Companies with designs that resemble an amusement park more than a workplace, impressionable employees who have not reached the age of 30, and bosses with excessively motivational speeches, typical of the coaching. There are more and more testimonies in the form of books from former employees of large digital platforms that reveal how calls move internally. big tech. What they describe are corporations that are convinced that they make the world a better, more connected and informed place, but behind the scenes they apply questionable work ethics with their employees, the unauthorized use of personal data and even put the company at risk. health of its users. All to obtain the greatest possible benefit at the lowest cost in a fiercely competitive environment.
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Deserters of the digital dream, computer scientists and engineers, such as Frances Haugen, Kristi Coulter, Zach Vorhies, Brittany Kaiser or Dan Lyons, have published memoirs that question practices of Facebook, Amazon, Google, Cambridge Analytica and HubSpot, respectively. The most recent case is They have played it on youlaunched in Spain at the end of September by Alianza, by the British Adrian Hon, who denounces gamification (the use of game designs as rewards, achievements and “treasure chests” for purposes unrelated to these) for labor exploitation and addiction. “Many books have been written about Amazon from a journalistic perspective, but very few about what it feels like to be there. I wanted readers to feel like they were with me, experiencing Amazon directly,” says Coulter, author of the 2023 book Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career (Exit interview: life and death of my ambitious career, unpublished in Spanish).
From Accidental billionaires. The birth of Facebook (2010), texts that narrate the ins and outs of digital platforms became popular, although before they were journalistic investigations. “Currently, companies, under pressure from their shareholders and income statements, sometimes play with very serious things without much consideration, such as minors or mental health. This has motivated many executives with a ‘conscience’ to denounce [hasta en los tribunales, en algunos casos] activities in which they may even have had to participate,” explains Alberto Payo, a journalist in the technology sector for 15 years and co-founder of the specialized media Applicants
Adrian Hon, a video game developer, believes that it is important to reveal the mechanics of the industry because they do not always match the image that is projected. “I don’t think gamification is bad. There are examples that are good and fun, but I disagree with some claims made by companies that they can make you smarter, change the world and solve poverty. It seemed ridiculous to me and I feel like they are taking advantage of people who like video games,” he says over a video call. In They have played it on yousays that gamification is used so that the consumer spends as much time as possible using their products and thus increases profits. For years, video games have been discussing calls loot boxes, an internal purchase system with a growing presence in some titles that, in exchange for money, provides a random reward box: you may receive exactly the item you want, but much more likely it will not happen. The Alliance for Health in Gaming showed that one in 10 young players borrow money they cannot pay back to spend on chests and collectible cards, while one in four spend more than 100 euros over the course of a game.
The worst part, the book maintains, is that the concepts of achievements and rewards have been implemented in companies to get more out of their employees, such as Uber or Amazon. “In the Amazon warehouse, the faster you work, the more you can play a game that looks like a cross between Minecraft y Pokémon. You collect monster pets as you work. I saw a video where an employee said he wanted to quit his job, but he didn’t want to abandon his pets. It’s funny, but also a way to emotionally manipulate people through a game so that they stay working more,” says Hon.
Engineer Zach Vorhies believes Google is also trying to control its users through the information they search for. In 2021 he published, together with lawyer Kent Heckenlively, Google Leaks (without Spanish edition), an allegation against the alleged way in which the search engine hid or censored conservative politicians and speeches. In addition, he assures that content critical of immigration and climate change was removed from YouTube and other platforms associated with Larry Page and Sergei Brin’s company; and through the “Equity Automatic Learning” system, the results of media such as The New York Times y CNN.
Vulnerable users
Vorhies handed over nearly 950 pages of internal Google documents to the US Department of Justice. A small number compared to the 22,000 pages of information that data scientist Frances Haugen provided to Congress to denounce Facebook. Its creator, Mark Zuckerberg, had to testify in 2021 about the social network’s responsibility in spreading hoaxes that incited violence, causing massacres in Burma and Ethiopia. In the six months that followed, the company’s stock market value plummeted by 50%. He recounts all of this journey and his experience working for almost two years in the company’s Citizen Disinformation section in The truth about Facebook (Deusto, 2023).
