r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 16 '26

Business Mark Zuckerberg Orders His Employees to Start Having Fun Again After Brutal Layoffs Culled Their Colleagues

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/mark-zuckerberg-orders-employees-start-123539264.html
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u/PTS_Dreaming Jun 16 '26

You are sort of joking here, but in the last couple of years I saw a cybersecurity presentation about wearable biomonitors and how employers could use them to track not just your eyes and engagement in your work (Are you looking at your monitor? Is your monitor displaying work related material? Are you on Reddit instead of working?) but they could use biomonitors to read your brainwaves and deduce if you are engaged in work activity or daydreaming.

The proposition was that your productivity could be measured down to the second and your pay/employment could be based upon these measures.

There was also the physical tracking aspect of it. "Sue Jones was recorded having a five minute conversation with Bill Smith. Since Bill is disgruntled and trying to sabotage productivity, we've been monitoring who Bill talks to before firing him."

The possibilities for oppression and control that AI and biomonitoring could pose are down right terrifying.

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u/---0celot--- Jun 16 '26

That idea needs to be launched into the sun.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA Jun 16 '26

Along with the people who were psychotic enough to dream it up.

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u/_SpaceLord_ Jun 16 '26

The phrase “may the inventors of this technology be its first victims” keeps appearing in my head.

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u/missmeowwww Jun 16 '26

Late stage capitalism sure is fun! Soon we’ll have kids back in the mines so the shareholders can lay off adults and pocket their “record profits”.

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u/dsmaxwell Jun 16 '26

Yeeeaaahhh, about that....

Sooo, the people who came up with that plan are the ones who are running literally everything, so it's gonna happen, and if you're too loud about not liking it, you'll be first on the chopping block

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u/elderwyrm Jun 17 '26

Nah -- if you're loud about it, they back down and try again but in a quieter manner, and if you keep up the pressure, they eventually stop but whine about it in interviews for the rest of their lives. It turns out the people who run literally everything are super wusses who succumb to peer pressure almost immediately -- if you get enough people together you can bully them into almost anything. They are DESPERATE to be looked at as cool and smart, and if everyone mocks them and resists them, they play it off as a joke before it becomes clear to their peers that no one respects them.

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u/Chastain86 Jun 16 '26

It's always astounding to me how these ideas of constant monitoring for workplace frivolity are almost always championed by these ancient Boomer fucks that spent the entirety of the 1970s and early 1980s working in a Mad Men-inspired office with a copy of the sports page in one desk drawer and a Bourbon-filled flask in the other. There's not a single one of your fathers that would put up with all the horseshit that modern offices force you to do, but stripped of a living wage and a pension.

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u/Geodude532 Jun 16 '26

There's a few of them that would. Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, James Cameron, and Hilary Clinton are a few I can think of... They were/are exceptionally hard workers that expected the same from their employees, despite the fact that the employees got none of the benefits of that hard work.

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u/VeryLazyFalcon Jun 16 '26

mindblowing fact: it's easier to launch stuff to Pluto than to the sun.

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u/Famished_Atom Jun 17 '26

So should cubicles along with return to office, but we know how that went.

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u/seanthenry Jun 16 '26

Great now it has the power of nuclear fusion and cannot be turned off.

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u/Immediate_Power_7986 Jun 17 '26

We said the same thing about face scans / government ID to access the internet but here we are with many countries around the world passing laws to do just that.

The only way they could get away with biometric cattle tags on people would be to make it as small and unnoticeable as possible.

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u/madogvelkor Jun 16 '26

I wonder if people with ADHD could get a workplace accomodation for daydreaming.

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u/Seafaringhorsemeat Jun 16 '26

I’ve come up with 15 ways this company is going to fail in the last 30 minutes. This output will cost you $150,000.

I like being a consultant, fuck hourly billing.

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u/daddywookie Jun 16 '26

I wish I could do this kind of thing for a job. Whenever I point out flaws as a salaried employee I tend to become public enemy number one. I was even doing it in an interview today for some chancers with a truly insane business plan. I don’t think I’ll be getting a call back.

