Packed with instruments and rovers, the soon-to-launch IM-2 mission will explore the lunar south pole and attempt something never done beforeto enter a shadowed moon crater to look for ice.

A full days work for Dora Manriquez, who drives for Uber and Lyft in the San Francisco Bay Area, includes waiting in her car for a two-digit number to appear. The apps keep sending her rides that are too cheap to pay for her time$4 or $7 for a trip across San Francisco, $16 for a trip from the airport for which the customer is charged $100. But Manriquez cant wait too long to accept a ride, because her acceptance rate contributes to her driving score for both companies, which can then affect the benefits and discounts she has access to.The systems are black boxes, and Manriquez cant know for sure which data points affect the offers she receives or how. But what she does know is that shes driven for ride-share companies for the last nine years, and this year, having found herself unable to score enough better-paying rides, she has to file for bankruptcy.Every action Manriquez takesor doesnt takeis logged by the apps she must use to work for these companies. (An Uber spokesperson told MIT Technology Review that acceptance rates dont affect drivers fares. Lyft did not return a request forcomment on the record.) But app-based employers arent the only ones keeping a very close eye on workers today. A study conducted in 2021, when the covid-19 pandemic had greatly increased the number of people working from home, revealed that almost 80% of companies surveyed were monitoring their remote or hybrid workers. A New York Times investigation in 2022 found that eight of the 10 largest private companies in the US track individual worker productivity metrics, many in real time. Specialized software can now measure and log workers online activities, physical location, and even behaviors like which keys they tap and what tone they use in their written communicationsand many workers arent even aware that this is happening. Whats more, required work apps on personal devices may have access to more than just workand as we may know from our private lives, most technology can become surveillance technology if the wrong people have access to the data. While there are some laws in this area, those that protect privacy for workers are fewer and patchier than those applying to consumers. Meanwhile, its predicted that the global market for employee monitoring software will reach $4.5 billion by 2026, with North America claiming the dominant share.Working todaywhether in an office, a warehouse, or your carcan mean constant electronic surveillance with little transparency, and potentially with livelihood-ending consequences if your productivity flags. What matters even more than the effects of this ubiquitous monitoring on privacy may be how all that data is shifting the relationships between workers and managers, companies and their workforce. Managers and management consultants are using worker data, individually and in the aggregate, to create black-box algorithms that determine hiring and firing, promotion and deactivation. And this is laying the groundwork for the automation of tasks and even whole categories of labor on an endless escalator to optimized productivity. Some human workers are already struggling to keep up with robotic ideals. We are in the midst of a shift in work and workplace relationships as significant as the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And new policies and protections may be necessary to correct the balance of power.Data as powerData has been part of the story of paid work and power since the late 19th century, when manufacturing was booming in the US and a rise in immigration meant cheap and plentiful labor. The mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who would become one of the first management consultants, created a strategy called scientific management to optimize production by tracking and setting standards for worker performance. Soon after, Henry Ford broke down the auto manufacturing process into mechanized steps to minimize the role of individual skill and maximize the number of cars that could be produced each day. But the transformation of workers into numbers has a longer history. Some researchers see a direct line between Taylors and Fords unrelenting focus on efficiency and the dehumanizing labor optimization practices carried out on slave-owning plantations.As manufacturers adopted Taylorism and its successors, time was replaced by productivity as the measure of work, and the power divide between owners and workers in the United States widened. But other developments soon helped rebalance the scales. In 1914, Section6 of the Clayton Act established the federal legal right for workers to unionize and stated that the labor of a human being is not a commodity. In the years that followed, union membership grew, and the 40-hour work week and the minimum wage were written into US law. Though the nature of work had changed with revolutions in technology and management strategy, new frameworks and guardrails stood up to meet that change.More than a hundred years after Taylor published his seminal book, The Principles of Scientific Management, efficiency is still a business buzzword, and technological developments, including new uses of data, have brought work to another turning point. But the federal minimum wage and other worker protections havent kept up, leaving the power divide even starker. In 2023, CEO pay was 290 times average worker pay, a disparity thats increased more than 1,000% since 1978. Data may play the same kind of intermediary role in the boss-worker relationship that it has since the turn of the 20th century, but the scale has exploded. And the stakes can be a matter of physical health.In 2024, a report from a Senate committee led by Bernie Sanders, based on an 18-month investigation of Amazons warehouse practices, found that the company had been setting the pace of work in those facilities with black-box algorithms, presumably calibrated with data collected by monitoring employees. (In California, because of a 2021 bill, Amazon is required to at least reveal the quotas and standards workers are expected to comply with; elsewhere the bar can remain a mystery to the very people struggling to meet it.) The report also found that in each of the previous seven years, Amazon workers had been almost twice as likely to be injured as other warehouse workers, with injuries ranging from concussions to torn rotator cuffs to long-term back pain.An internal team tasked with evaluating Amazon warehouse safety found that letting robots set the pace for human labor was correlated with subsequent injuries.The Sanders report found that between 2020 and 2022, two internal Amazon teams tasked with evaluating warehouse safety recommended reducing the required pace of work and giving workers more time off. Another found that letting robots set the pace for human labor was correlated with subsequent injuries. The company rejected all the recommendations for technical or productivity reasons. But the report goes on to reveal that in 2022, another team at Amazon, called Core AI, also evaluated warehouse safety and concluded that unrealistic pacing wasnt the reason all those workers were getting hurt on the job. Core AI said that the cause, instead, was workers frailty and intrinsic likelihood of injury. The issue was the limitations of the human bodies the company was measuring, not the pressures it was subjecting those bodies to. Amazon stood by this reasoning during the congressional investigation.Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel told MIT Technology Review that the Sanders report is wrong on the facts and that the company continues to reduce incident rates for accidents. The facts are, she said, our expectations for our employees are safe and reasonableand that was validated both by a judge in Washington after a thorough hearing and by the states Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals.Yet this line of thinking is hardly unique to Amazon, although the company could be seen as a pioneer in the datafication of work. (An investigation found that over one year between 2017 and 2018, the company fired hundreds of workers at a single facilityby means of automatically generated lettersfor not meeting productivity quotas.) An AI startup recently placed a series of billboards and bus signs in the Bay Area touting the benefits of its automated sales agents, which it calls Artisans, over human workers. Artisans wont complain about work-life balance, one said. Artisans wont come into work hungover, claimed another. Stop hiring humans, one hammered home. The startups leadership took to the company blog to say that the marketing campaign was intentionally provocative and that Artisan believes in the potential of human labor. But the company also asserted that using one of its AI agents costs 96% less than hiring a human to do the same job. The campaign hit a nerve: When data is king, humanswhether warehouse laborers or knowledge workersmay not be able to outperform machines.AI management and managing AICompanies that use electronic employee monitoring report that they are most often looking to the technologies not only to increase productivity but also to manage risk. And software like Teramind offers tools and analysis to help with both priorities. While Teramind, a globally distributed company, keeps its list of over 10,000 client companies private, it provides resources for the financial, health-care, and customer service industries, among otherssome of which have strict compliance requirements that can be tricky to keep on top of. The platform allows clients to set data-driven standards for productivity, establish thresholds for alerts about toxic communication tone or language, create tracking systems for sensitive file sharing, and more.An AI startup recently placed a series of billboards and bus signs in the Bay Area touting the benefits of its automated sales agents, which it calls Artisans, over human workers.JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGESWith the increase in remote and hybrid work, says Teraminds chief marketing officer, Maria Osipova, the companys product strategy has shifted from tracking time spent on tasks to monitoring productivity and security more broadly, because thats what clients want. Its a different set of challenges that the tools have had to evolve to address as were moving into fully hybrid work, says Osipova. Its this transition from Do people work? or How long do they work? to How do they work best? How do we as an organization understand where and how and under what conditions they work best? And also, how do I de-risk my company