Detroit Tigers vs Texas Rangers.

I'll be following a baseball game tonight, weather permitting, of course, that has my Texas Rangers playing the Detroit Tigers. With a scheduled start time of 5:40 PM CDT, I'll have MLB's Gameday Screen activated on a laptop to keep the score and stats updated in real time, and will listen to the radio call of the game from 105.3 The Fan, DFW Sports Radio.

And the adventure continues.

You don’t code anymore as a software engineer; you only prompt. For years, knowledge of a particular programming language ecosystem was a core distinction for developers, but almost overnight, it no longer matters. It still helps to be able to quickly read and understand code. Also, software engineering is much more than coding, but the job has changed a lot.

Does the role of a writer change in the same way, prompting AI instead of writing the words yourself? Writers are obviously pushing back against that. I‘m a bit unsettled reading through a thread like this one on Substack Notes. We do use AI for glamglare, so will our posts be marked as „AI-assisted“ and filed under „slop“?

It is convenient to buy into the thought that by not using AI, your work automatically becomes better and that you come down on the right side of culture. AI won‘t go away; just look at the companies that embrace it wholeheartedly.

Is it true that AI can flatten language and „steal“ your voice? We see that every day when working on copy for glamglare. But you don‘t have to accept what AI gives you. You can push back, ask for changes, or simply ignore it. And unlike a human editor, it is never offended.

A study on how writing on the internet is changing due to AI found that of six assumptions, only two could be confirmed: language becomes less diverse, and the general tone becomes more positive. I think we can live with that. 

BTW, this post, like all posts here, is entirely written by me and only slightly revised for grammar with Grammarly.

On croit souvent que la vie est devant soi.

Même à quarante ans, même à cinquante ans, même quand le corps commence déjà à nous parler autrement, une partie de nous continue d’imaginer l’avenir comme une grande étendue. Ce qui vient paraît immense. Ce qui est passé semble appartenir à un autre homme, à une autre femme, à une version ancienne de nous-mêmes.

On se dit souvent qu’il reste le temps. Le temps de comprendre. Le temps de réparer. Le temps d’aimer mieux. Le temps de faire ce que l’on remet depuis des années.

Puis un jour, sans drame particulier, on compte autrement.

On ne voit plus dix ans comme une simple tranche de temps. On les voit comme une part du tout. Dix ans, ce n’est pas rien. Dix ans, c’est plus qu’une décennie. C’est parfois plus de dix pour cent d’une vie. C’est un enfant qui devient adolescent. C’est un visage qui change. C’est une maison qui se remplit ou qui se vide. C’est un amour qui prend racine ou qui s’éteint doucement. C’est une blessure qui peut devenir une prison, ou une porte.

Quand on pense ainsi, les choses prennent leur vraie taille. On comprend que le temps n’est pas une matière vague dans laquelle on pourra toujours revenir puiser. Il n’est pas une réserve infinie. Il est ce compte discret qui avance avec nous, même quand nous faisons semblant de ne pas le voir. Chaque année déposée derrière soi ne reviendra pas sous une autre forme. Elle a été vécue, ou perdue, ou traversée à moitié. Elle a appartenu à quelqu’un. À nous.

Alors la vraie question n’est plus seulement : qu’est-ce que je veux faire dans les dix prochaines années ?

La question devient plus intime.

Qu’est-ce que je veux faire des vingt prochains pour cent de ma vie, si la vie me les donne ?

Qu’est-ce que je veux faire des trente prochains pour cent ?

Et si j’ai encore la chance d’avoir cinquante pour cent devant moi, à quoi est-ce que je veux les consacrer ?

Cette façon de voir change le goût des choses. On devient moins impressionné par le bruit. Moins disponible pour les disputes qui tournent en rond. Moins fidèle aux anciennes colères. On cesse peu à peu de croire que souffrir longtemps donne forcément raison. On regarde certaines ambitions et l’on se demande si elles sont vraiment les nôtres. On regarde certaines relations et l’on sent, sans accusation, qu’elles coûtent plus de vie qu’elles n’en nourrissent.

Avec les années, j’ai appris que la paix ne ressemble pas à une victoire. Elle ne fait pas beaucoup de bruit. Elle ne demande pas qu’on efface ce qui a été difficile. Elle demande seulement que le passé reprenne sa place. Une place réelle, mais pas toute la place.

On peut avoir porté des choses lourdes et ne plus vouloir vivre courbé. On peut avoir été blessé sans faire de sa blessure une identité. On peut avoir manqué d’amour, de sécurité, de clarté, et choisir pourtant de ne pas transmettre ce manque comme un héritage. Il arrive un moment où l’on ne veut plus seulement survivre à son histoire. On veut habiter ce qui reste avec plus de justesse.

Et ce qui reste mérite mieux que l’automatisme.

Il mérite des matins choisis. Des paroles plus propres. Des amours moins négligés. Des silences moins fuyants. Des gestes qui ont du poids. Il mérite que l’on cesse de remettre sa vraie vie dans un futur vague, comme si ce futur nous devait quelque chose.

La vie ne nous doit pas du temps. Elle nous en donne. Puis elle le reprend.

Ce n’est pas une pensée sombre. C’est une pensée qui redresse. Elle remet de la dignité dans les jours ordinaires. Elle rappelle qu’une année n’est pas petite. Qu’un mois peut changer une trajectoire. Qu’une conversation peut sauver une relation. Qu’un choix répété peut devenir une vie entière.

Il ne reste jamais “simplement du temps”.

Il reste une part du tout.

Et cette part, justement parce qu’elle est limitée, peut devenir précieuse.

Desde que comencé a llevar mi agenda, me he dado cuenta de lo insignificante que soy.

No digo que no haya algún asunto importante en momentos puntuales, pero esto depende de lo que uno quiera llamar importante.

El jueves pasado, por ejemplo, el director de personal subió a mi despacho para mostrarme el organigrama de su departamento. Si yo puedo bajar al piso tres y ver las cosas con mis ojos, no sé qué sentido tiene. Pero esto se entiende aquí como una reunión importante, quizás porque los directores nos sentimos así.

Otra reunión importante es la de la gotera. En el departamento de archivos la directora me mostró una gran gotera que sale del techo, justo donde está el piso de mi baño.

Mantenimiento no tiene presupuesto para esta reforma y trasladar una partida asignada a otro fin podría ser delito, según nos dijo el contable.

Cuando tocamos el tema en la reunión semanal con el ministro, este me miró y me dijo:

-Resuélvelo Jaime, tú sabes más que yo de estas cosas.

Y en eso estoy.

Leise knirschen Muscheln

unter dem Fuß.

Wellen rollen sanft ans Ufer.

Ein Rauschen, das

hinein nimmt,

da sein lässt,

in der Natur.

Seevögel,

die auf und ab hüpfen,

auf den Wogen.

