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Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

theintercept.com

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Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#381

Post by banannaise »

adriand wrote: post #346
krageon wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is that people are not lazy or ethically incompetent, but rather just straight up evil. Is that a fair characterisation? If so, I don't find it compelling.

It’s not compelling and it’s not true. In fact most people are inherently good, and enjoy being generous and helpful. Let’s consider this within the context of tech workers specifically. The existence of an enormous open source software community and huge crowd-built resources like Stackoverflow are two examples that demonstrate the willingness of tech workers to contribute, free of charge, to each other and to the w…

One of the truly unfortunate things about modern capitalism is that making money and doing good for the world are more or less mutually exclusive. There's little money to be made helping people, and even when you find an exception, it often gets quickly overwhelmed by grift.

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#382

Post by banannaise »

cs702 wrote: post #368
uncomputation wrote: post #49

> The major goal of the program, Amazon’s head of worldwide consumer business, Dave Clark, said, was to reduce employee attrition by fostering happiness among workers — and also productivity. Shout-Outs would be part of a gamified rewards system in which employees are awarded virtual stars and badges for activities that “add direct business value,” documents state. At the meeting, Clark remarked that “some people are…

Yes, that was my reaction too. But what shocks me most is what this implies about the (many?) managers at Amazon who are responsible for it. They must be either: (a) under so much pressure that they decided to go ahead with it despite being aware of the horrifying similarities their New Approved Language has with Newspeak, the centrally controlled language that prohibits the use of certain words in Orwell's classic n…

In my experience with managers of all sorts, (a) is incredibly common. Low-level managers everywhere are under a ton of pressure, and are often stuck in a position where they know the measures they are implementing hurt the people who report to them, but they've been railroaded into it and don't see any realistic alternative.

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#384

Post by toyg »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #377
toyg wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, Arendt was a journalist so her work starts from an event. Not every Nazi member was trialled, Eichmann wad just one of the high-profile ones. The point is that from the particular situation we get a more generalised theory of the development of "evil" at the mass level, that works better than "people just like to abuse others, because the devil or something".

The problem really comes down to this: is Nazism something which we are all capable of quickly becoming, i.e. inherent to human nature, or do we only become this horrible when small groups of intelligent elites cynically exploit our psychology and concretely plan for us to become brainwashed slaves (the opposite of banality)? Perhaps a bit of both, but at some point someone definitely isn't a banal and clueless burea…

The point is that in most cases you don't need any major social-engineering. The elements of efficiency and obedience to the hierarchy are already there, built-in in most orderly societies. You just need to veer the actual aims a little bit, and you are effectively in a regime not very different from the nazi one.

That's why seemingly democratic societies can turn into regimes almost overnight.

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#385

Post by bigDinosaur »

toyg wrote: post #384
bigDinosaur wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem really comes down to this: is Nazism something which we are all capable of quickly becoming, i.e. inherent to human nature, or do we only become this horrible when small groups of intelligent elites cynically exploit our psychology and concretely plan for us to become brainwashed slaves (the opposite of banality)? Perhaps a bit of both, but at some point someone definitely isn't a banal and clueless burea…

The point is that in most cases you don't need any major social-engineering. The elements of efficiency and obedience to the hierarchy are already there, built-in in most orderly societies. You just need to veer the actual aims a little bit, and you are effectively in a regime not very different from the nazi one. That's why seemingly democratic societies can turn into regimes almost overnight.

This is discounting all the times people fight back against fascism though. Lots and lots of people absolutely do not accept some natural link between orderly conduct and fascism, and so that goes back to my original point about Eichmann making Nazism seem banal as a goal for the Nazi ideology - if we're basically one step away from becoming Nazis at any point, is what they did really so bad?

Well, yes it was, because it was engineered. The Nazis never won a majority in any election, but once they were in power they were famous for their social engineering and propaganda. They're a classic example of how a minority of people in a population can absolutely gain control over everyone else and bend the majority to their will using highly cynical but intelligent tactics.

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#386

Post by andrekandre »

grapeskin wrote: post #277
throw93232 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is really dystopian stuff. Instead of electing goverment that would split monopoly, we will blame low level employees for not "resisting". Be quiet and toe the party line!!