when I give that amount of trust?The clients myriad use cases and risks demand a very robust platform that can monitor multiple types of input. So think about what applications are being used. Think about being able to turn on the conversations that are happening on video or audio as needed, but also with a great amount of flexibility, says Osipova. Its not that its a camera thats always watching over you.Selecting and tuning the appropriate combination of data is up to Teraminds clients and depends on the size, goals, and capabilities of the particular company. The companies are also the ones to decide, based on their legal and compliance requirements, what measures to take if thresholds for negative behavior or low performance are hit.But however carefully its implemented, the very existence of electronic monitoring may make it difficult for employees to feel safe and perform well. Multiple studies have shown that monitoring greatly increases worker stress and can break down trust between an employer and its workforce. One 2022 poll of tech workers found that roughly half would rather quit than be monitored. And when algorithmic management comes into the picture, employees may have a harder time being successfuland understanding what success even means.Ra Criscitiello, deputy director of research at SEIUUnited Healthcare Workers West, a labor union with more than 100,000 members in California, says that one of the most troubling aspects of these technological advances is how they affect performance reviews. According to Criscitiello, union members have complained that they have gotten messages from HR about data they didnt even know was being collected, and that they are being evaluated by algorithmic models they dont understand. Dora Manriquez says that when she first started driving for ride-share companies, there was an office to go to or call if she had any issues. Now, she must generally lodge any complaints by text through the app, and any response appears to come from an automated system. Sometimes theyll even get stuck, she says of the chatbots. Theyre like, I dont understand what youre saying. Can you repeat that again?Many app-based workers live in fear of being booted off the platform at any moment by the ruling algorithmsometimes with no way to appeal to a human for recourse.Veronica Avila, director of worker campaigns for the Action Center for Race and Economy (ACRE), has also seen algorithmic management take over for human supervisors at companies like Uber. More than the traditional Im watching you work, its become this really sophisticated mechanism that exerts control over workers, she says.ACRE and other advocacy groups call whats happening among app-based companies a deactivation crisis because so many workers live in fear that the ruling algorithm will boot them off the platform at any moment in response to triggers like low driver ratings or minor traffic infractionsoften with no explicit explanation and no way to appeal to a human for recourse.Ryan Gerety, director of the Athena Coalition, whichamong other activitiesorganizes to support Amazon workers, says that workers in those warehouses face continuous monitoring, assessment, and discipline based on their speed and their performance with respect to quotas that they may or may not know about. (In 2024, Amazon was fined in California for failing to disclose quotas to workers who were required to meet them.) Its not just like youre monitored, Gerety says. Its like every second counts, and every second you might get fired.MICHAEL BYERSElectronic monitoring and management are also changing existing job functions in real time. Teraminds clients must figure out who at their company will handle and make decisions around employee data. Depending on the type of company and its needs, Osipova says, that could be HR, IT, the executive team, or another group entirelyand the definitions of those roles will change with these new responsibilities.Workers tasks, too, can shift with updated technology, sometimes without warning. In 2020, when a major hospital network piloted using robots to clean rooms and deliver food to patients, Criscitiello heard from SEIU-UHW members that they were confused about how to work alongside them. Workers certainly hadnt received any training for that. Its not Were being replaced by robots, says Criscitiello. Its Am I going to be responsible if somebody has a medical event because the wrong tray was delivered? Im supervising the robotits on my floor.Nurses are also seeing their jobs expand to include technology management. Carmen Comsti of National Nurses United, the largest nurses union in the country, says that while management isnt explicitly saying nurses will be disciplined for errors that occur as algorithmic tools like AI transcription systems or patient triaging mechanisms are integrated into their workflows, thats functionally how it works. If a monitor goes off and the nurse follows the algorithm and its incorrect, the nurse is going to get blamed for it, Comsti says. Nurses and their unions dont have access to the inner workings of the algorithms, so its impossible to say what data these or other tools have been trained on, or whether the data on how nurses work today will be used to train future algorithmic tools. What it means to be a worker, manager, or even colleague is on shifting ground, and frontline workers dont have insight into which way itll move next.The state of the law and the path to protectionToday, there isnt much regulation on how companies can gather and use workers data. While the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) offers some worker protections in Europe, no US federal laws consistently shield workers privacy from electronic monitoring or establish firm guardrails for the implementation of algorithm-driven management strategies that draw on the resulting data. (The Electronic Communications Privacy Act allows employers to monitor employees if there are legitimate business reasons and if the employee has already given consent through a contract; tracking productivity can qualify as a legitimate business reason.) But in late 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did issue guidance warning companies using algorithmic scores or surveillance-based reports that they must follow the Fair Credit Reporting Actwhich previously applied only to consumersby getting workers consent and offering transparency into what data was being collected and how it would be used. And the Biden administrations Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights had suggested that the enumerated rights should apply in employment contexts. But none of these are laws.So far, binding regulation is being introduced state by state. In 2023, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was officially extended to include workers and not just consumers in its protections, even though workers had been specifically excluded when the act was first passed. That means California workers now have the right to know what data is being collected about them and for what purpose, and they can ask to correct or delete that data. Other states are working on their own measures. But with any law or guidance, whether at the federal or state level, the reality comes down to enforcement. Criscitiello says SEIU is testing out the new CCPA protections.Its too early to tell, but my conclusion so far is that the onus is on the workers, she says. Unions are trying to fill this function, but theres no organic way for a frontline worker to know how to opt out [of data collection], or how to request data about whats being collected by their employer. Theres an education gap about that. And while CCPA covers the privacy aspect of electronic monitoring, it says nothing about how employers can use any collected data for management purposes.The push for new protections and guardrails is coming in large part from organized labor. Unions like National Nurses United and SEIU are working with legislators to create policies on workers rights in the face of algorithmic management. And app-based advocacy groups have been pushing for new minimum pay rates and against wage theftand winning. There are other successes to be counted already, too. One has to do with electronic visit verification (EVV), a system that records information about in-home visits by health-care providers. The 21st Century Cures Act, signed into law in 2016, required all states to set up such systems for Medicaid-funded home health care. The intent was to create accountability and transparency to better serve patients, but some health-care workers in California were concerned that the monitoring would be invasive and disruptive for them and the people in their care.Brandi Wolf, the statewide policy and research director for SEIUs long-term-care workers, says that in collaboration with disability rights and patient advocacy groups, the union was able to get language into legislation passed in the 20172018 term that would take effect the next fiscal year. It indicated to the federal government that California would be complying with the requirement, but that EVV would serve mainly a timekeeping function, not a management or disciplinary one.Today advocates say that individual efforts to push back against or evade electronic monitoring are not enough; the technology is too widespread and the stakes too high. The power imbalances and lack of transparency affect workers across industries and sectorsfrom contract drivers to unionized hospital staff to well-compensated knowledge workers. Whats at issue, says Minsu Longiaru, a senior staff attorney at PowerSwitch Action, a network of grassroots labor organizations, is our countrys moral economy of workthat is, an economy based on human values and not just capital. Longiaru believes theres an urgent need for a wave of socially protective policies on the scale of those that emerged out of the labor movement in the early 20th century. Were at a crucial moment right now where as a society, we need to draw red lines in the sand where we can clearly say just because we can do something technological doesnt mean that we should do it, she says.Like so many technological advances that have come before, electronic monitoring and the algorithmic uses of the resulting data are not changing the way we work on their own. The people in power are flipping those switches. And shifting the balance back toward workers may be the key to protecting their dignity and agency as the technology speeds ahead. When we talk about these data issues, were not just talking about technology, says Longiaru. We spend most of our lives in the workplace. This is about our human rights.Rebecca Ackermann is a writer, designer, and artist based in San Francisco.