Nass glänzende Steine,

schwarz und weiß,

eingegraben im weissen Sand.

Zwei rote Rosen,

verschlungen in Seegras,

das sich wie ein Herz darum windet.

Meerspaziergang

Sonnenaufgang. Der Steg ragt ins Morgenlicht. Die See schimmert bläulich.

Zwischen den großen Ufersteinen liegt ein Rettungsring.

Gehen. Weitergehen.

Hier ist der Strand. Der Fuß tritt zwischen den verschütteten Felssteinen in den Sand. Der Boden wird fester. Ein Saum aus Steinen, Muscheln, Rotalgen und Seegras bildet die Wasserkante.

Die weiss-schwarzen Steine fallen ins Auge.

Die Sonne fällt über das Wasser und leuchtet bis zum Strand. Möwen tänzeln ins Wasser, schwimmen. Die Promenade ist hier weit entfernt. Hier ist eine andere Stimmung, hier am Strand, gleich am Wasser.

Da hinten stehen Strandkörbe. Dort beim Badesteg. Hier lagen die beiden roten Rosen eingewunden in Seegras. Sandig und doch vom Wasser leuchtend schön. Frisch.

Rückweg. Die Perspektive ändert sich. Die Seebrücke. Die Sonne. Jogger. Radfahrer.

Eine Lehmfläche mit Fußabdrücken. Spuren. So wie die Möwen, deren Zehen feine Abdrücke im Sand hinterlassen, bis die Wellen sie wieder überspülen.

Gelesen. Gesehen. Gehört.

#gelesen

Virginia Woolf: Die Wellen, 1931 3 Männer und 3 Frauen, ein Freundeskreis, reflektieren in inneren Dialogen über ihr Leben, gerahmt von Sonnenauf- und Untergängen am Meer.

#gesehen

Was wäre, wenn das Leben anders verlaufen wäre? Der französisch-belgische Spielfilm aus dem Jahr 2019 „Meine geliebte Unbekannte“ handelt von den Protagonisten, die sich nach zehn Jahren plötzlich in einer Parallelwelt wiederfinden.

#gehört

Und vor uns (k) ein neuer Morgen von Svenja Lassen, 2024 Ein Roadtrip mit einem Camper entlang der Nord- und Ostseeküste durch den Norden Deutschlands, Dänemark und Schweden. Es geht um Trauer, Liebe und die Erkenntnis, dass die Sonne jeden Tag aufs Neue aufgeht.

Today I went for a big PR, and completely miss grooved and the weight just slammed into my chest lol. But I also did make a lot of new friends today, I even got someone’s Instagram who said that we would work out sometime. I talked with some people that recognized me later and smiled and said bye while they were leaving. And I can’t you like everything is OK again. Yes I don’t have a huge network of friends that I feel are ride or die and that I can invite to anything, but I do have friends, and I also feel like I am at a social capacity where I feel fulfilled. And I also feel happy in life right now which I’m really grateful for.

It’s the first of May, the sun is shining and there’s some brilliant racing on offer today from Ascot, Newmarket and Goodwood. And if all that doesn’t get you all excited for the next 4 months or so of flat action, you may as well give up.

With all that said, there’s just the one bet for me on here, and it’s in the 4.20 at Ascot.

4.20 Ascot Top weights win flat handicaps more than their rivals and think ALL WAYS GLAMOROUS – top weight here – has a good chance in this. He has finished 2nd in his last 3 turf outings, all of them better races than this. Subsequently he is now off a career high mark but the return to good to firm ground (2112 in handicaps) can eek out some more improvement for this 5yo who can go well fresh (2nd on reapperance last term) for Gina Mangan who is 9/2/7p on him. Should be definitely in the shake-up from a decent draw.

ALL WAYS GLAMOROUS // 0.5pt E/W @ 10/1 BOG (Bet365) 5 places

WaternITis

Een verse kwaal is per ongeluk ontdekt door medische onderzoekers van het De Universele Medische Fabriek Smægmå. Onderzoek leider Jan Heelwat Opdelever oog viel tijdens het testen van randapparatuur nodig voor het meten van waarden op opvallende bijvangst. Hij zag tijdens de immer dralende en falende metingen voortdurend dezelfde onnodige resultaten opdoemen. Hij adviseerde het team om te blijven sleutelen aan de meetapparatuur voor de waarheid zodat eens op een mooie dag deze zijn gelijk op een beeldscherm kon vertonen, liefst in een taart diagram of desnoods een opgaande curve. Ondanks alle inspanningen, door blinde ambitie gedreven handelingen en zo goed als eindeloze investeringen rondom de noodzaak voor dergelijke apparaten slaagden ze er enkel in om steeds meer ongevraagde resultaten te behalen.

Na lang wikken en nog langer wegen ontstond er een verklaring voor deze duidelijke feiten, het nodige resultaat was significant afwezig maar daarom des te belangrijker. Verder onderzoek was nodig met betrekking op dit gebrek aan beloning van de goede wil, er moet iets mis zijn met de hedendaagse mensheid als zoveel energie, arbeid, kantoor en laboratorium werkzaamheden, geldstromen, papierwerk en nog veel meer activiteiten zinloos en roemloos verdwijnen. Het was aan Jan en zijn compagnie kornuiten om deze opgemerkte leegte te labelen zodat ze er daarna weer echt werk van konden maken. Na vijf jaar en 7 maanden dag in dag uit bezig met meten van alles wat we even moeten willen weten ontdekten ze dan eindelijk dat ene ontbrekende stukje. Het deeltje dat er altijd voor zorgt dat langdurig en kortstondig onderzoek nooit zorgt voor een definitieve oplossing van het eerder gespotte probleem maar alleen zorgt voor keiharde hoofdbrekens, ijskoud zweet, na en daar weer na ijver en lange neerslachtige perioden in de nabijheid van harde schijven, beeldschermen en stapels papier.

Dit deeltje noemden ze WaternITis. Het is er ook al zie je het niet, voor eeuwig latent in elk wezen, belangrijk onderdeel van het gebeurde maar werd des ondanks nooit door belangrijke personen daarvoor ingehuurd opgemerkt, de ongehoorde oorzaak van het gevolg van een reeks aan effecten, de waternITis dus. De bazen van Het Almachtig Universele Kennis Instituut, de geldschieters en bijbehorende overheden, werden door Jan en zijn assistent Deelnemer Met de Pet tijdens een pers en overige belanghebbenden conferentie in het geheim op de hoogte gebracht van dit grote nieuws.

