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Simon Head

Sunday 7th of December 2025

Big Brother … in their capacity to track employee performance, to speed it up, to measure it against targets, managers at Walmart and Amazon are empowered in ways that their predecessors of a century ago could only dream of. Simon Head, Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Humans Dumber © 2016 Kwiple.com
Capitalism Here then is the transfer to Chinese soil lock, stock and barrel of the dual systems of management control that define contemporary American capitalism: the transfer of Business Process Reengineering, with its shaping of horizontal business processes in both manufacturing and services, and Corporate Panoptics, with its empowerment of top management with the electronic representations of the corporate organism in its entirety and in real time. Simon Head, Mindless © 2016 Kwiple.com
Technology … a contrarian indicator of this growing industrialization of the service economy is the rapid and parallel growth of the concierge economy, in which very high- income consumers use their financial muscle to escape reliance on the defective, mass-produced services available to middle- and lower-income consumers. So there are concierge doctors on Park Avenue and mass-production doctors with HMOIs … In the concierge economy, the relationship between technology and work is turned on its head and information systems are used to supplement rather than replace the skills of employees. There are no digital scripts at the Goldman Sachs private bank. Simon Head, Mindless © 2016 Kwiple.com
 
White-collar workers What we are witnessing is the emergence of a new white-collar working class, subject all the regimentation and discipline of its predecessor, but lacking the latter's solidarity, its willingness to organize and to fight its cause in the workplace. Simon Head, Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Humans Dumber © 2016 Kwiple.com