Week 12 Reading Response: Gaslighting Your Boss - kalibirdsall/Creative-Coding-Class-Wiki GitHub Wiki

Gaslighting Your Boss: Creative Experiments in Digital Sabotage. By Sam Lavigne

I love the idea of sabotaging the capitalist system! I mean, isn't capitalism just a huge disappointment? I was listening to a podcast today about the first city ever constructed, the city of Uruk, which is 5,500 years old. It put into perspective for me that capitalism and labor abuses are the logical outgrowth of humans building cities and social hierarchies. The first individual people whose names were ever recorded lived in Uruk, and of the first 4 names recorded, 2 of them were slaves. Slavery is capitalism, labor abuse is capitalism. How do we reach a reasonable level of equality within capitalism without just becoming hunters and gathers again? Anyway, I love that someone is advocating for disrupting capitalism!

But back to the actual article...

It's interesting to think about workplace sabotage. I brings to mind a few actual cases I've seen happen in places I've worked. For example, a salesperson at the last place I worked messed with a bunch of the sales orders before he was forced out of his job. This sabotage was discovered 3-6 months later when our sales team realized that they had no idea what many of the orders were incorrect or completely missing. I could hardly blame this saboteur, honestly. This workplace was pretty toxic and there was no way to transform the environment. It's almost surprising more people didn't take this approach.

Digital self-sabotage seems less appealing to me. I do try to not be controlled by my devices, but purposely making my computer impossible to use doesn't seem like something I'm looking for. However, I really like that general concept and the way it draws our attention to how reliant we are on our digital devices, and how maybe we should step away from them a little more.