In a government elected by the people, the people can't absolve themselves of guilt when they're willingly voting for corrupt officials. In governments without elected representatives, the responsibility lies entirely with the people enforcing the oppression against those weaker than them and protecting those above. So yeah. People happily enforcing a massive wealth divide are responsible. They just don't want to acc…

  > In a government elected by the people, the people can't absolve themselves of guilt when they're willingly voting for corrupt officials.
it can be said, that increasingly its representatives that are choosing (gerrymandering) thier constituents instead of the other way around, and many districts are not competitive at all (e.g no alternative candidates)

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#387

Post by hoseja »

heavyset_go wrote: post #292
krageon wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is that people are not lazy or ethically incompetent, but rather just straight up evil. Is that a fair characterisation? If so, I don't find it compelling.

This is Hannah Arendt's thesis behind "the banality of evil"[1]: > Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case. Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a…

It's the meme that is evil. Human is merely the host and, depending on the sophistication of the meme and lack thereof of the human, perhaps very unwitting.

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#388

Post by avidphantasm »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #151
avidphantasm wrote: post #104

When I was in grad school my advisor was in China for a few months. Any emails where air quality was discussed seemed to end up black-holed. Similar messages using pig latin versions of the same phrases seemed to make it through just fine.

Somewhat unsurprising - more interestingly, was it individual words or combinations of phrases that caught the filter? Also amusing that somewhat simple ciphers still easily defeat the Great Firewall (would ROT13 have also worked?)

It's been about 10 years, but I think simple obvious words like "pollution" or "air quality" were problems. In addition to using pig latin, I imagine you could also use oblique or florid prose to get by the filters, but that takes more time.

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#389

Post by colanderman »

kennywinker wrote: post #301
sokoloff wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. Preventing a coworker from calling another a “slut”, “motherfucker”, “fag”, or “n####r” seems like a pretty reasonable feature for a workplace chat system. Lacking such a system might even constitute creating or contributing to a hostile workplace environment. What’s the level of dev who should show allegiance to fellow coworkers by refusing to implement that? Then some non-dev employee realizes you can block the…

And then some dev can accidentally roll back the changes as part of a bug fix. Actually we’re having problems with the whole filtering system, it turns out it relies on a library that has some security vulnerabilities and it’s no longer operational. Or if you must, wait until it breaks on its own, and then refuse to fix it. “Suppressing labour organizing isn’t part of my job description” I.e. Grow a spine and stand u…

Why assume this list is hardcoded? It's possible/likely it's controlled by an API (ultimately through a web frontend) and stored on a machine devs don't even have permission to access... that's pretty par for the course for Amazon. The person who coded that functionality, and the person who has credentials to edit the list are likely not one in the same.

(The exception would be, when the person who coded the API goes on-call. Still there's lots of checks and balances there and any such change would be quickly undone.)

Re: Amazon worker chat app to ban words such as “union”, “pay raise”, “slave labor”

#390

Post by portpecos »

grapeskin wrote: post #157
uncomputation wrote: post #49

> The major goal of the program, Amazon’s head of worldwide consumer business, Dave Clark, said, was to reduce employee attrition by fostering happiness among workers — and also productivity. Shout-Outs would be part of a gamified rewards system in which employees are awarded virtual stars and badges for activities that “add direct business value,” documents state. At the meeting, Clark remarked that “some people are…

The scariest thing isn't that Amazon is a company worth nearly trillions and using that money to oppress workers to maintain their lead. It's that tech workers are happily applying to get a decent paycheck and crushing people under them, just to protect the company's billions. Then they'll post online about how happy they are to have been smart enough to save up to buy a lakefront home and retire at 45, and say peopl…

> The lame social media posts from fellow tech workers about how things "should" be regulated gets tiresome. The real solution is to simply not work for them.

Just like Twitter can ban Donald Trump for using certain phrases (Steal, Election), so can Amazon ban certain words. They’re both private corporate entities.

Exactly as you said, if you don’t like it, move elsewhere.

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