Dit leverde eerst de nodige consternatie op en zorgde daarna voor ophef in de gelederen. Na lang vergaderen, overleggen, informatie uitwisselen, diverse besprekingen, flink aantal symposia voor een geselecteerd gezelschap en heel veel man uren kwam men tot een oordeel over WaternITis. Het moest worden beschouwd als een ziekte waaraan mensen konden lijden en dus aan gaan lijden of beter uitgedrukt al onder lijden. De kennis deskundigen overal op aard, maar vooral in Smægmå moesten vanaf heden op zoek gaan naar WaternITis, anderen er over ondervragen, ze waar maar mogelijk onderzoeken en eenmaal een geval lijdend er aan ontdekt deze isoleren en behandelen tot het over is, of in ieder geval opvallend verbeterd, de verbetering zichtbaar in uitdraaibare statistieken.

Het onderzoek aangaande WaternITis heeft inmiddels gezorgd dat de symptomen ervan op papier staan zodat iedereen, de ware kenners en iedereen in bezit van een medium voor ontvangen en versturen van berichten, boodschappen en dergelijke weet heeft van deze symptomen en gelijk kan ingrijpen, een noodzakelijke interventie eisen, zichzelf kan overleveren aan het instituut voor persoonlijke verbetering. Elk mens heeft namelijk recht op bestrijding van waternITis zodat ze gezond en wel door kunnen gaan met wat er wel is.

De hoofd symptomen zijn;

Gedwongen Studio Opnamen

Produceren van Artikelen

Veeleisend Gedrag

Angst en Bevelen

Zinloze Schrijvers

Waardeloze Waarden

Eindeloze (her)organisatie van Afstandelijkheden rondom Afhankelijkheden

Vormen van Ongestructureerd Handelen

Onmiskenbare Gevoelens ten opzichte van Anderen

Onverdraagzaamheid aangaande zaken van groot gewicht

Iedere dag alle uren van de dag online zetten van bewegende beelden, teksten, liedteksten, vele versies van mogelijke informatie en een grote woeste stream van koopwaar.

Zitten op een eenvoudige zetel of op een bank

Geld overal in beleggen als ook dat willen laten doen

De hele lijst symptomen plus bijwerkingen kunt u vinden op de site waternitis.org

Kent u na het lezen van deze lijst mensen waarvan u denkt dat deze lijden aan deze kwaal of denkt u na het lezen en herlezen van deze lijst dat u zelf last heeft raadpleeg dan zo spoedig mogelijk een deskundige, u kunt deskundigen altijd vinden in het dichtst bijzijnde zorgcentrum of als u zich te erg schaamt kunt u zich anoniem aanmelden bij de AW anonieme waternitisten, indien nodig voor onze 13,4 stappen behandeling ter verandering van u zelve en de bij u ontstane WaternITis problematiek.

Wij danken u voor u wil om deze verse kennis al lezend tot u te nemen, geniet er van en hopelijk tot later in de kliniek.

Dit artikel kwam tot stand dankzij VVA medisch, VVA Pharmania, VVA human investments co. en VVA LLC

Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms: The Northern Marches by Robert Conley, the spiritual successor to the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, is now available from DriveThruRPG.

It is a sandbox fantasy setting perfect for hexcrawl games, with numerous settlements, factions, bespoke encounter tables, and plenty of space to insert own adventures, locales, and flair.

Rob went to great lengths to support busy Judges:

• guidebook to the Northern Marches (not just PDF, but also in markdown format for those who want to adapt the setting for their specific world)
• reference PDFs for encounters, travelling, merchant adventures, and rumours
• 4 campaign maps for the Judges
• 4 campaign maps for the Players
• combined campaign maps for the Judges
• combined campaign maps for the Players
• maps available as layered PDF and SVG for those who wish to tweak and customise them
• 5 town maps for Judges
• 5 town maps for Players
• custom heraldry (for 41 factions!)

And all of that released under Creative Commons.

See below to get a feeling for the material:

Northern Marches Player map

Guidebook table of contents

Realms and heraldry

Castle Westguard Judge map

Hex entries in the Wild North

Random encounters in the Northern Marches

Important notice: while both book and associated maps are available as POD from DriveThruRPG, the latter are usually too expensive for non-USA customers. That is because DTRPG prints maps in the USA, which results with high shipping and taxes, for a high final price despite low per-unit cost. Rob has made the print-ready map files available so everyone can take them to their local print shop and get the maps done in any size they want for a low price.

#News #OSR #MFRPG

Todos los días algo desaparece sin que nadie lo extrañe. Una flor, un juguete, un ejemplo.

This month I've revised the overall structure of the game and come up with something I'm happy with, but I haven't had a lot of time to work it so I haven't getten back to the writing yet. But the project was actually in a good place for me to step back and let it “lie fallow” for a little while, so taking a break at this point will hopefully help me overall.

But that means I don't have anything to show in this diary, so instead here is a fluffy listicle of some of my favourite space villains who inspired the game, and my personal crazy fan theories about each of them. (These are in chronological order of first appearance.)

Ming the Merciless

First appearance: Flash Gordon Sunday newspaper strip, 1934.

Ming is a cruel and scheming politician who gained usurped the rightful emperor of Mongo and who now rules the planet with an iron fist.

Ming started out as a “yellow peril” stereotype with his fu manchu mustache and orientalist palaces, but this aspect of his character was downplayed almost immediately. As Alex Raymond's art style evolved, Ming's skin changed from bright yellow to a more natural colour, and as the strip moved into the late 30s Ming and his minions looked and acted less like orientalist fantasy villains and more like real-life Nazis.

(When Raymond eventually left the Flash Gordon strip in 1944 it was to enlist in the U.S. Marines, which he insisted on doing despite having already done enough military service to be exempt from the draft.)

Interestingly, the idea of Ming wanting to conquer the Earth is actually not in the original comics, but first appears in the 1936 movie serial. Ming's goals in the early comics are to forcibly marry Dale Arden and to retain control of his empire in the face of rebellious vassals and a population that hates him. Later versions of Flash Gordon have given Ming more far-reaching ambitions, and have tended to downplay his orientalist origins even further by e.g. making him a grey-skinned alien.

My fan theory: Ming wants to marry Dale Arden not because he lusts after her (although he does), but because she exists outside the Mongothic social structure and thus solves a political problem. If he marries a noble it'll affect the balance of power between his vassals, and if he marries a commoner he'll lose everyone's respect, but Dale is from another planet, so he can present her as some kind of exotic alien princess. This is also why (in the original 1930s comic) he loses interest in Dale once Princess Aura has given him a grandson, instead shifting his focus to kidnapping the baby in order to raise him as his ideal heir.

The Mekon

First appearance: Eagle comic, 1950.

The first Dan Dare story introduces the Treens, reptilian aliens who have done away with emotions and devote themselves to remorseless scientific logic. Whereas Flash met Ming almost immediately, it is several months before Dan meets the Mekon, a diminutive creature with a swollen head and atrophied body, whom the Treens had specifically engineered to be their super-intelligent ruler.

