1974 Star Trek action figures by Mego

“In the time of Nero, the Roman author Lucan wrote how the necromantic sorceress Erictho was tracked down (Roger Raupp illus. from AD&D 2e HR5: The Glory of Rome designed by David Pulver, TSR, 1993)

This is a wild, hopeful story: grad students at @Northeastern  successfully pushed back against digital workplace surveillance, through fearless solidarity and the bright light of publicity. It's a tale of hand-to-hand, victorious combat with the #ShittyTechnologyAdoptionCurve . 1/

What's the "shitty tech adoption curve?" It's the process by which oppressive technologies are normalized and spread. 3/

If you want to do something awful with tech - say, spy on people with a camera 24/7 - you need to start with the people who have the least social capital, the people whose objections are easily silenced or overridden. 4/

That's why all our worst technologies are first imposed on refugees -> prisoners -> kids -> mental patients -> poor people, etc. Then, these technologies climb the privilege gradient: blue collar workers -> white collar workers -> everyone. 5/

Northeastern's Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) is home to the "Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute," where grad students study the harms of surveillance and the means by which they may be reversed. 9/

If there's one group of people who are prepared to stand athwart the shitty tech adoption curve, it is the CPI grad students. 10/

Which makes it genuinely baffling that Northeastern Senior Vice Provost for Research David Luzzi decided to install under-desk heat sensors throughout ISEC, overnight, without notice or consultation. Luzzi signed the paperwork that brought the privacy institute into being. 11/

This is the kind of #FullStackLuddism  this present moment needs. These researchers aren't opposed to *sensors* - they're challenging the *social relations* of sensors, who gets sensed and who does the sensing. 51/