Issue 4: Tech Bosses At The Border
15 Jun 2018
Peter Thiel exploiting handouts from the government, Founders Fund pitch decks shared over Chick-fil-A, a Lord of the Rings collector sword, MythBusters’ final fall from grace—these details are only the tip of the iceberg of horror behind Oculus founder’s latest venture: a VR forcefield inside “Call of Duty goggles” for detecting and trapping border crossers. Read and wallow in despair—then get moving because y’all, we’ve got work to do.
Palmer Luckey thinks it's another fun way to make more money. For others, it's a matter of life and death.
Worker’s Perspective
Peter Thiel exploiting handouts from the government, Founders Fund pitch decks shared over Chick-fil-A, a Lord of the Rings collector sword, MythBusters’ final fall from grace—these details are only the tip of the iceberg of horror behind Oculus founder’s latest venture: a VR forcefield inside “Call of Duty goggles” for detecting and trapping border crossers. Read and wallow in despair—then get moving because y’all, we’ve got work to do.
They had a name and an executive team. But what was the product? “The DOD has been asking for what some people describe as Call of Duty goggles,” Luckey says. “Like, you put on the glasses, and the headset display tells you where the good guys are, where the bad guys are, where your air support is, where you’re going, where you were.” (Pause to consider this Escher-esque scenario of soldiers clamoring for gear inspired by a game that mimics their combat experience.) But tiny Anduril—with no experience or history—couldn’t just barge into the Pentagon and demand to build battlefield tech. “We needed a quick win,” Schimpf says.
Anduril’s pitch deck offered a sci-fi fantasia, including autonomous long-range bombers, attack-drone swarms, and something they called “perimeter security on a pole.” The team zeroed in on this last notion. They figured they could build a surveillance tower using off-the-shelf sensors and cameras, connect them in a network, and make something in the spirit of Google Maps and Pokémon Go. By using AI, the system would identify what data was important … in a 10-week period, Lattice’s test in Texas helped customs agents catch 55 unauthorized border crossers.
Tech Workers Coalition stands against the use of surveillance technology to monitor the migration of people, the majority of whom are looking for work or escaping oppressive and violent conditions in their countries. We recognize the economic in-opportunity and entrapment bred by American foreign policy and trade agreements. We are opposed to the unaccountable expansion of police and military power through the use of technology. For Palmer Luckey, this is just another fun way to make money; but for the people trying to cross the border, it’s a matter of life and death.
Upcoming Events
Resisting Attacks on Labor, Migrant Workers, & Their Communities
Thursday, 6/21 7PM at 2940 16th Street in San Francisco
Facebook
LABORFEST 2018
Kicks off with a History of Labor bike tour, Sunday, 7/1 12PM at 518 Valencia in San Francisco
Full event schedule
The Code of Conduct is in effect at all TWC events.
News
This week in Amazon's evil
An Amazon policy called Voluntary Time Off (VTO) is (like most aspects of workers’ lives at Amazon) anything but voluntary. Managers can intimidate their workers into taking unpaid time off when most convenient for the “sortation facility”. This latest scheme, designed to attract local government subsidies by “creating more (flexible, part-time) jobs,” does nothing but further exploit Amazon’s workforce.
On the warehouse floor, workers are forced to push themselves even further to “make rate” in order to get paid. Rate in this case means the number of runs a worker can complete in a given time.
“My rate was 140 and all of a sudden it was 89 because I couldn’t walk fast enough to make my rate because the gun was sending me all around,” a picker with over three years experience said, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that they’re throwing you around in the hopes that you’re going to finally just give up.”
In addition to taking credit for “good job creation,” Amazon is also proud of its special recruiting program, “CamperForce” that targets folks who live in camper vans, trailers and cars.
Also see: The supply chain of exploitation, low wages and long hours that leads from your kindle to the world’s richest man.
New York Times interns implemented Amazon’s Rekognition to detect faces in the halls of Congress. Due to its poor accuracy rate, the team working on it suggest just asking the unidentified individual what their name is.
ICE has signed a $2.4 million contract with PenLink, electronic surveillance technology that provided evidence to convict a person of murder and sentence them to death. “Sanchez said that while PenLink’s software could be used to track and convict individual people, immigration enforcement would also likely be attracted to its big data services, which PenLink advertises as being ‘virtually limitless.’”
Predictive policing software company PredPol says in their user documentation and training materials that their tech operates on “broken windows” policing principles, a widely criticized strategy that has led to overpolicing of minority communities and is shown to be ineffective.
Berkeley Labor Center unpacks the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data on “gig work”: understanding the conditions of the average American worker is less about the explosion of gig jobs and more about the fact that wages across all jobs, especially W-2/full-time jobs, are stagnant or decreasing. Supplement those numbers with this vignette from a self-proclaimed radicalized “failmom”. We see you Lori.
Minimum-wage workers can’t afford a 2-bedroom apartment anywhere in the U.S.
Truckers in Brazil have united and organized the most effective trucker strike in the nation’s history—all using WhatsApp and without the support of their union. “Meanwhile, the truckers used WhatsApp to win the support of their fellow citizens. Drivers sent voice messages explaining their plight and linking their demands with general frustrations about the government. Eight days into the strike, 87 percent of Brazilians supported the truckers, according to one poll.”
Song Of The Week
Propagandhi - I’d Rather Be Flag-Burning (Part 1/2) with lyrics
Born, hired, disposed / Where that job lands everybody knows / You can tell by the smile on the CEO, the environmental restraints are about to go / You can bet the laws will be set to ensure the benefit of unrestricted ‘labour laws’, kept in place by displaced government death squads / They own us / They own us / Produce us / Consume us
All that harms labor is treason to America. No line can be drawn between these two. If any man tells you he loves America, yet he hates labor, he is a liar. If a man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool.
I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails under which laborers can strike when they want to … I like the system which lets man quit when he wants to and wish it might prevail everywhere.
The stronger bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people of all nations, tongues and kindreds.
―Abraham Lincoln