Has anyone ever asked you to be more strategic? Heres what that meansStrategy for beginners, how Starbucks lost its soul, and a food safety pointer (Issue #274)Published inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter4 min readJust now--Being told you need to be more strategic is common feedback for senior engineers, writes CTO and technical advisor Dan Pupius on Medium. (He was Mediums Head of Engineering a decade ago.)Its a phrase Ive heard a lot throughout my career, and its usually thrown around without a precise definition. The gist seems to be to work smarter, not harder, but its unclear how to apply that phrase to the messiness of inbound emails and Slacks, some of which might simply require hard work.For some background, I dug through the Medium archive and found this story by product designer Stephanie Irwin. Irwin draws a clear distinction between a plan and a strategy. A plan is basically a to-do list, but a strategy is a set of choices that position you in a way to win. Or, in the words of Pupius, strategy is a framework that guides decision making. If youre doing it right, youll have defined your priorities in advance, giving yourself permission to say no to work that doesnt serve your goals.And if youre not strategic? As Irwin explains, You may feel incredibly busy, yet months pass and that dream or goal you have still hasnt happened.Pupiuss example: Youre an engineer whose product seems to be getting buggier (thats not great) and you want to catch issues before they hit production. An easy, not-super-strategic solution? Simply add more tests and/or a manual QA phase. A better, more strategic path: End-to-end automated tests of critical user flows. This gives you a framework for understanding what kinds of tests you want to add, and how youll prioritize them.For a far deeper dive into the decades (centuries, even!) of meaning hidden behind that be more strategic comment you might hear during a performance review, I recommend spending some time with Roger Martins Medium archive. Hes written a book on this topic (Playing to Win) and, in this brief history, traces business strategy all the way back to a 1911 Harvard Business School course on military strategy. In both military and business contexts, as Martin points out, the art is to achieve a sense of equilibrium (peace, basically) between yourself and your competitors. You want to get your desired positioning and have your competitors largely satisfied with theirs to create as positive-sum a game as circumstances allow. Harris Sockel Your responses to our newsletter about third places (and Starbucks)Last Thursday, we sent a newsletter about Starbucks attempt to reclaim its position as Americas go-to coffee shop and third place (a zone of connectedness and community between work and home). Many of you responded thoughtfully, on both Starbucks business prospects (its not doing well lately) and the importance of third places. Here are a few responses that stood out to us:I lived in Seattle when Starbucks was in its early days. It still had a 3rd Place vibe then, but I had a front seat to the changes. IMHO, the two biggest things Starbucks did to ruin the brand:1) Replace skillful baristas with push-button, automated espresso machines, eliminating the art and know-how of pulling espresso. This created an army of fake baristas and removed the craft from the coffee. []2) Centralized and standardized food offerings. This is the biggest reason I tend to avoid Starbucks. Their food looks anemic, generic, and totally unappealing. In the old days, they contracted with local bakeries and vendors and had quality items that varied somewhat among stores. Now, it all comes in shrink-wrapped from a central hub.[] As with so many businesses they let efficiency and the bean counters steer decisions that have impacted their brand for the worse. A. WyattTrying to reclaim the community/coffeehouse vibe is a big lift for a corporation whose actions have consistently degraded that experience over the years. Actions need to align with that aspiration and should be directed within first. Get your house in order before inviting company over. Improving the barista experience will improve the customer experience. R. A. Jones Some practical wisdomFood expiration dates are confusing because theres no national system. A rule of thumb someone should have taught me in elementary school: Use by is a safety threshold (dont cross it unless youve frozen the item beforehand); Best before is a quality threshold (fine to cross if youre okay sacrificing flavor or texture).

US game spending fell 15% to $4.5bn in January 2025 | US Monthly ChartsFinal Fantasy 7: Rebirth leaped into the Top Three following launch on SteamImage credit: Square Enix News by Sophie McEvoy Staff Writer Published on Feb. 24, 2025 Following Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth's successful launch on Steam, the Square Enix title leaped to the No.3 spot of Circana's US charts for January.Final Fantasy 7's renewed success comes after Square Enix noted the game did "not meet expectations" following its original release in February 2024.The Final Fantasy 7 Remake & Rebirth Twin Pack also benefited from the Steam launch, skyrocketing from No.265 to No.16 in the Top 20.Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 maintained the top spot overall, also ranking No.1 on PlayStation's individual chart and No.2 on Xbox Series X|S.The only new title to release in January was Donkey Kong Country Returns, which debuted at No.8 on the overall chart and in first place on the individual platform chart for Nintendo Switch.Looking at mobile, Monopoly Go topped the charts followed by Roblox and Candy Crush Saga. Pokmon TCG Pocket fell by three places, though it saw its second biggest week in revenue towards the end of January following an update.Streaming app ReelShort Short Movie & TV made it into the Top Ten, falling under the interactive story sub-genre as noted by Sensor Tower's Samuel Aune."ReelShort was released in August 2022, but didn't see real traction until 2023," said Aune. "In the past two years the streaming video/game hybrid has skyrocketed, and now it's cracked the Top Ten mobile games by US monthly consumer spend."Speaking of US consumer spending, it fell 15% year-on-year to $4.5 billion. However, it's worth noting that Circana's tracking period for January was a week shorter than the five weeks tracked in January 2024.As for video game content spend, this dropped 12% compared to the same period last year.While non-mobile subscription spending grew by 13% in addition to a 2% rise in mobile spending, it "could not offset declines across other areas of content spending" according to Circana.This includes hardware, which decreased 45% YoY to $205 million the lowest January total since $131 million in January 2020.There were sales declines across all platforms, with PS5 falling by 38%, Xbox Series X|S by 50%, and Switch by 53%.Here are the top 20 selling games from the period January 5 to February 1, 2025, data courtesy of Circana:RankLast month rankTitle11Call of Duty: Black Ops 622Madden NFL 25356Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth44EA Sports College Football 2559Minecraft^^613Marvel's Spider-Man 273EA Sports College Football 258NEWDonkey Kong Country Returns*97Hogwarts Legacy106Sonic Generations1115Helldivers 2128Astro Bot1315Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero145Super Mario Party Jamboree*1512Elden Ring16265Final Fantasy 7 Remake & Rebirth Twin Pack1716Mario Kart 8*1831The Crew: Motorfest1928UFC 52082It Takes Two*Digital sales not included, ^^Digital sales on Nintendo platforms not included.

