The Fast Company piece on rising workplace surveillance opens with two images that deserve to sit next to each other: a college administrator reading an adjunct professor's comments on student essays, and a manager telling a pharmacist to spend less time with patients. Both are examples of surveillance being used not to improve outcomes but to compress the parts of work that cannot be easily quantified. The monitoring knows what you are doing. It cannot know why, or whether it was the right thing.
The Open-Weight Model Card Problem, Applied to Humans
A 2026 position paper in arXiv CS.AI by Chae, Kim, et al. argues that current model cards for open-weight AI models are insufficient for downstream governance, that the documentation of what a model can do does not capture what it will do when deployed in novel contexts. Workplace surveillance suffers an identical governance gap. The tools are documented. Their effects in specific organizational contexts, on specific types of workers, in specific power configurations, are not. The employer knows what the tool records. Nobody is systematically studying what it produces: higher anxiety, lower clinical engagement, faster burnout, quieter employees. Meanwhile, the federal government itself is under scrutiny for its use of hacking tools with similarly thin oversight frameworks. The surveillance state and the surveillance workplace are not metaphorically linked. They share vendors, legal frameworks, and the same structural assumption that observation is inherently productive.
When the Watcher Has No Watcher
The 2026 scoping review by Bonfils and Becker in arXiv CS.CY on the energy and carbon footprint of web tracking and advertising adds a material dimension: surveillance infrastructure is not just ethically costly, it is physically costly, consuming measurable energy to run systems whose primary output is behavioral data that benefits the observer, not the observed. Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick has written about enshittification as a condition of internet infrastructure. Workplace surveillance is enshittification applied to the employment relationship: the platform extracts, the worker is the resource, and the value flows upward. The pharmacist told to spend less time with patients is not being managed. She is being mined.