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Our Hero

Early humans found hollowed out rocks to turn into homes, originating the term “Cave men”. ¹ This constraint made community difficult, so humans advanced to creating homes from natural materials, such as wood. Primitive homes were modeled on the cave, with nothing but some closed walls and an uncovered opening. Thousands of years of evolution lead us to create doors that open, close, and lock, and windows that allow us to see out and in, then glass to keep what’s out out and what’s in in, then curtains to cover what’s both out and in. In the end, we have the same caves we had before, with our darkness and privacy.

In the 1600′s the Dutch East India company was like the Wal-Mart of the high seas. If you worked on a ship for the DEI, actually called VOC, but let’s not have an acromania tournament over it, you lived day in and day out with the other people on the ship. Everyone knew everyone’s business, and that’s just how it was. There would be no need to do a status update when you went to the head, because everyone watched you go.

With the onset of industrialization and assembly-style production in the 1900′s, factories became central to small towns and people began working together, but their was a similar environment of everyone knew everyone’s family and friends and kids and lifestyle. There just weren’t a lot of secrets. Only in the last 50 years have we moved to the cubiclised, white-collar, technically-oriented jobs where turnover is an expectation and no one really bothers to get to know everyone else. Cliques form, but on the whole there isn’t a sense of community.

In a relatively short span of time, we created a generation and a culture that has a “right to privacy.” We have seen this concept denied by courts who say employers can regulate lifestyle as a condition of employment, and that what an employee does outside of work can still be used against her at work. Drinking, drugs, cigarettes, and even functions allowed to be attended can all be used as conditions of employment in our “right to work” world.  Though it has been upheld time and time again, the belief in this right grows ever stronger.

The political buzzword of the last decade has been “transparency.” We the people should have an open window on the workings of our government, of our corporations, of our financial institutions. We should see how the cogs turn and the deals are made, we should have open access to it all. At the same time, a subculture of companies has grown around controlling the online image of individuals. Ex-boyfriend posted some risque pictures of you? They can fix that. You got fired from your old job for coming to work drunk, and some people decided to blog about it? They can fix that. From the benign to the outright slanderous, companies that specialize in online identity rehab are doing bang up business curing the internet of individuals’ indiscretions.

Should it matter? Should you want to work for a company that would use your facebook status update about hating filing against you in an interview? Does that tweet about being drunk at the Alice In Chains concert make you a bad person or in any way impact your job performance? Are companies better off pretending that their employees don’t have a personal life? Maybe this is the wake up call that companies need to start treating their employees like people. Maybe it’s time to open up the door to the cave and not worry about what others will see, because their cave door is wide open too.

^{1. This is rather vague and unresearched proposition, because this is a tech blog and not an anthropology blog. Please do not blame us when you crib this and fail your class.}

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