Unlike Ming and his quarrelling vassals, the Mekon has absolute authority over his Treens—at least until the end of the first story, when he is deposed and flees into space. After that he pops up in roughly every second story, with a small band of fanatically loyal Treens and a new plan to conquer the Earth.

(Once the Mekon is removed, most of the Treens seem content to return to their ordered, scientific lives and live in peace with Earth people. I like to imagine Treen science lab directors being quietly relieved to be able to focus on their obscure research areas now that this disruptive business of conquering the universe is out of the way.)

The Mekon remains mostly unchanged across all the later versions of Dan Dare, although the 2007 Garth Ennis/Gary Erskine version does redesign his flying chair to finally give it a back rest. Possibly if his chair had been more ergonomically designed from the start, he wouldn't have been so unpleasant.

My fan theory: We know that the Mekon is the last in a long line of similar Mekons, so why does this Mekon have designs on conquering the universe when previous ones seemed content to keep Treen society running? Perhaps this Mekon is defective somehow, dominated by unusually powerful emotions that he can't admit to himself and doesn't have the ability to process. Perhaps a “normal” Mekon would look at him in disgust...and perhaps, deep down, he knows that...

Davros

First appearance: Doctor Who, “Genesis of the Daleks”, 1975.

Doctor Who has lots of great villains, but the one that's most relevant to this list is Davros, creator of the Daleks.

Like the Mekon (who partially inspired him), Davros is super-intelligent but physically frail, and is confined to a mobile life support unit. That life support module was also the design basis of the Daleks, whom he intended to be the ultimate life-form according to his genocidal ideology—so he resembles an intermediate step between Daleks and ordinary humanoids.

Davros is an unusual villain in that he's super-intelligent but still treats the hero as an intellectual equal, or at least close enough to one to engage them in philosophical conversations. (Ming and the Mekon might monologue at their respective heroes, but there's never a chance that they'll listen to what the hero says and change their mind.) “Genesis of the Daleks” is in part a sort of intellectual duel between the hero and villain, one in which the villain listens to what the hero says, is confronted with the philosophical ramifications of their plans, realises that they're utterly evil—and decides to do it anyway.

My fan theory: Even when Davros is seemingly in charge of things, he only exists because the Daleks keep resurrecting him and keeping him alive—and they only do that because they need his non-Dalek intelligence to deal with some problem—which is usually the Doctor—so in a sense Davros only continues to exist because the Doctor does. (Actually I'm not sure this is a fan theory, it might be canon, but I'm not enough of a Doctor Who nerd to be sure.)

The Borg Queen

First appearance: Star Trek: First Contact, 1996.

The Borg, like the Daleks, were introduced without an overall leader, and in fact their lack of individual identity seemed to make such a concept meaningless. The Star Trek story “The Best of Both Worlds” gave them a temporary spokesperson in the form of an assimilated Picard (who called himself “Locutus of Borg”), which implied that the Borg might do a similar thing when dealing with other species they wanted to assimilate. The fact that the Borg didn't have individuals in the normal sense was one of the things that made them alien and scary. They were a sort of twisted mirror image of the Federation, an interplanetary culture based not on diversity but on a complete negation of diversity.

So the introduction of an individual ruler of the Borg, in the form of the Borg Queen, would seem to contradict one of the things that makes the Borg work—but she's such a great villain that I think they get away with it.

Like the previous villains in this list, the Queen is intelligent and articulate, but unlike them hers is an alien intelligence because it's bent towards utterly inhuman goals. Conquering the universe and enslaving or exterminating everyone is evil, but it's understandable; assimilating everyone into a hive mind is a science fiction concept that requires an imaginative leap; and an individual intelligence devoted to a hive-mind goal is a further conceptual leap. And the visual design, with its seamless integration of flesh and technology, is great.

My fan theory: The Borg Queen isn't an individual with a continuous identity, but something the Borg collective can sort of extrude when it needs an administrative or diplomatic focal point, whenever and wherever is required. So the question of whether the Borg Queen who dies at the end of First Contact is “the same” as the one who later appears in Voyager is meaningless.

Bonus fan theory: Assimilated Picard is called “Locutus of Borg” because that's the kind of pretentious Latinate name the Borg would get from rummaging around in Picard's subconscious. If they'd assimilated Riker he'd have called himself something straightforward like “Speaker for the Borg”.

*

OK that's all for now. I'm hoping that next month I'll have time to make progress on the game so I'll be able to give you a normal developer diary at the end of May.

Will Vorak, the Master Brain join this canon of space villains, or will our hero fail to make progress once again? Find out in next month's developer diary...

#FoolishEarthCreatures #DevDiary #FlashGordon #DanDare #DoctorWho #StarTrek

好きなことをやろうと思って、たとえば音楽とか文章とかに向かう。 でもそれだって、純粋に好きだからというより、「仕事をしたくない」という前提がどこかにあると、コンテンツそのものをちゃんと楽しめていない感覚が残って、その行動さえも少し萎えてしまう。

友達に漫才をやってみないかとお願いして、何日か試してみたものの、漫才だって結局は商業的なものだし、これ本当に楽しめてるのか？と疑心暗鬼にもなる。 そんなことを考えても進めるしかないだろ、と元気な自分がそれらのマイナスを強引にシャットアウトする。

それでも音楽に携わることは、確信とまではいかないが、一番心に優しい選択なのではないかと感じている。 今もBandcampでベースミュージックやアンビエントを漁っていると、昔、少し髪が長かった頃の自分が憑依してくるようで、体が少し軽くなる。

バーとか、喫茶店とか、古着屋とか。 そういう目と体に優しい仕事もやってみたいが、技術屋見習いの自分にとってはかなり遠い場所にある。 今いる位置からそこへ身を運ぶには、距離がありすぎる。 どこから手を付けていいのか分からない。

自分は、ないものをあるように存在させることに、無意識的にも意図的にも強く惹かれている。 そこにギラついた憧れがある。 けれど同時に、実際に存在している点々とした人や土地、手で触れられる物理的なものに一度屈してでも、まずはそこへアクセスすべきなのだとも思う。

たとえ今は、手で文章を書くことくらいしかできなくても。 似たような文章を何度も書いて外にさらし、それ、いつまで言ってるの？と思われたとしても、少しでも前に進んでいると信じて続けるしかない。

こうして現実的なことを文章にしていること自体が、現実を保留しているだけなのか、それとも単なる逃げなのか。 そんなことを考えながら、そろそろ始まるGWの予定を確認する。

GWは横須賀に墓参りに行き、そのついでにピクニックをする。 それと、まだラーメン二郎を食べたことがないので、それも食べてみようと思っている。

休みの日だけを並べれば、こんなにも普通の日々が続いているのに。 いつも頭の中は悩みでいっぱいで、よく分からない顔のまま、今日も椅子に座り続けている。

The more people try to fix me, the less I think fixing me will fix things. I am broken: anorexia, bipolar, trauma. Broken things get fixed: Cyproheptadine, lamotrigine, mirtazapine; UT, DBT, art therapy. I have so many people trying to fix me. At last count, a dozen. I pay a lot for that. I’m pretty lucky to be a project for a dozen people. I should be fixed in no time.