“Facebook loves to remind us that the personalized world we saw in our News Feed was largely determined by our preferences and actions. The reality is that it is progressively filling your feed with content you never asked for to satisfy the insatiable need of its shareholders for ever greater profits,” Haugen writes in the book. The problem began when Facebook launched Free Basics in 2015, a plan to bring the internet to the least developed countries in the world: users could access the internet for free, but only to enter Facebook; for the rest of the open web, you had to pay. “They wanted a monopoly: to bring their own network to a level of penetration where no one could compete.”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, testifies in the United States Senate, in January 2024.Tom Williams (CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag)
The result was that the Government of Burma, in its campaign of ethnic cleansing against Muslims, created thousands of accounts and groups that spread false information to stoke hatred in the community. CNN later claimed that the campaign contributed to the massacre of 25,000 people. Facebook claimed that it did not have enough budget to verify information in countries that did not bring it as many monetary benefits. Haugen’s complaint is not the only one against Meta, Zuckerberg’s company that manages Facebook. In fact, it is the company that has received the most blows in this type of books, such as Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook catastrophe (2019), by Roger McNamee, or, more tangentially, The dictatorship of data (HarperCollins, 2019), de Brittany Kaiser.
Kaiser worked at Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis technology company, when the company’s misuse of personal information for profit was uncovered. Through a supposed personality survey, the software accessed the information posted on Facebook of millions of users, and then sold it to political campaigns such as Trump’s in 2016 or in favor of Brexit in 2019. What most scandalizes the authors of these books is the hypocrisy with which digital platforms They are presented to the world: Cambridge Analytica was announced as the transformer of segmentation based on a psychological profile; Meta as the internet provider for the entire world; Google as the universal information facilitator; and gamification as the method to make people feel more empowered and satisfied with the real world.
Fantasy of changing the world
“It’s pure Orwellian doublespeak,” writes Dan Lyons in Disruptionother memories about the experience in a big techin this case HubSpot, a developer of marketing and customer service tools. The author compares the company’s training with “the brainwashing that takes place in sects.” Plays the speech of one of the executives: “This software It doesn’t just help companies sell products. “We are changing people’s lives.” An ideology that is usually reinforced with the grandiose office designs. Lyons equates HubSpot’s to a Montessori preschool, with “lots of bright colors, toys, and a nap room with a hammock and some relaxing palm trees painted on the wall”; Haugen says Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park looks like a “gray megalith straight out of a science fiction movie,” and Google installed a full-scale model of the first private spacecraft to reach space.
“In true Silicon Valley style: what they believed was in the dream, not in reality. I think that at school they were marginalized in some way and that now, as adults, they are more powerful and want to prove that they are the boss. That they will not accept any type of criticism,” says Hon, who defines this type of discourse as techno-optimism or charismatic technology. Contrary to what one might think about these environments, where an optimistic psychology predominates, the treatment of employees can be degrading, with long work hours, pressure to achieve results and a prevailing machismo. The reflection of that reality is basically the basis of the book Exit Interview by Coulter.
prevailing machismo
“Work at Amazon is fast-paced, fascinating and intellectually stimulating. But it is also an environment where human needs for recognition, appreciation and rest do not matter. It is appreciated that you dedicate your entire being to the demands of the company, and that you are constantly aware that if you fall behind more than a step or two, you will be replaced like a disposable battery,” says Coulter. The writer also criticizes the lack of gender equality and assures that 75% of the managers at Amazon are men. Haugen makes a similar observation, stating that less than 13% of the technical staff at Google (where she worked before Facebook) were women, and that they sometimes looked at her as if they considered her “among the dishes on the daily menu.”
Amid so much criticism, the authors of these works still believe in the cause of technology to create a democratically connected and informed world. The barriers, in his vision, have been imposed by executives, with a culture based on metrics at all costs, without taking into account the ageism or exhaustion that workers may reach. They seek to plant a seed of awareness about how the corporations that rule the world work without having to wait for another defector to turn their disillusionment into a book.
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