscious decision to step up their monitoring efforts when his book The Cuckoos Egg caught the public eye? Or if not then, it was earlier. Someone had to write the software to keep track of network connections at some point.
The boss-boss seemed to have thought so little about how her computer use was watched that when I asked her if the company recorded keystrokes she had no idea what I was talking about. Labor scholars say computer monitoring is part of deprofessionalization, the breaking down of the walls between expectations of professionals and other less-well-paid/respected workers. I know the bosss flaming at me in this case was probably fueled by her frustration with this state of affairs.
We come to take things for granted. Labor historians remember that the decision to move to an assembly line system was taken deliberately in such a way as to disempower workers. Everyone else takes it as a necessary requirement of the machines involved. In truth, Im told, many factory machines could actually be run by a collective of people in such a way that everyone knew the whole of the process.
Why are you so concerned if you didnt do anything wrong? the boss-boss asked me repeatedly. It was an eerie echo of the question asked by the officers presiding over my arrest in DC. Why do you kids wear masks if you aint got nothing to hide? You got a warrant out on you someplace else? People wore masks for fear of tear gas, for fear of losing their jobs if they got seen on TV, for fear of later harrassment by police as they walked down the street. When I mentioned this to my mother, she reminded me that the same thing was asked of actors and musicians who refused to sign statements saying they were not Communists in the McCarthy era. Why? Are you now, or have you ever been.
I am concerned because with every recorded keystroke and each new security camera, I lose the freedom to whisper. That moment of class when the teacher looks away and I can pass a note to my friend never comes; the boss is always there when I want to talk about forming a union. I cant make the little mistakes which history washes away, and I cant plan to act against laws I think are wrong.
Anyway, saying things far briefer than this got me smacked for delivering the boss-boss a lecture on civil liberties If this is the way the working world is going to be, watch me run screaming back to academia. I didnt even mean to give her a lecture. I wanted to say my piece, and have her LISTEN, and say she at least sympathized with me and believed that Id unintentionally committed an error. I wanted a discussion! Dammit, in school if I was able to put together ideas like this the teachers cooed over what a great student I was. I dont understand this. Shutting up and sitting down is not what I was trained to do.
Theres a lot more I could say about thisanyone who Ive already told the whole story would probably agree that the sordid details of how my employers handled my transgression are much more entertaining and horrifying than all this hoo-hah. In general it boils down to this: I should be at a smaller organization, and I shouldnt be in this goddamned government program to begin with; its just not how I want to serve my country. Im sure theres legal ramifications to my posting any more on the subject, though, and so Im going to shut up and sit down now.
Posted by Gus at August 13, 2000 02:37 AM