You would think that. Except every statistic indicates otherwise, and my experiences track. Maybe I can be fixed. But maybe I can’t. And if I can, it will probably take a long time. A long time of people trying to fix me. A long time being told I’m broken. A long time not being enough.

Will a long time of not being enough fix me?

I don’t think I want to be fixed. I want to be helped. I want to be met on my terms, not theirs. I want to make art about my experiences and not be told it’s wrong. I want to be given vocabulary to speak my experiences, not be told I can’t share them. I want to be a person again. I want to feel alive.

Stop trying to fix me. I need help, but I’m not broken. I want support, guidance, language, ideas, and empathy; not regulation, management, monitoring, supervision, and condescension. And I don’t want to be told that fixing my broken soul is help. No, you can’t fix me, but you can help me.

Please, please, help me.

In May 2024, Wells Fargo fired more than a dozen employees in its wealth and investment management division. Their offence was not fraud, misconduct, or incompetence. It was the use of mouse jigglers, small devices costing roughly twenty dollars apiece that simulate cursor movement on a screen, creating the illusion of an active worker at their desk. The disclosures, filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, described their transgression as “simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work.” A Wells Fargo spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company “holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behaviour.”

The incident became a flashpoint. Not because the employees were blameless, but because it exposed the architecture of suspicion that now undergirds the modern workplace. These workers were not stealing money or falsifying accounts. They were gaming a system designed to reduce their entire working day to a stream of keystrokes, mouse movements, and activity scores. The fact that such a system existed, and that circumventing it was treated as a fireable offence, tells you more about the state of employer-employee relations in 2026 than any corporate mission statement ever could.

Across the industrialised world, millions of remote and hybrid workers now operate under what researchers and labour advocates have come to call “bossware”: a sprawling ecosystem of software tools that log keystrokes, capture screenshots at random intervals, track application usage, monitor website visits, record webcam footage, score activity levels in real time, and in some cases analyse facial expressions to determine whether someone is paying attention. According to industry surveys, 80 per cent of US companies now track employee performance digitally, and 74 per cent use online tracking tools of some kind. Sixty-one per cent use AI-powered analytics to measure employee productivity or behaviour, signalling a shift from simple time tracking to algorithm-driven performance evaluation. The employee monitoring software market, valued at approximately 587 million US dollars in 2024, is projected to reach 1.4 billion dollars by 2031. Some market analyses place it significantly higher, with estimates ranging up to 4.59 billion dollars in 2026 depending on scope. However you measure it, the trajectory is unmistakable. The business of watching workers is booming.

And yet, a growing body of research from institutions including MIT, Stanford, and the US Government Accountability Office suggests that these tools are not accomplishing what they promise. They are not making workers more productive. In many cases, they are making them more anxious, more disengaged, and more likely to leave. Some evidence links intensive productivity monitoring to increased physical injury rates. The question that emerges is not simply whether this technology works, but what its continued adoption reveals about the distribution of power between employers and the people who work for them.

The Machinery of Ambient Scoring

To understand what bossware does, it helps to examine the tools themselves. The market is crowded, but a handful of names dominate: Teramind, Hubstaff, ActivTrak, Time Doctor, Veriato, and Kickidler, among others. Their capabilities vary, but the general architecture is consistent. Each tool sits silently on an employee's device, often installed by IT departments without detailed explanation, collecting behavioural data and feeding it into management dashboards that convert a working day into graphs, percentages, and colour-coded scores.

Teramind, one of the more comprehensive platforms, offers keystroke logging, screen recording, application and website monitoring, email surveillance, file transfer tracking, chat monitoring, clipboard capture, and even printing activity logs. Hubstaff provides screenshot capturing at set intervals, keyboard and mouse activity tracking, GPS location monitoring for mobile workers, and application usage analytics. These tools run continuously, and their data collection is often invisible to the worker. There is no blinking light, no notification, no moment when the system asks permission. It simply watches.

Some systems go further still. Fujitsu Laboratories developed an AI model capable of detecting small changes in facial expression muscles using a framework called Action Units. The system claims to determine whether someone is concentrating or not by tracking muscular micro-movements every few seconds, capturing both short-term changes such as a tense mouth and longer-term patterns such as a sustained stare. Fujitsu reported an 85 per cent accuracy rate based on a study of 650 participants across the United States, China, and Japan, and has targeted applications including teleconferencing support and employee engagement measurement. The Victorian parliamentary inquiry into workplace surveillance in Australia specifically cited this kind of facial analysis technology as an example of the expanding frontier of worker monitoring. The committee heard evidence about wearable devices that monitor conversations, including how enthusiastically someone is speaking.

The data these tools generate is then fed into dashboards that score employees on productivity metrics, often in real time. Managers can view who is “active” and who is “idle,” which applications are being used, and how time is distributed across tasks. In some implementations, these scores feed directly into performance reviews, promotion decisions, and disciplinary processes. The worker rarely sees the same dashboard the manager sees. They experience the outputs of the system, in the form of warnings, performance ratings, or termination, without access to the inputs that produced those outcomes.

The core premise is straightforward: if you can measure activity, you can optimise it. What the research increasingly shows is that the premise is wrong.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

In February 2025, MIT Technology Review published a detailed investigation by Rebecca Ackermann into how opaque algorithms designed to analyse worker productivity have been rapidly spreading through workplaces. The piece argued that these algorithmic tools are less about efficiency than about control, and that workers have less and less recourse to challenge the decisions made on the basis of their data. There are few laws, Ackermann noted, requiring companies to offer transparency about what data goes into their productivity models or how decisions are derived from them. Labour groups, the article reported, were pushing back against this shift in power by seeking to make the algorithms that fuel management decisions more transparent.

The evidence against the effectiveness of monitoring has been building for years. A meta-analysis published in Computers in Human Behavior Reviews examined the impact of electronic monitoring on job satisfaction, stress, performance, and counterproductive work behaviour. The findings were stark: electronic monitoring showed a near-zero correlation with performance improvement (r = -0.01) while showing positive correlations with stress and counterproductive behaviour. In other words, monitoring does not make people work better. It makes them more stressed and, in some cases, more likely to act out. The study also found that performance targets and feedback, when combined with monitoring, could further exacerbate these negative effects.

