Meet your digital twin
Max Hancock on simulation technology
“At long last,” announces a tech company in a viral post by the writer Alex Blechman, “we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.” While the titular technology of the dystopian TV show Severance — which splits employees into two selves, one always at work and one always off the clock — is mercifully still yet to materialize, our corporate overlords have already invented the next best thing, as Max Hancock explains in his Issue Sixteen essay “Model Employees.” Inspired by years of experimentation creating “digital twins” of the machines and materials in industrial factories, executives are increasingly fantasizing about creating virtual replicas of their workers that they can more easily surveil and control. As Hancock argues, new workplace technologies aren’t coming to eliminate your job; they’re coming “to make your job worse.”
Model Employees | The Dawn of Digital Twins
MAX HANCOCK
The first industrial revolution, in the middle of the eighteenth century, gave capitalists steam power and mechanization. The second, at the turn of the twentieth, ushered in electricity and the assembly line, and the third, some seventy years after that, computers. The fourth, apparently, will let middle management play The Sims.
Fascinating and unsettling in equal measure. The shift from digital twins for machines to digital twins for workers feels inevitable once managment realizes surveillance is easier than actual trust. Hancock's point about these tools making jobs worse rather than eliminating them completly reframes a lot of the automation debate.