Ping-Pong Oppression
Arguably the most pervasive element enabling exploitative office culture is the postmodern trickery of the contemporary working environment. [The Slovenian philosopher] Slavoj Žižek argues that modern employment tactics create the illusion that our employer is our friend. This fabrication empowers the employer while denying the employed the right to vocalize and protest dissatisfaction of their working conditions. “You’re not going to stick around and help out? I thought we were a team? I thought we were friends?” Žižek suggests that the environment of the workplace has been twisted, using architectural devices, to manipulate employees. Kitchens, "break-out spaces," lounges, free food, free coffee -- all this is a postmodern sleight of hand designed to manipulate and disarm staff. By fabricating the illusion of employer as friend, the employed is denied the opportunity to protest, argue, fight, be adversarial, and demand more of their working conditions. These informal spaces are political spaces of control, surveillance, and manipulation.
http://www.archdaily.com/234633/worklifework-balance/
The Fax Refuses to Die
Consider what a fax machine actually is: a little device with a sheet feeder, a terrible scanning element, and an ancient modem. Most faxes run at 14,400bps. That is just over 1KB per second -- and people are still using faxes to send 52 poorly scanned pages of some contract to one another. Over analog phone lines. Sometimes while paying long-distance charges! The mind boggles. If something as appallingly stupid as the fax machine can live on, it makes you wonder how we make progress at all. It just goes to show you: Bad technology generally is not the problem; it is the people who persist in using that technology rather than embracing far superior alternatives.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/why-the-fax-machine-refuses-die-171308
Management Foul-up Number One
When companies make money, we assume they are well-managed. That perception is reinforced by the CEOs of those companies who are happy to tell you all the clever things they did to make it happen. The problem with relying on this source of information is that CEOs are highly skilled in a special form of lying called leadership. Leadership involves convincing employees and investors that the CEO has something called a vision, a type of optimistic hallucination that can come true only in an environment in which the CEO is massively overcompensated and the employees have learned to be less selfish.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575285000265955016.html
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