A 2024 study published in Social Currents by Paul Glavin, Alex Bierman, and Scott Schieman, based on a nationally representative sample of 3,508 Canadian workers, found that perceptions of workplace surveillance were indirectly associated with increased psychological distress and lower job satisfaction. The mechanism, the researchers found, ran through what they termed “stress proliferation”: surveillance increased job pressures, reduced autonomy, and heightened feelings of privacy violation, all of which compounded into measurable psychological harm. The study used a novel measurement approach that captured overall surveillance perceptions across all types of work, rather than focusing narrowly on specific monitoring technologies.

The American Psychological Association's 2024 Work in America Survey, conducted by The Harris Poll among more than 2,000 employed adults, found that 56 per cent of workers who reported being monitored also reported feeling tense or stressed at work, compared with 40 per cent of those who were not monitored. Just over a third of respondents said they worried that their employer used technology to spy on them during work hours. The prevalence of monitoring was notably higher among Black and Hispanic workers (55 per cent and 47 per cent respectively) than among White workers (38 per cent), and higher among those doing manual labour (55 per cent) than among office workers (44 per cent). These disparities point to an equity dimension that is rarely discussed in the productivity optimisation conversation. The people bearing the heaviest burden of surveillance are disproportionately those who already occupy the most precarious positions in the labour market.

The US Government Accountability Office weighed in with a comprehensive report, GAO-25-107126, published in September 2025 and reissued with revisions in December 2025. The GAO reviewed 122 studies published between 2020 and 2024 on the effects of digital surveillance on workers' physical health and safety, mental health, and employment opportunities. The report concluded that while surveillance can in some contexts alert workers to potential health problems and increase their sense of physical safety, it can also increase anxiety and, critically, increase the risk of injury by pushing workers to move faster to meet productivity targets. The report further noted that several federal agencies that had previously provided guidance to employers about digital surveillance had, by mid-2025, rescinded those efforts or were reassessing their alignment with current administration priorities. The Department of Labor, for instance, removed a relevant resource from its website in June 2025 as part of a broader review.

When Productivity Scores Cause Injuries

The starkest illustration of how productivity tracking can cause physical harm comes from Amazon's warehouse operations. In December 2024, the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions published a 160-page report following an 18-month investigation led by Chairman Bernie Sanders. The investigation examined Amazon's internal systems for tracking worker speed, including the so-called “Time Off Task” metric that penalises workers for any period of inactivity, including time spent using the bathroom or waiting for equipment.

The Senate report cited an internal Amazon study, Project Soteria, which found a direct relationship between the speed at which workers performed tasks and their rate of injury. In each of the prior seven years, Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured as workers at other warehouses. More than two-thirds of Amazon's fulfilment centres had injury rates exceeding the industry average. The investigation concluded that Amazon had studied this connection for years but refused to implement changes that might reduce productivity, even when its own internal data showed those changes would reduce injuries. The report further alleged that Amazon manipulated workplace injury data to make its facilities appear safer than they were, and prevented injured workers from receiving needed medical care.

The report also found that Amazon's disciplinary systems, powered by automated tracking, forced workers into an impossible choice: follow safety procedures such as requesting help to move heavy objects, or risk discipline and potential termination for not maintaining sufficient speed. The system was, in effect, using surveillance and automated scoring to compel workers to choose between their physical safety and their employment.

Amazon contested the report's findings, insisting that injury rates had declined and that the investigation distorted the data. But the pattern the Senate investigation described, automated monitoring creating pressure that leads to physical harm, is not confined to warehouses. It is the logical endpoint of any system that reduces work to quantified activity and then optimises for speed.

The Panopticon Has a Subreddit

If you want to understand what it feels like to work under constant surveillance, the academic literature is illuminating. But Reddit may be more revealing.

A 2024 study published on arXiv and later in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, titled “It's Always a Losing Game: How Workers Understand and Resist Surveillance Technologies on the Job,” analysed posts from nine work-related subreddits, including r/antiwork, r/remotework, r/WorkersStrikeBack, and r/overemployed, alongside ten in-depth semi-structured interviews with employees and managers from industries including operations, customer service, marketing, and food and beverage. The researchers found that workers consistently identified surveillance technologies as causing significant stress, reducing their productivity, and increasing their risk of disciplinary action. Workers also reported that these technologies fostered paranoia and distrust, not just between employee and employer, but among colleagues who feared that their peers might be reporting monitored data to management.

The resistance tactics the researchers documented included commiseration (sharing frustrations with fellow workers), obfuscation (using tools like mouse jigglers to game activity trackers), soldiering (deliberately slowing down work in protest), and quitting. Search queries for “mouse mover” and “mouse jiggler” have remained consistently elevated since March 2020, when the mass shift to remote work began. Approximately 16 per cent of employees, according to industry surveys, now use some form of device or software to circumvent inactivity tracking, while roughly 7 to 8 per cent use automation specifically to fake productivity metrics.

The psychological weight described in these communities is consistent with the formal research. Workers describe the sensation of being permanently watched not as an inconvenience but as a persistent source of anxiety that colours every aspect of their working day. The knowledge that a screenshot might be taken at any moment, that an idle period might be flagged, that a bathroom break might register as a productivity dip, creates a state of hypervigilance that is functionally indistinguishable from chronic low-level stress. These accounts are anecdotal, but they are also numerous, spanning thousands of posts across multiple communities, and they align precisely with what peer-reviewed studies have documented.

Industry-level surveys reinforce the picture. Seventy-two per cent of monitored employees say that monitoring has not improved their productivity. Forty-two per cent of monitored workers plan to leave their employer within a year, compared with 23 per cent of those who are not monitored. Fifty-nine per cent report that digital tracking damages workplace trust. Fifty-four per cent say they would consider quitting if their employer increased surveillance. Eight in ten employees report that monitoring erodes trust. The tools designed to keep workers productive are, by workers' own accounts, driving them away.

A Regulatory Patchwork Full of Gaps

The legal landscape governing workplace surveillance is, to put it charitably, fragmented. In the United States, there is no comprehensive federal law regulating employers' use of electronic monitoring. New York requires employers to provide advance written notice if they monitor employees' phone and internet use, a requirement that has been in force since May 2022, but this is a notification requirement, not a consent mechanism. Workers must be informed, but they cannot refuse. Illinois enforces the Biometric Information Privacy Act, one of the more stringent biometric protection statutes in the world, requiring written consent before employers collect fingerprints, facial scans, or retinal data. Violations carry penalties of 1,000 to 5,000 US dollars per incident. California's Consumer Privacy Act extends some data rights to employees, including the right to know what personal information is being collected. But these are state-level provisions, inconsistent in scope and enforcement, and they leave the vast majority of American workers without meaningful protection.