For a franchise whose core tenet is exploring the unknown, the universe of Star Trek is extremely well mapped out. Following the events described by its TV shows and movies, we can create a pretty comprehensive timeline of events from last year (the year of the Bell Riots, Irish reunification and the first crewed mission to Europa) to the mid-33rd century.If you want to know the distance from Betazed to Bajor, there are reference materials that exist to help with that. If you want to know the deck layout of the Enterprise D, or read the employee handbook for the Cerritos, you can do that.But the Star Trek universe has not always been so comprehensively catalogued. Once upon a time, nobody could decide whether the Enterprise served Starfleet, or the Federation, or the United Earth Space Probe Agency, and our only reference materials were 79 TV episodes with not always entirely consistent continuity.As Star Trek fandom became a thing, people wanted to learn more about this universe, starting to fill out the details, and naturally one of the first places they sought those answers was the authority on all things Trek, its creator, Gene Roddenberry. Much like Dungeons & Dragons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek is the work of countless individuals and collaborations, but suffers from credit being mounted on a single messianic visionary that, on closer inspection, proves to be problematic. As Lance Parkin documents in his blog about writing Roddenberrys biography, Roddenberry was what we euphemistically call a complex person whose public image as a prophet of an inclusive and utopian future was as much a career-salvaging marketing exercise as anything else.Once it became clear that this Star Trek thing could run and run, a lot of people saw that there was money to be made, and the story behind Treks journey from cancelled TV show to globally recognised multimedia franchise is one of legal, financial and creative battles. One of the key battlefields it was fought on was Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a production that Roddenberry himself was thrown off multiple times.It can be hard, looking at Roddenberrys contributions to Trek, to see where he isnt taking credit for someone elses work (Gene Coon, for instance, or script editor D.C. Fontana) or having his own ideas watered down by budget or executives. But there is one place where we can see Gene Roddenberrys vision of the Star Trek future unfettered and unfiltered: Star Trek The Motion Picture A novel by Gene Roddenberry, to give it its full title.The Sexy FrontierThe slim paperback makes a surprising read today. For instance, a footnote has Kirk himself turn straight to camera and address the notion that he and Spock are lovers, a hotly discussed idea in early Trek fandom:I was never aware of this lovers rumor, although I have been told that Spock encountered it several times. Apparently he had always dismissed it with his characteristic lifting of his right eyebrow which usually connoted some combination of surprise, disbelief, and/or annoyance. As for myself, although I have no moral or other objections to physical love in any of its many Earthly, alien and mixed forms, I have always found my best gratification in that creature woman. Also, I would dislike being thought of as so foolish that I would select a love partner who came into sexual heat only once every seven years.This passage has been quoted here in full to demonstrate that a close reading will reveal Kirk never actually denies it.Relatedly, the book revels in a quality that saturated Trek through the original series and early The Next Generation, but which, to be honest, has been tragically lacking in the latest incarnations of the franchise sheer horniness. If we are to accept Star Trek as Roddenberrys singular vision, it is the vision of someone who, in the Star Trek The Next Generation writers bible, compares Doctor Beverly Crusher to a striptease queen.Join our mailing listGet the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!Roddenberry wastes no time telling us that the Enterprises Rec Room (which most fans will know as the place Kirk briefs the crew on VGer and where we first glimpse a picture of the Enterprise XCV-330) is definitely used for sex. When Kirk meets a Starfleet officer he once had a fling with he could feel the slight pressure of his genitals responding to those memories. Well skip the bit where Kirk calls her a whore a few pages later, and well just leave the whole unfiltered, Roddenberry-authored portrayal of Deltans well alone.But the most interesting parts of the novelization are the areas where Roddenberry can enter the blank space of the as-yet unexplored Star Trek universe, to show us what his conception of this future might look like when we move away from a single starship and its latest planet-of-the-week.Making HistoryFrom the off, the timeline of Star Trek The Motion Picture A novel by Gene Roddenberry does not line up with the history you learned on the Memory Alpha wiki. Where the movie Star Trek: First Contact places Zefram Cochranes discovery of Warp Drive and humanitys first context with aliens on April 5th, 2063, Roddenberry tells us that warp drive was invented nearly a century ago making it a pretty short road getting from there to here. This chronology doesnt even map to the tiny amount of continuity Star Trek already had. The TOS episode Metamorphosis tells us the inventor of Space Warp, the aforementioned Zefram Cochrane, supposedly died 150 years earlier more than 50 years before he was supposed to make the discovery.It also casts doubt on Star Treks claim at presupposed Miguel Alcubierres invention of the Alcubierre Drive theory. Canonically, Treks warp drive allows for seemingly faster-than-light travel without any of the problematic time dilation effects by creating a warp bubble around a ship, compressing space in front of the vehicle and expanding it behind to traverse interstellar distances.Roddenberrys description is a little different when that starship reached the threshold of light speed, it also reached that boundary between normal space and hyperspace. That boundary was time, making it appear to those first hyperspace travellers that the universe around their starship had suddenly begun to shrink in size. Beginning with warp one and increasing geometrically, the higher the warp speed, the smaller the universe and the closer together the points within it become.Whats interesting is this description does hint at a throwaway line in the unused Star Trek pilot The Cage, where a crewmember tells marooned space travellers scientists have broken the Time Barrier within recent years, which lines up more neatly with his idea that Warp Drive is a relatively new invention in the Star Trek universe.Ancient AliensBeyond interfering with people who like writing timeline spreadsheets (thats me, Im those people) Roddenberry was also not afraid to go entirely off-piste. As the Enterprise flies out of the solar system to meet VGer, it refers to the so-called mutant-farm civilization of pre-history who had somehow received a gift of the secrets that would later be learned by Galileo. It also passes Io, which held some shocks for the first Earth scientists to land there but not as shattering as the discovery that Earths own moon had once served as a base for space voyagers (their identity still a mystery) who had conducted genetic experiments with Earths early life forms millions or more years before human history began.This leaning into Ancient Aliens lore had predecessors and descendants in on-screen Trek lore. Who Mourns for Adonis? had already introduced us to the idea that the gods of Greek myth had been powerful aliens. The Paradise Syndrome introduced us to ancient aliens who had scooped up Native Americans and transplanted them to alien worlds to continue undisturbed by European invaders. The unfairly maligned Animated Series would give us an episode where Satan himself would turn out to be a similar Ancient Alien, and also a thoroughly chill guy.Eventually the Star Trek The Next Generation episode The Chase would introduce us to the precursor civilization that had seeded sentient life across the galaxy (giving each world a different variety of bumpy forehead), while aliens have also been seen popping in to steal Amelia Earhart (Voyagers The 37s), towns from the Old West (Star Trek Enterprises North Star), and people sheltering from nuclear war (Star Trek Discoverys New Eden).Star Trek on screen wouldnt give us a glimpse of how humanity at large responds to discovering how often our history has been meddled with by other species until maybe Lower Deckss introduction of a member of the Greek God species in its last season (although maybe the Prime Directive is a clue).The Earth of Star TrekBut the really interesting parts of The Motion Picture novelization are the bits where we get to see a bit more of Earth. Even in the entire expanded on-screen Trek universe, Earth has always been a bit of a mystery. We only get glimpses of park-like areas surrounding glass and metal Starfleet buildings, the occasional recognisable cityscape with some monorails and domes thrown in, or close-ups of pedestrianised streets with horse-drawn carriages and people LARPing at running a restaurant or vineyard.And thats the thing Star Trek on screen has always been frustratingly vague about how humanity achieved post-scarcity, post-social inequality utopia (however much fans of the franchise whisper the answer is definitely Communism). As far as we can tell, people who live in this utopia have two choices of lifestyle Starfleet officer or scarcity-era historical re-enactment.So the most interesting bits of Roddenberrys book are the bits that let us see what The Great Bird of the Galaxy himself thought the utopia he had envisioned looked like. It is very different to the one we have in modern Trek.One of the first things to notice about Roddenberrys Future Earth is a question of scale. During the Enterprises flight out to meet VGer it not only passes Ancient Aliens archaeology digs, but also the scattered necklace of energy collectors linking Sol and Earth (Kirk