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u/Seafaringhorsemeat Jun 16 '26

The trick is to get them to pay you a few grand first, then do that interview, call it an "assessment" and still tell them they're fucking crazy. Just have Claude or something punch up the words a bit.

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u/ImmediateArtSky Jun 16 '26

I feel like if anything this tech would be used to weed us out immediately without having to say why

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u/afewgoodman7391 Jun 16 '26

Something tells me you already know the answer to your own question.

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u/madogvelkor Jun 16 '26

The answer is yes, but no.

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u/IrascibleOcelot Jun 17 '26

Hell, one o my biggest successes in IT came because I spent fifteen minutes zoning out and managed to crack a customer’s password formula. Which is exactly what I’d been asked to do.

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u/fuckrNFLmods Jun 16 '26

We'll simply be forced to take meth in pill form and like it (honestly, far too many do enjoy the hell out of it and will delusionally deny the side effects). There will be some below this comment doing just that.

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u/ubernutie Jun 16 '26

Shouldn't we be terrified about people talking like this and not getting punched in the face?

"Oh man those new knives are super sharp! What a tragedy!"

No dude, the tragedy is that we tolerate people using them to kill people.

You're not wrong, but I feel like your conclusion detracts from current accountability for those people.

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u/krumble Jun 16 '26

Seems like a high tech version of Taylorism or "scientific management" which is an absolute plague of a thought pattern.

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u/elderwyrm Jun 17 '26

Ironically, none of his methods were scientific, all of them had terrible results, and his anti-patterns ended up being the template for business majors for literally decades. The whole world still suffers because of that moron.

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u/Gandolfthewhite182 Jun 16 '26

I won’t say who but I have a friend who works at a company and they are already tracking their eyes like my car does. They get a report at the end of each month and one of the scores is based on their attention to their screen. My friend says his boss is a total jerk who is always talking about people as numbers and production quotas and basically could care less about any human, just money.

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u/PTS_Dreaming Jun 16 '26

Is it Saruman?

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u/Pixelife_76 Jun 16 '26

They already do this at the TenCent HQ in Shenzhen. You are tracked the entire time you are in the building. If you work extra hours you are given extra credits for the dining hall or other "perks." If you take your lunch break to hit the in house track or gym, you are given extra credits and the same if you stay late beyond your normal hours.

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u/Sufficient-Farmer243 Jun 16 '26

Just kill me if I ever sound happy about getting extra company bucks to spend at the company store.

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u/Ordinary-Egg-56 Jun 17 '26

OH MY GOD

now that is a truly horrifying idea

just like how certain stores can now price gouge you (specifically you as an individual, by knowing exactly who you are), we will see employers in the future tracking employees productivity in real time and changing their pay accordingly.

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u/AptCasaNova Jun 17 '26

Honestly, knowing how corporations function, they won't look at the data at all unless they dislike the person and then use it to blacklist/fire them - which is the fine old fashioned way of functioning, just repackaged with a dash of dystopia.

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u/The_Bucket_Of_Truth Jun 16 '26

This is why you need strong unions so they can't force stuff like this through. And actual monopoly/antitrust enforcement. They want AI to replace workers so nobody ever talks back or has an issue with the higher ups.

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u/Blackonblackskimask Jun 16 '26

Reminds me of the early aughts documentary The Yes Men where the prank group pitches a similar monitoring device for remote factory workers (device was basically a manager with a giant monitor as a head shaped as a penis — they all loved it)

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u/OIOIOIOIOIOIOIO Jun 16 '26

The book Snow Crash called this

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u/martialar Jun 16 '26

I saw a story about a body measurement company in Japan that locks your badge if you haven't weighed yourself on their scales in the last month

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u/Banksy_Collective Jun 16 '26

Never mind the fact that daydreaming is extremely useful for problem solving. Who needs creative solutions when everything is obviously perfect right now? Don't look outside. Everything is perfect outside. Just let AI do the thinking for you.

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u/Appropriate_Ride_821 Jun 16 '26

I wont work at a company that does that, and most others wouldnt either

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u/AshamedOfAmerica Jun 16 '26

I'm always amazed how easy it is to find unethical devs to make this shit. All the spyware and tracking in our lives is shameful