The EU AI Act, which entered into force on 1 August 2024, represents the most significant regulatory intervention to date. Its risk-based framework explicitly classifies AI used for performance evaluation and other employment-related decision-making as high-risk. Emotion recognition in workplaces was banned outright in February 2025. Starting in August 2026, any AI tool used in recruitment, screening, or performance assessment will require mandatory risk assessments, technical documentation, bias testing, human oversight, transparency disclosures, and continuous monitoring. Penalties for violations can reach 35 million euros or 7 per cent of global annual turnover for prohibited practices. In November 2025, the European Parliament advanced a further call for the European Commission to launch a dedicated legislative initiative regulating AI in the workplace. That same month, the EU AI Office introduced a dedicated whistleblower tool, enabling employees, contractors, and external stakeholders to report breaches of the AI Act anonymously through a secure platform.

In Australia, the Victorian parliamentary inquiry that reported in May 2025 made 29 findings and 18 recommendations. The committee concluded that workers were increasingly being subjected to surveillance through optical, listening, tracking, and data-recording devices, often without their knowledge or consent. It found widespread examples of biometric surveillance in practice, including the collection of retinal, finger, hand, and facial data from nurses and construction workers. The committee recommended dedicated workplace surveillance legislation requiring employers to demonstrate that any monitoring is “reasonable, necessary and proportionate to achieve a legitimate objective.” It called for the prohibition of selling worker data to third parties and severe restrictions on the collection of biometric data. The Victorian government subsequently provided in-principle support for 15 of the 18 recommendations.

In July 2025, the National Employment Law Project in the United States published “When 'Bossware' Manages Workers,” a policy report arguing that employers' expanding use of digital surveillance and automated decision-making systems had intensified a range of existing job quality problems, including harmful disciplinary practices, job precarity, lack of autonomy, exploitative pay, unfair scheduling, barriers to benefits, discrimination, and the suppression of collective action. NELP called for a two-pronged approach: updating existing workplace protections to account for bossware-related harms, and directly regulating the tools themselves.

The picture that emerges is one of significant regulatory activity, but mostly at the margins. In the jurisdictions where the largest number of workers are subject to monitoring, particularly the United States, the legal framework remains permissive. Employers can, in most states, monitor virtually everything an employee does on a company device without explicit consent. The gap between what the research shows and what the law permits is enormous.

The Power Question

If workplace surveillance does not reliably improve productivity, increases worker stress and anxiety, drives higher turnover, may contribute to physical injuries, and erodes the trust that functional employment relationships require, then why is the market for these tools growing at double-digit rates? The question is not rhetorical. It has an answer, and the answer has less to do with productivity than with power.

Part of the explanation lies in a perception gap that the data makes visible. According to industry surveys, 68 per cent of employers believe that monitoring improves work output. Meanwhile, 72 per cent of the workers being monitored say it does not improve their productivity, and 59 per cent report feeling stress or anxiety as a result of surveillance. The two sides of the employment relationship are looking at the same technology and reaching opposite conclusions. But only one side gets to decide whether the tools stay installed. The employer's belief that monitoring works is sufficient for continued adoption, regardless of whether the employees' experience confirms or contradicts that belief. This is not a failure of communication. It is the predictable outcome of a relationship in which one party holds unilateral decision-making authority over the terms of the other's working conditions.

Merve Hickok and Nestor Maslej, writing in AI and Ethics in 2023, published a policy primer examining assumptions embedded in workplace surveillance and productivity scoring technologies. Their central finding was that, in the absence of legal protections and strong collective action capabilities, workers are in a structurally imbalanced power position to challenge the use of these tools. The tools, they argued, undermine human dignity and human rights. Employers adopt them because they can, and because the technology offers a sense of control and visibility that managers find appealing, regardless of whether it translates into measurable performance gains. The tools serve a managerial appetite for legibility rather than any demonstrated improvement in output.

This dynamic explains the otherwise puzzling disconnect between evidence and adoption. Companies are not purchasing bossware because the data shows it works. They are purchasing it because it satisfies an organisational desire to see what employees are doing, to quantify their effort, and to possess a mechanism for discipline and justification. In a labour market shaped by years of remote and hybrid work arrangements, where physical presence can no longer serve as a proxy for productivity, surveillance software fills the gap. It is not a productivity tool. It is a control tool marketed as a productivity tool.

The asymmetry runs deeper than individual employer-employee interactions. The employees most heavily monitored tend to be those with the least bargaining power: warehouse workers, call centre operators, gig economy participants, and remote workers in competitive labour markets. The APA survey data showing disproportionate monitoring of Black and Hispanic workers suggests that existing social inequalities are being replicated and potentially amplified through the architecture of digital surveillance. The workers most likely to be watched are also the workers least likely to have the resources or institutional support to push back.

Can Workers Ever Trust Workplace AI?

If the current model of workplace AI is fundamentally about surveillance and control, the question remains: is there an alternative? Can artificial intelligence be deployed in the workplace in a way that workers would actually choose to use?

The answer, according to some emerging research and practice, is conditionally yes, but only if the architecture of the technology is rebuilt around entirely different principles. The distinction that matters is between surveillance-oriented monitoring and what researchers call developmental monitoring. A meta-analysis of electronic performance monitoring studies found that when monitoring data is used developmentally, meaning it is shared transparently with employees, used to provide constructive feedback, and oriented towards growth rather than discipline, the negative effects on wellbeing and counterproductive behaviour are significantly reduced. The tool is the same; the governance model is different. Supervisors who return performance monitoring data to employees in a constructive, developmental way can buffer the negative relational consequences that electronic monitoring would otherwise produce.

Broader surveys of workplace AI tell a similar story. A 2025 study cited by Wiley found that employees who understood how AI tools functioned, how they would affect their roles, and how they could contribute to shaping their deployment reported significantly higher trust and engagement. Sixty-seven per cent of employees reported increased efficiency from AI integration, 61 per cent reported improved information access, and 59 per cent cited greater innovation. But these gains tracked almost exclusively with organisations that had communicated clearly about how AI was being used. Where communication was absent, trust collapsed. Between May and July 2025, employee trust in company-provided generative AI tools fell 31 per cent, and trust in agentic AI systems that act autonomously dropped 89 per cent. Only 34 per cent of employees reported that their organisations had clearly explained how AI affected their roles and skill requirements. The pattern is consistent: productivity gains alone do not build confidence or engagement. Workers want to understand how AI fits into their work today and how it shapes opportunity tomorrow.

The pattern is not complicated. Workers do not inherently distrust AI. They distrust opacity. They distrust tools deployed without their input, governed without their participation, and used for purposes they cannot see or challenge. The EU AI Act's transparency and human oversight requirements for high-risk employment AI represent one structural answer to this problem. The Victorian inquiry's recommendation that employers demonstrate surveillance is “reasonable, necessary and proportionate” represents another. Both approaches share a common logic: the legitimacy of workplace technology depends on the extent to which the people subject to it have meaningful knowledge of and voice in how it operates.