cant remember if they were foreseen by Einstein and Clark, but I suspect the answer was Freeman Dyson), as well as planettes based on ONeills predictions a reference to the ONeill Cylinder, a space megastructure designed as a piece of NASA concept art, and frankly, the sort of thing the Star Trek universe could really stand to see more of.On Earth itself, one of the first places we visit is the island of Gibraltar, a location weve definitely never had cause to visit in the TV shows. Here we find a Starfleet office on top of a gigantic hydroelectric dam complex spanning Gibraltar, Africa and the Atlantic, apparently based on the Atlantropa concept proposed over the 1920s and 30s. Kirk comes here to speak to Starfleet seniority over a holographic video call Roddenberry having apparently forgotten that with TOSs flip-top communicators, he also invented the mobile phone.From here Kirk travels to Los Angeles, by tube. As well as being a delightfully batshit bit of futurism, is also potentially a sly attempt at bringing Roddenberrys failed Genesis II pilot into the canon (where a modern-day astronaut awakens from a suspended animated experiment to travel a post-apocalyptic Earth via its widespread underground subshuttle system).Perhaps most charmingly, as Kirk pulls into San Francisco, the always canonical home of Starfleet, he passes Alcatraz Childrens Park.The New HumansYet aside from all these megastructures, we also see innovations in microtechnology. Starfleet officers might not have mobile phones, but what they do have is senceivers, brain implants that allow Starfleet to send messages that appear in the recipients brain like a memory. In a nod to near future history, Roddenberry points out that Starfleet keeps these telepathic brain chips a secret to avert associations with the Mind Control Revolts of 2043 to 2047.But the thing is mind control seems to be a grey area, in the paradise of the 23rd century.Throughout the Starfleet canon, from TV to movies to videogames, books and comics, from the canon and approved to those annuals where the Enterprise bridge had seatbelts, the depiction of what a Starfleet officer is has remained the same. Starfleet officers are the bravest, the smartest, the most adaptable. A Reginald Barclay on the Enterprise is a 10 anywhere else. Whichever way you slice it, if you wear Red, Gold and Blue (or the beige, white and pale blue if were in the Motion Picture era) you are the absolute cream of humanitys crop. Not that humanity has a cream of the crop, you understand, because we have done away with all forms of discrimination. Ahem.But in his novel, Roddenberry pitches things a little differently.In Kirks preface to the novel, he notes that his masculine name is unusual in most circles, but not in Starfleet. We are a highly conservative and strongly individualistic group. The old customs die hard with us, he says, while conceding that Some critics have characterized us of Starfleet as primitives and with some justification.Kirk goes on to explain that early space travel for humanity was disastrous, full of ship disappearances, crew defections and mutinies. For all the dead redshirts in his wake, even Kirk stands out as exceptional for having returned from a five-year mission with so much of his ship and crew still intact. By the time of Star Trek, it is accepted those early disastrous missions were because Starfleets standards were too high.As Kirk explains, The problem was that sooner or later starship crew members must inevitably deal with life forms more evolved and advanced than their own. The result was that these superbly intelligent and flexible minds being sent out by Starfleet could not help but be seduced eventually by the high philosophies, aspirations and consciousness levels being encountered.To reiterate Starfleet policy is to recruit people too dumb to be won over by more advanced intelligences.So what is the rest of humanity up to if theyre not running Creole restaurants? This is where we come back to the mind control issue. Kirk describes Starfleet officers as not part of those increasingly large numbers of humans who seem willing to submerge their own identities into the groups to which they belong even as he accepts that these so-called new humans represent a more highly evolved breed, capable of finding rewards in group consciousness that we more primitive individuals will never know. If those descriptions sound a bit familiar, and indeed, sinister to a modern Star Trek fan, it is for good reason.It is basically a description of Number One Star Trek Villain, the Borg. A Borg who, possibly because they are too smart, is not as good at space travel as its primitive counterparts, who are sent out to explore the universe while the hivemind chills out at home and, this being Roddenberry, probably have a great deal of group sex.

As previously reported in January, the AirPods Pro 2 can now be used as hearing aids in the United Kingdom, having now received government approval for over-the-counter hearing aid devices.AirPods Pro 2 can address mild to moderate hearing loss. With an iPhone and AirPods Pro, users can perform a hearing test, and apply their hearing profile to their earbuds for continuous hearing correction. This functionality is all available as a free software update.In a statement, Apple says it is delighted to bring an end-to-end hearing health experience to its United Kingdom users.The Hearing Test is conducted by wearing a pair of AirPod Pro earbuds in your ears, and following the instructions on the connected iPhone. The test takes about five minutes to complete, and generates a report including a number representing detected hearing loss for each ear. Users can then simply apply that hearing profile to use their AirPods as a hearing aid. The audiogram is also saved in the Health app, if you want to have further discussions with a health professional. The hearing aid feature primarily helps you hear outside environment sounds, such as making it easier to hear what other people are saying. Additionally, the hearing profile is automatically applied when listening to music, movies, and other media on your Apple device.Even if you dont have hearing loss right now, Loud Sound Reduction can mitigate the impact of loud environmental sounds and help prevent damage. Loud Sound Reduction is enabled automatically, independent of the other Hearing Health features. These Hearing Health features are exclusively available with AirPods Pro 2, which were released in late 2022. First-generation AirPods Pro and AirPods 4, as well as AirPods Max and the entire Beats lineup, do not support it.Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed. FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.Youre reading 9to5Mac experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Dont know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Feb 24, 2025Ravie LakshmananSoftware Security / Data ProtectionAustralia has become the latest country to ban the installation of security software from Russian company Kaspersky, citing national security concerns."After considering threat and risk analysis, I have determined that the use of Kaspersky Lab, Inc. products and web services by Australian Government entities poses an unacceptable security risk to Australian Government, networks and data, arising from threats of foreign interference, espionage and sabotage," Stephanie Foster PSM, the Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, said."I have also considered the important need for a strong policy signal to critical infrastructure and other Australian governments regarding the unacceptable security risk associated with the use of Kaspersky Lab, Inc. products and web services."Foster further pointed out that entities are responsible for managing the risks arising from Kaspersky's extensive collection of user data and exposure of that data to extrajudicial directions from a foreign government that conflicts with Australian law.Under the new direction (002-2025) issued by the government, government entities are prohibited from installing Kaspersky's products and web services on government systems and devices, as well as removing all existing instances by April 1, 2025.That said, agencies may seek an exemption for the use of Kaspersky's software for what has been described as a "legitimate business reason" and ensure that appropriate mitigations are in place.Such exemptions must be time-limited and restricted to meeting requirements for purposes of meeting compliance and law enforcement functions.The move follows that of the U.S. which, in late June 2024, banned Kaspersky from selling its software and products in the country or issuing product updates to existing customers. The company exited the U.S. market in mid-July 2024.Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.SHARE

