My life is contemporaneous with the development and ubiquitous adoption of microprocessors. I was born in the early 70's. I've been programming and working with computers since I was a kid. A good chunk of my "career" was spent automating systems. The previous generation of that engineering part of the workforce had already automated many key elements of the economy.
We're in a new era where managers think they can "automate" people's lives, that is, monitor people and punish or reward behaviors through a game-like system. The "they" have been trying to come up with ways to shove everyone into this system. Some of it is "voluntary"; poor people, or very cheap people, for example, can completely surrender their privacy to car insurance companies to get "lower rates"--although I'm sure like every similar scam, the rates seem low initially, then creep up over a couple of years so they're no longer competitive. Similarly, if you then make a claim against your insurance, the company finances any payout, and your premiums go up so you pay for the damage many times over.
Unfortunately, I think the coronavirus is going to be exploited to shove more people into these shitty systems. It will start with things that seem reasonable, like monitoring people for fevers during an epidemic... however a lot of that stuff will just hang around afterward and chew up more private life, making people into employees of some invisible, all pervasive corporation.
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