There are practical models that point in this direction. ActivTrak, one of the larger workforce analytics platforms, has explicitly positioned itself as a “privacy-first” alternative that analyses productivity patterns at the team level rather than conducting individual keystroke surveillance. It does not offer keystroke logging or screen recording, and its analytics are designed to surface patterns such as burnout risk and collaboration bottlenecks rather than to generate individual compliance scores. Whether one believes ActivTrak's marketing claims is a separate question. But the fact that a monitoring company sees market advantage in positioning itself against surveillance suggests that the appetite for a different model exists, both among workers and among employers who recognise that trust is a precondition for sustained performance.

What Comes Next

The current trajectory of workplace surveillance is not sustainable in either a practical or a political sense. Practically, the evidence base for its effectiveness is thin and getting thinner. Tools that increase stress, drive turnover, and damage trust impose real costs on the organisations that use them, even if those costs do not appear on the dashboards that justify the software's purchase. Politically, the regulatory tide is turning. The EU has moved from general principles to specific prohibitions. Australia's Victorian inquiry has produced actionable recommendations with government backing. The GAO has documented the harms. Labour advocates and legal scholars are building the frameworks for broader reform.

But the pace of regulatory action remains slow relative to the pace of technological adoption. The employee monitoring market continues to grow. New tools are entering the market with increasingly granular capabilities. And in the jurisdictions where the regulatory environment is most permissive, particularly the United States, there is little immediate prospect of comprehensive federal legislation.

What the continued adoption of surveillance tools tells us, in the face of contrary evidence, is something uncomfortable but important. It tells us that the employment relationship, in its current form, is not fundamentally structured around mutual benefit. It is structured around control. When an employer can install software that monitors every keystroke, captures random screenshots, and scores an employee's activity minute by minute, and the employee has no legal right to refuse, challenge, or even fully understand what is being collected, that is not a partnership. It is an asymmetry of power expressed through technology.

The conversation about workplace AI needs to begin from this recognition. The problem is not that the technology is too powerful or too imprecise. The problem is that it is deployed within a relationship that gives one party near-total discretion over its use and the other party near-zero recourse. Fixing the technology without fixing the relationship will produce, at best, more sophisticated forms of the same dysfunction.

A version of workplace AI that workers could genuinely trust would require, at minimum, transparency about what data is collected and how it is used; meaningful consent, not the kind buried in paragraph 47 of an employment contract; worker participation in the governance of monitoring systems; clear limitations on the purposes for which collected data can be used; independent auditing of algorithmic decision-making; and enforceable rights of challenge and appeal. These are not radical proposals. They are the basic conditions under which any reasonable person would agree to be monitored. The fact that they describe almost no workplace surveillance system currently in operation is the most important thing to understand about where we are.

The tools exist. The evidence exists. The regulatory models exist. What does not yet exist, in most of the world, is the political will to force the rebalancing that workers deserve and that, if the research is to be believed, productivity actually requires.

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References

1. Bloomberg, “Wells Fargo Fires Over a Dozen for 'Simulation of Keyboard Activity,'” June 2024.
2. MIT Technology Review, Rebecca Ackermann, “How AI Is Used to Surveil Workers,” February 2025.
3. Glavin, P., Bierman, A., and Schieman, S., “Private Eyes, They See Your Every Move: Workplace Surveillance and Worker Well-Being,” Social Currents, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 327-345, August 2024.
4. American Psychological Association, “2024 Work in America Survey: Psychological Safety in the Changing Workplace,” 2024.
5. US Government Accountability Office, “Digital Surveillance: Potential Effects on Workers and Roles of Federal Agencies,” GAO-25-107126, September 2025.
6. US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, “The Injury-Productivity Trade-off: How Amazon's Obsession with Speed Creates Unprecedented Danger for Workers,” December 2024.
7. Parliament of Victoria, Economy and Infrastructure Committee, “Inquiry into Workplace Surveillance,” May 2025.
8. Victorian Government, “Victorian Government Response to the Inquiry into Workplace Surveillance Report,” November 2025.
9. National Employment Law Project, “When 'Bossware' Manages Workers: A Policy Agenda to Stop Digital Surveillance and Automated-Decision-System Abuses,” July 2025.
10. Hickok, M. and Maslej, N., “A Policy Primer and Roadmap on AI Worker Surveillance and Productivity Scoring Tools,” AI and Ethics, Springer, 2023.
11. Sum et al., “It's Always a Losing Game: How Workers Understand and Resist Surveillance Technologies on the Job,” arXiv:2412.06945 / Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), 2024-2025.
12. Fujitsu, “Fujitsu Develops AI Model to Determine Concentration During Tasks Based on Facial Expression,” Press Release, March 2021.
13. EU AI Act, “Regulatory Framework for Artificial Intelligence,” European Commission, entered into force August 2024.
14. Crowell and Moring LLP, “Artificial Intelligence and Human Resources in the EU: A 2026 Legal Overview,” 2026.
15. Fortune Business Insights, “Employee Surveillance and Monitoring Software Market,” 2024-2034.
16. APA, “Electronically Monitoring Your Employees? It's Impacting Their Mental Health,” 2024.
17. ADM+S Centre, “Being Monitored at Work? A New Report Calls for Tougher Workplace Surveillance Controls,” 2025.
18. Wiley, “How Employee Trust in AI Drives Performance and Adoption,” 2025.
19. High5Test, “Employee Monitoring Statistics in the US (2024-2025): Surveillance and AI Tracking,” 2025.
20. ScienceDirect / Computers in Human Behavior Reviews, “The Impact of Electronic Monitoring on Employees' Job Satisfaction, Stress, Performance, and Counterproductive Work Behavior: A Meta-Analysis,” 2022.
21. Teramind, “ActivTrak vs Hubstaff: Features, Pros, Cons and Pricing,” 2025.
22. European Parliament, Resolution on AI in the Workplace, November 2025.
23. Biometric Update, “Australian State Launches Inquiry into Workplace Surveillance,” August 2024.
24. Corrs Chambers Westgarth, “Victorian Government Backs Landmark Workplace Surveillance Reforms,” November 2025.
25. IT Pro, “The Rise of 'Bossware' Means Workers Have Nowhere to Hide from Management,” 2025.

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

In Summary: * A quiet Thursday winds down. My WNBA game of choice is only minutes away. When this game ends the only things remaining on my agenda will be finishing the night prayers and putting these old bones to bed.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 231/82 lbs. * bp= 140/86 (67)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:35 – 1 chocolate chip cookie, 1 banana * 06:50 – biscuits and butter * 09:55 – mashed potatoes and gravy, cole slaw * 12:00 – bowl of home made stew, white bread * 16:30 – 1 fresh apple * 17:15 – 1 small dish of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 06:15 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 06:40 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 11:45 to 14:00 – watch Detroit Tigers vs Atlanta Braves MLB Game * 14:20 – listen to relaxing music, read, pray, follow news reports from various sources

Chess: * 08:15 – moved in all pending CC games