A full days work for Dora Manriquez, who drives for Uber and Lyft in the San Francisco Bay Area, includes waiting in her car for a two-digit number to appear. The apps keep sending her rides that are too cheap to pay for her time$4 or $7 for a trip across San Francisco, $16 for a trip from the airport for which the customer is charged $100. But Manriquez cant wait too long to accept a ride, because her acceptance rate contributes to her driving score for both companies, which can then affect the benefits and discounts she has access to. The systems are black boxes, and Manriquez cant know for sure which data points affect the offers she receives or how. But what she does know is that shes driven for ride-share companies for the last nine years, and this year, having found herself unable to score enough better-paying rides, she has to file for bankruptcy. Every action Manriquez takesor doesnt takeis logged by the apps she must use to work for these companies. (An Uber spokesperson told MIT Technology Review that acceptance rates dont affect drivers fares. Lyft did not return a request forcomment on the record.) But app-based employers arent the only ones keeping a very close eye on workers today. A study conducted in 2021, when the covid-19 pandemic had greatly increased the number of people working from home, revealed that almost 80% of companies surveyed were monitoring their remote or hybrid workers. A New York Times investigation in 2022 found that eight of the 10 largest private companies in the US track individual worker productivity metrics, many in real time. Specialized software can now measure and log workers online activities, physical location, and even behaviors like which keys they tap and what tone they use in their written communicationsand many workers arent even aware that this is happening. Whats more, required work apps on personal devices may have access to more than just workand as we may know from our private lives, most technology can become surveillance technology if the wrong people have access to the data. While there are some laws in this area, those that protect privacy for workers are fewer and patchier than those applying to consumers. Meanwhile, its predicted that the global market for employee monitoring software will reach $4.5 billion by 2026, with North America claiming the dominant share. Working todaywhether in an office, a warehouse, or your carcan mean constant electronic surveillance with little transparency, and potentially with livelihood-ending consequences if your productivity flags. What matters even more than the effects of this ubiquitous monitoring on privacy may be how all that data is shifting the relationships between workers and managers, companies and their workforce. Managers and management consultants are using worker data, individually and in the aggregate, to create black-box algorithms that determine hiring and firing, promotion and deactivation. And this is laying the groundwork for the automation of tasks and even whole categories of labor on an endless escalator to optimized productivity. Some human workers are already struggling to keep up with robotic ideals. We are in the midst of a shift in work and workplace relationships as significant as the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And new policies and protections may be necessary to correct the balance of power. Data as power Data has been part of the story of paid work and power since the late 19th century, when manufacturing was booming in the US and a rise in immigration meant cheap and plentiful labor. The mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who would become one of the first management consultants, created a strategy called scientific management to optimize production by tracking and setting standards for worker performance. Soon after, Henry Ford broke down the auto manufacturing process into mechanized steps to minimize the role of individual skill and maximize the number of cars that could be produced each day. But the transformation of workers into numbers has a longer history. Some researchers see a direct line between Taylors and Fords unrelenting focus on efficiency and the dehumanizing labor optimization practices carried out on slave-owning plantations. As manufacturers adopted Taylorism and its successors, time was replaced by productivity as the measure of work, and the power divide between owners and workers in the United States widened. But other developments soon helped rebalance the scales. In 1914, Section6 of the Clayton Act established the federal legal right for workers to unionize and stated that the labor of a human being is not a commodity. In the years that followed, union membership grew, and the 40-hour work week and the minimum wage were written into US law. Though the nature of work had changed with revolutions in technology and management strategy, new frameworks and guardrails stood up to meet that change. More than a hundred years after Taylor published his seminal book, The Principles of Scientific Management, efficiency is still a business buzzword, and technological developments, including new uses of data, have brought work to another turning point. But the federal minimum wage and other worker protections havent kept up, leaving the power divide even starker. In 2023, CEO pay was 290 times average worker pay, a disparity thats increased more than 1,000% since 1978. Data may play the same kind of intermediary role in the boss-worker relationship that it has since the turn of the 20th century, but the scale has exploded. And the stakes can be a matter of physical health. In 2024, a report from a Senate committee led by Bernie Sanders, based on an 18-month investigation of Amazons warehouse practices, found that the company had been setting the pace of work in those facilities with black-box algorithms, presumably calibrated with data collected by monitoring employees. (In California, because of a 2021 bill, Amazon is required to at least reveal the quotas and standards workers are expected to comply with; elsewhere the bar can remain a mystery to the very people struggling to meet it.) The report also found that in each of the previous seven years, Amazon workers had been almost twice as likely to be injured as other warehouse workers, with injuries ranging from concussions to torn rotator cuffs to long-term back pain. An internal team tasked with evaluating Amazon warehouse safety found that letting robots set the pace for human labor was correlated with subsequent injuries. The Sanders report found that between 2020 and 2022, two internal Amazon teams tasked with evaluating warehouse safety recommended reducing the required pace of work and giving workers more time off. Another found that letting robots set the pace for human labor was correlated with subsequent injuries. The company rejected all the recommendations for technical or productivity reasons. But the report goes on to reveal that in 2022, another team at Amazon, called Core AI, also evaluated warehouse safety and concluded that unrealistic pacing wasnt the reason all those workers were getting hurt on the job. Core AI said that the cause, instead, was workers frailty and intrinsic likelihood of injury. The issue was the limitations of the human bodies the company was measuring, not the pressures it was subjecting those bodies to. Amazon stood by this reasoning during the congressional investigation. Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel told MIT Technology Review that the Sanders report is wrong on the facts and that the company continues to reduce incident rates for accidents. The facts are, she said, our expectations for our employees are safe and reasonableand that was validated both by a judge in Washington after a thorough hearing and by the states Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals. A study conducted in 2021 revealed that almost 80% of companies surveyed were monitoring their remote or hybrid workers. Yet this line of thinking is hardly unique to Amazon, although the company could be seen as a pioneer in the datafication of work. (An investigation found that over one year between 2017 and 2018, the company fired hundreds of workers at a single facilityby means of automatically generated lettersfor not meeting productivity quotas.) An AI startup recently placed a series of billboards and bus signs in the Bay Area touting the benefits of its automated sales agents, which it calls Artisans, over human workers. Artisans wont complain about work-life balance, one said. Artisans wont come into work hungover, claimed another. Stop hiring humans, one hammered home. The startups leadership took to the company blog to say that the marketing campaign was intentionally provocative and that Artisan believes in the potential of human labor. But the company also asserted that using one of its AI agents costs 96% less than hiring a human to do the same job. The campaign hit a nerve: When data is king, humanswhether warehouse laborers or knowledge workersmay not be able to outperform machines. AI management and managing AI Companies that use electronic employee monitoring report that they are most often looking to the technologies not only to increase productivity but also to manage risk. And software like Teramind offers tools and analysis to help with both priorities. While Teramind, a globally distributed company, keeps its list of over 10,000 client companies private, it provides resources for the financial, health-care, and customer service industries, among otherssome of which have strict compliance requirements that can be tricky to keep on top of. The platform allows clients to set data-driven standards for productivity, establish thresholds for alerts about toxic communication tone or language, create tracking systems for sensitive file sharing, and more. An AI startup recently placed a series of billboards and bus signs in the Bay Area touting the benefits of its automated sales agents, which it calls Artisans, over human workers.JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES With the increase in remote and hybrid work, says Teraminds chief marketing officer, Maria Osipova, the companys product strategy has shifted from tracking time spent on tasks to monitoring productivity and security more broadly, because thats what clients want. Its a different set of challenges that the tools have had to evolve to address as were moving into fully hybrid work, says Osipova. Its this transition from Do people work? or How long do they work? to How do they work best? How do we as an organization understand where and how and under what conditions they work best? And also, how do I de-risk my company when I give that amount of trust? The clients myriad use cases and risks demand a very robust platform that can monitor multiple types of input. So think about what applications are being used. Think about being able to turn on the conversations that are happening on video or audio as needed, but also with a great amount of flexibility, says Osipova. Its not that its a camera thats always watching over you. Selecting and tuning the appropriate combination of data is up to Teraminds clients and depends on the size, goals, and capabilities of the particular company. The companies are also the ones to decide, based on their legal and compliance requirements, what measures to take if thresholds for negative behavior or low performance are hit. But however carefully its implemented, the