Antonym: The Mouse-Jigglers Edition

Fake remote work, writing tricks from Celeste Ng and AI–AI, sir.

Oct 30, 2022

Image: Jiggling your mouse so you don’t have to. Antonym x DALL-E 2.

This week we’re leaving internet rabbit holes behind and disappearing into a mouse-hole—the shadow world of the great hybrid work experiment, exemplified and revealed by a device called the Mouse Jiggler.

Mouse Jigglers

What will be a symbol of the barbarity and futility of modern office work? I’m putting in an early bid for the mouse jiggler. Many people haven’t heard of them. If you have, then it’s likely (a) you work from home, (b) you are employed by a large company that doesn’t trust its staff to work unobserved, or (c) your job involves spying on your co-workers.

Mouse jigglers come in various forms—mechanical pads that literally move your mouse a little, USB plug-ins that do it virtually, and app—but all are designed to stop your computer from going to sleep. Switch it on, go back to bed or turn on the telly and colleagues see a green dot next to your icon and, most importantly, employee monitoring software thinks that you are still working.

This is no one-off novelty product. Amazon has over a hundred you can choose from, and the top-sellers have thousands of mostly positive, often grateful, reviews from customers.

From the product benefits section on Amazon for the VAYDEER mouse jiggler.

What does the existence of a well served market for mouse jigglers tell us about the work culture in these places?

Employees are not to be trusted. Not only are people not trusted, but they are actively distrusted to the point where an organisation is prepared to invest in surveillance technology purchase and implementation—with all the meetings, update reports and conversations that go with installing and maintaining a system like that.
Place and time are used as proxies for productivity. There may be a correlation between how much someone moves their mouse and for how long with how well they do their job. Mostly, how much time people are present by a machine or in an office are the only things that are measurable.
The best measure they have for employee performance can be duplicated by a device or software that moves a cursor around a screen. If work is performative instead of productive, then a machine can mimic that performance for you.

Hybrid-working was the pandemic’s silver-lining for office workers. It up-ended the idea that you needed to commute for hours and show that you were working by being present in an at-best-acceptable working environment. It seems, though, that presenteeism has just been replaced by tele-presenteeism.

You just know that this is an arms race between IT and individuals, don’t you? Somewhere, there are teams of software professionals working on apps that will spot a mouse. One day, there will be an employment tribunal or court case where a red-faced employer will have to explain that their surveillance software detected a mouse jiggler faking an employee’s presence in front of a laptop.

Writing on the train

Let’s switch to a positive take on productivity. Writing on the move…

The train from Brighton to London—if you don’t travel in rush hour and can get a table—is one of the my most productive places. Around one hour while the world whizzes by is just perfect to get a lot of focused work done. Two weeks in a row, I’ve taken the journey and aced a bit of copywriting or editing each way. It’s almost worth the ticket price alone.

Celeste Ng: Don’t kill your darlings—re-home them

And speaking of writing, here’s organisational psychologist Adam Grant in conversation with author Celeste Ng. In this clip, she discusses the old "kill your darlings" advice to writers and suggests using a "cut file". I've done exactly this for some time—I called it my “cutting room floor” file–and it definitely makes it easier to take things out.

https://youtube.com/shorts/NzQDrdlEGAw?feature=share

Listen to the whole episode for lots of lovely advice for everyone about why and how you should write more…

Moron risk profile

The context for the delightful jargon-ese “moron risk premium” is the after-shocks in the bond markets of the Worst UK Government Ever™, but sounds like a phrase one might happily apply more often in business and other walks of life…

At the height of the chaos, Britain’s five-year borrowing costs were higher than those of Italy and Greece, two countries that have difficult relationships with their lenders. Although the markets are now calmer, the country’s sovereign bonds, or “gilts”, still trade at much higher yields than they did before the self-inflicted blow [of the Truss-Kwarteng “mini-budget”]. Dario Perkins of ts Lombard, an investment-research firm, has dubbed this a “moron risk premium”.

— Can Britain escape the “moron risk premium”? | The Economist

Anti-hostile architecture clothing

I love the cheek and the edge of this plush artwork pointing at the horrible practice of “hostile architecture” (stuff to stop people sitting down or hanging around in urban spaces.

21st Century City @urbanthoughts11

Dress right for hostile architecture

Stop Press! Cormac McCarthy’s new book is out!

*The Passenger*, spotted in the wild at Foyles.

That is all.

Other bits…

How TikTok’s Algorithm Made It a Success: ‘It Pushes the Boundaries’

[Time to Get Fit — An Open Letter From Altimeter to Mark Zuckerberg]

Altimeter, a large investor in Meta, recommends slashing its investment in “the Metaverse” from about $27BN TO $5BN. But…

We believe the future lies in AI. In fact, we believe that augmented and artificial intelligence has the potential to drive more economic productivity than the internet itself.

Great read about the folly of affecting foresight: The Fallacy of Forecasting in a Complex World
10 Inventions Turning 100 in 2022: Frozen food! Waterskiing!
The Lancashire pubs’ “blacks only” policy that started a gun fight with the American army (Twitter thread—click on the Tweet below for more).