Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Virtual prisons

During a lull in the Olympic Games TV coverage, I switched over to the 
ABC. (There were too many lulls in Channel Seven's coverage, which was 
determinedly repititious, even though it left out many events and 
sports.)

It was a Wednesday, so the ABC, undeterred by competition from the 
Olympics, was running its regular feature, Press Club. On this 
occasion, the guest speaker was Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, one 
of Bill Gates' competitors.

Not as rich as Gates, by any means, but still comfortably off, McNealy was 
relaxed, confident and friendly. He joked with the media types he 
was addressing. With a merry quip he poured scorn on people's concerns 
about information technology and invasion of privacy.

"If you get hit by a bus, you want people to be able to access your 
medical records", he observed. Doesn't mean we want employers and insurance 
companies to have that access.

But it seems we worry unnecessarily about our privacy in the computer age:

"You have none", said the lovable McNealy. And gave an impish grin. Anyway, 
he went on (turning serious in the process), if you lived in a democracy 
with a government that you elected every few years then you really had 
nothing to worry about, for if such a government abused its access to 
computerised data, why, you would simply change the government.

Apparently, government agencies (including covert ones), corporations and 
extreme right organisations in the USA don't pose a threat to ordinary 
people's privacy (spilling over into their civil and democratic rights) 
because the USA's a democracy.

Touching, isn't it, the way some people retain a belief in the tooth fairy 
well into adulthood?

Scott McNealy did have some interesting things to say about the direction 
of the personal computer business. As I understood the vision he was 
dangling before his audience, computer outfits like Sun are working to 
develop a system that would enable you to sit down at any computer, 
anywhere, and by keying in your particular ID open up your own work at 
whatever point you had left it the last time you were using a computer.

To achieve this sort of versatility, your files would have to held not on 
your own computer's hard disc but presumably on some commercial adaptation 
of the Internet. No wonder he didn't want us to worry too much about such 
matters as our privacy.

But McNealy's vision extended even further. Computers would liberate people 
from having to work in actual offices, he trumpeted proudly. Corporations 
would be freed from the necessity to tie up capital in office space he 
pointed out with fervour.

He described his concept of the "office" of the future: a lap-top computer, 
a modem and a mobile phone in a sporty four-wheel-drive, parked by a lake 
somewhere.

Didn't it sound just scrumptious? Employers and employees would all come 
out winners in this scenario.

He didn't say whether the corporation would provide the 4WD, since they no 
longer had to provide the office, or whether the grateful employee would be 
expected to provide it himself or herself (but I can guess).

Silicon Valley, however, is a poor base from which to plan the format of 
future work places. Most employees in the tech industry are already housed 
in pokey little cubicles rather than offices.

Scott Adams' widely syndicated comic strip Dilbert, set in a hi-tech 
corporation and based on Adams' own time working at Pacific Bell, had 
Dilbert's boss announce in one strip that since downsizing had left the 
company with a surplus of empty cubicles, they had decided to convert them 
to prison cells which they would lease to the state.

It indicated what Adams and his co-workers thought of their 
cubicles.

McNealy's concept of people who work in offices is one alienated from life: 
they work in isolation, conferring with their fellow workers only when they 
assemble together for formal meetings. He allows for no informal gathering 
together in the course of work (it probably develops bolshie ideas).

As for the idyllic scene of the 4WD parked by the lake with the workers 
sitting in the back in special armchairs with their super lap-top, forget 
it.

For most people, working on the end of a phone rather than in the office 
would merely mean working from home: in other words, providing your own 
office.

Yes, I can write Culture and Life sitting on the verandah or down by 
the dam under the gum trees. But I cannot afford a 4WD, and I still need 
reference books which are going to be in my office not my 4WD.

McNealy's vision will be a boon to corporations, who can divest themselves 
of the responsibility to provide a place of work for their professional and 
technical staff (and probably their clerical staff — several years ago I 
came upon a company in Sydney whose clerical work was all done by workers 
sitting at computers in Singapore).

They will no doubt attempt to sell this, not as shifting the burden of 
providing a workplace onto the shoulders of the worker, but as something 
that "frees" the worker to choose his or her own working environment.

No doubt the TV commercial will feature a "liberated" worker with a lap-top 
in a 4WD parked by a lake.

Employers are interested in screwing the maximum surplus value from each 
and every employee. They have no interest in making workers' lives more 
enjoyable or comfortable or stimulating.

The development of new generation computers, as McNealy predicts, will see 
the practice of getting employees to "work from home" increase.

It saves the boss a lot of money which does not get passed on to the 
worker. It also keeps employees isolated from one another, and that's 
another benefit for the boss.

McNealy, meanwhile, will probably be parked in his 4WD by a lake, counting 
his money.