very existence of electronic monitoring may make it difficult for employees to feel safe and perform well. Multiple studies have shown that monitoring greatly increases worker stress and can break down trust between an employer and its workforce. One 2022 poll of tech workers found that roughly half would rather quit than be monitored. And when algorithmic management comes into the picture, employees may have a harder time being successfuland understanding what success even means. Ra Criscitiello, deputy director of research at SEIUUnited Healthcare Workers West, a labor union with more than 100,000 members in California, says that one of the most troubling aspects of these technological advances is how they affect performance reviews. According to Criscitiello, union members have complained that they have gotten messages from HR about data they didnt even know was being collected, and that they are being evaluated by algorithmic models they dont understand. Dora Manriquez says that when she first started driving for ride-share companies, there was an office to go to or call if she had any issues. Now, she must generally lodge any complaints by text through the app, and any response appears to come from an automated system. Sometimes theyll even get stuck, she says of the chatbots. Theyre like, I dont understand what youre saying. Can you repeat that again? Many app-based workers live in fear of being booted off the platform at any moment by the ruling algorithmsometimes with no way to appeal to a human for recourse. Veronica Avila, director of worker campaigns for the Action Center for Race and Economy (ACRE), has also seen algorithmic management take over for human supervisors at companies like Uber. More than the traditional Im watching you work, its become this really sophisticated mechanism that exerts control over workers, she says. ACRE and other advocacy groups call whats happening among app-based companies a deactivation crisis because so many workers live in fear that the ruling algorithm will boot them off the platform at any moment in response to triggers like low driver ratings or minor traffic infractionsoften with no explicit explanation and no way to appeal to a human for recourse. Ryan Gerety, director of the Athena Coalition, whichamong other activitiesorganizes to support Amazon workers, says that workers in those warehouses face continuous monitoring, assessment, and discipline based on their speed and their performance with respect to quotas that they may or may not know about. (In 2024, Amazon was fined in California for failing to disclose quotas to workers who were required to meet them.) Its not just like youre monitored, Gerety says. Its like every second counts, and every second you might get fired. MICHAEL BYERS Electronic monitoring and management are also changing existing job functions in real time. Teraminds clients must figure out who at their company will handle and make decisions around employee data. Depending on the type of company and its needs, Osipova says, that could be HR, IT, the executive team, or another group entirelyand the definitions of those roles will change with these new responsibilities. Workers tasks, too, can shift with updated technology, sometimes without warning. In 2020, when a major hospital network piloted using robots to clean rooms and deliver food to patients, Criscitiello heard from SEIU-UHW members that they were confused about how to work alongside them. Workers certainly hadnt received any training for that. Its not Were being replaced by robots, says Criscitiello. Its Am I going to be responsible if somebody has a medical event because the wrong tray was delivered? Im supervising the robotits on my floor. A New York Times investigation in 2022 found that eight of the 10 largest US private companies track individual worker productivity metrics, often in real time. Nurses are also seeing their jobs expand to include technology management. Carmen Comsti of National Nurses United, the largest nurses union in the country, says that while management isnt explicitly saying nurses will be disciplined for errors that occur as algorithmic tools like AI transcription systems or patient triaging mechanisms are integrated into their workflows, thats functionally how it works. If a monitor goes off and the nurse follows the algorithm and its incorrect, the nurse is going to get blamed for it, Comsti says. Nurses and their unions dont have access to the inner workings of the algorithms, so its impossible to say what data these or other tools have been trained on, or whether the data on how nurses work today will be used to train future algorithmic tools. What it means to be a worker, manager, or even colleague is on shifting ground, and frontline workers dont have insight into which way itll move next. The state of the law and the path to protection Today, there isnt much regulation on how companies can gather and use workers data. While the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) offers some worker protections in Europe, no US federal laws consistently shield workers privacy from electronic monitoring or establish firm guardrails for the implementation of algorithm-driven management strategies that draw on the resulting data. (The Electronic Communications Privacy Act allows employers to monitor employees if there are legitimate business reasons and if the employee has already given consent through a contract; tracking productivity can qualify as a legitimate business reason.) But in late 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau did issue guidance warning companies using algorithmic scores or surveillance-based reports that they must follow the Fair Credit Reporting Actwhich previously applied only to consumersby getting workers consent and offering transparency into what data was being collected and how it would be used. And the Biden administrations Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights had suggested that the enumerated rights should apply in employment contexts. But none of these are laws. So far, binding regulation is being introduced state by state. In 2023, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was officially extended to include workers and not just consumers in its protections, even though workers had been specifically excluded when the act was first passed. That means California workers now have the right to know what data is being collected about them and for what purpose, and they can ask to correct or delete that data. Other states are working on their own measures. But with any law or guidance, whether at the federal or state level, the reality comes down to enforcement. Criscitiello says SEIU is testing out the new CCPA protections. Its too early to tell, but my conclusion so far is that the onus is on the workers, she says. Unions are trying to fill this function, but theres no organic way for a frontline worker to know how to opt out [of data collection], or how to request data about whats being collected by their employer. Theres an education gap about that. And while CCPA covers the privacy aspect of electronic monitoring, it says nothing about how employers can use any collected data for management purposes. The push for new protections and guardrails is coming in large part from organized labor. Unions like National Nurses United and SEIU are working with legislators to create policies on workers rights in the face of algorithmic management. And app-based advocacy groups have been pushing for new minimum pay rates and against wage theftand winning. There are other successes to be counted already, too. One has to do with electronic visit verification (EVV), a system that records information about in-home visits by health-care providers. The 21st Century Cures Act, signed into law in 2016, required all states to set up such systems for Medicaid-funded home health care. The intent was to create accountability and transparency to better serve patients, but some health-care workers in California were concerned that the monitoring would be invasive and disruptive for them and the people in their care. Brandi Wolf, the statewide policy and research director for SEIUs long-term-care workers, says that in collaboration with disability rights and patient advocacy groups, the union was able to get language into legislation passed in the 20172018 term that would take effect the next fiscal year. It indicated to the federal government that California would be complying with the requirement, but that EVV would serve mainly a timekeeping function, not a management or disciplinary one. Today advocates say that individual efforts to push back against or evade electronic monitoring are not enough; the technology is too widespread and the stakes too high. The power imbalances and lack of transparency affect workers across industries and sectorsfrom contract drivers to unionized hospital staff to well-compensated knowledge workers. Whats at issue, says Minsu Longiaru, a senior staff attorney at PowerSwitch Action, a network of grassroots labor organizations, is our countrys moral economy of workthat is, an economy based on human values and not just capital. Longiaru believes theres an urgent need for a wave of socially protective policies on the scale of those that emerged out of the labor movement in the early 20th century. Were at a crucial moment right now where as a society, we need to draw red lines in the sand where we can clearly say just because we can do something technological doesnt mean that we should do it, she says. Like so many technological advances that have come before, electronic monitoring and the algorithmic uses of the resulting data are not changing the way we work on their own. The people in power are flipping those switches. And shifting the balance back toward workers may be the key to protecting their dignity and agency as the technology speeds ahead. When we talk about these data issues, were not just talking about technology, says Longiaru. We spend most of our lives in the workplace. This is about our human rights. Rebecca Ackermann is a writer, designer, and artist based in San Francisco.

Submitted to Westminster City Council, the proposed jolly and mischievous structure, drawn up by the Archigram founder, will sit alongside this years Serpentine Pavilion by Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum, unveiled last month.The Serpentine Galleries said in planning documents that Cook had been invited to draw up a second summer pavilion inspired by Hadid, the architect behind the inaugural Serpentine Pavilion 25 years ago.Cooks hemispherical pop-up pavilion, which will stand between June and August, takes inspiration from Hadids credo that there should be no end to experimentation, which was also the title of a 2017 exhibition about her work, planning documents say.AdvertisementSitting on a circular base, the proposed play pavilion features timber walls and a hemispherical roof covering formed of faceted steel sections supported by four hidden steel columns. At its tallest point, the pavilion will reach 7.8m high.Planning documents say the dome roof will be of lightweight construction, using both translucent and opaque prestressed membranes to form the cladding. LEGO bricks will also be integrated into the multi-coloured faade of the 87m design.Cooks play-focused pavilion will be erected near to this years main Serpentine pavilion, which the Serpentine Galleries revealed last month is the brainchild of Tabassum: an architect, educator and founder of Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA).The 56-year-old Dhaka-born architects proposal for the temporary structure in Londons Kensington Gardens will be the 24th in the gallerys ongoing series of annual architectural commissions. It is due to open on 6 June and will remain open until 26 October.Cooks play pavilion is scheduled to open on 11 June and would run until 10 August, subject to planning.AdvertisementSerpentine Galleries have contacted for comment. Source:Peter CookPeter Cook's proposed Serpentine play pavilion (2025)Architects statementPlay transcends survival, achievement and common sense. It encourages, or at least permits us, to explore and idly delight in a territory between the wayward and speculative towards unashamed amusement.A pavilion, among the trees, neighbours a famous institution, sits across from the Serpentine 2025 pavilion, and is a hop, skip and a jump away from the iconic Serpentine Lake. It thus plays a reciprocal role the fool, the joker, the mischievous child offering audiences a chance to come inside, play WITH it and become part of this jolly thing.It is a piece of theatre. From a distance, intriguing shapes rise from within the structure, although partly obscured. Activities inside can be viewed through pierced and scooped walls, as if teasing 'come closer, theres more'. A child might pop out on a slide, another may crawl through a hole on the ground, mystifying conventional entrance routes. Another, mouth-shaped opening, reveals an orator, performer, or singer entertaining eavesdroppers beyond.The entire play pavilion is a graphic toy. Inside there are large swathes of textured panels inviting visitors to make their own castles, forests, homes, space-worlds or entirely random inventions, contributing to the overall Gesamtkunstwerk. Its a space for gatherings, small events, workshops and performances.The play pavilion is a dome with surfaces that vary in intensity. Its colourful dome transition toward a translucent base, playing against the vibrant towers, or stalagmites, rising from within. Active by day and dream-like at dusk, it glows like a lantern. In contrast to the austere monuments that populate the parks, it reminds us we should never take ourselves too seriously.Peter Cook, (in planning documents)

The planning inspectorate gave its consent on the controversial ceremonial funeral pavilion and a surrounding woodland burial site in Farnham, designed by the former Stirling Prize winner, earlier this month (8 February).McLaughlins scheme for a single-storey wooden structure with a thatched roof had faced local opposition, mainly due to fears over increased traffic in the area and its potential environmental impact.The plans, which also feature landscaping, a footpath and associated parking, were refused by Waverley Borough Council in March last year before the Ismaili Trust, the charity behind the project, lodged an appeal.AdvertisementExplaining the decision to approve the scheme following the planning inquiry in December, inspector Gareth Wildgoose said the site would be of significant benefit to London and south-east Englands Ismaili community, which had run out of space at another cemetery.Wildgoose added that it was appropriate to provide dedicated and dignified spaces for the process of ghusal, funeral, burial and post-burial rituals in a single consolidated location a space for all the different aspects of an Ismaili burial.Waverley Borough Council had claimed the scheme went against Farnhams local plan. The local authoritys head of planning had said: The proposed building, due to its size and scale together with its ancillary infrastructure, would affect the openness of the site, thereby impacting on the character of the area.However, the planning inspectorate said the applications impact on the surrounding landscape would be only slight and moderate/minor, with the proposals specifically designed to provide a peaceful, reflective, enclosed landscape, drawing on positive characteristics of its surroundings.Opposition to the scheme had also centred on concerns over increased road traffic, which Wildgoose said had been based on evidence necessarily focused upon the worst-case scenario of large-scale funerals at the site.AdvertisementThe Ismaili Trust had also spelled out that the scheme was a ceremony pavilion, not a building for daily worship, and there will be no calls to prayer.McLaughlins design, which can accommodate 181 persons, is designed for an average funeral size of about 40 people.McLaughlin said: We are pleased that the inspectorate has granted planning permission on appeal for this important project.We have been working on it since we won a competition in 2021. The Ismaili Trust has an impressive commitment to high-quality architecture and landscape design.We look forward to continuing our work with the trust to create a special place at the heart of the community for many years to come.A timeline for completion of the scheme is unknown.Architects statementThe aim of the project is to create a dignified and beautiful woodland burial site, complete with a funeral pavilion, for the Ismaili community.Nestled deep within the site, the pavilion is to be located at the intersection of a new tree-lined access path and a clearing within a woodland. The woodland will emerge through extensive tree-planting, including broad-leaved and fast-growing native species.The proposed building has been designed to serve both practical and spiritual needs, facilitating the Ismaili funeral rites whilst respecting and enhancing the immediate natural landscape setting.The pavilion is envisioned as a single-storey barn structure flanked by two low, flat-roofed volumes. The central barn, which contains the main hall, features a glulam timber portal frame that supports a pitched, thatched roof. The roof extends over the entrance, creating a sheltered drop-off area for mourners.The south-western wing will accommodate spaces for funeral attendees, while the north-eastern wing will house areas for the care of the deceased and other support functions. Natural materials such as timber and thatch, combined with newly planted grasses, shrubs and trees, will help the pavilion blend seamlessly into its woodland setting.Nall McLaughlin, principal, Nall McLaughlin Architects