Think VAR is ruining the World Cup? Your workplace is next
The rise of digital twins
Replay technology has long served up fodder for intense arguments among sports fans, but the hyper-sophisticated system FIFA has deployed at this year’s World Cup has generated a series of controversies that threaten to overshadow what human beings are doing on the field. Most recently, and most dramatically, Argentina’s miraculous comeback over Egypt in the Round of 16 was aided by the decision to overturn a pivotal Egyptian goal on the recommendation of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR), fueling longstanding accusations of FIFA favoritism toward Lionel Messi’s team.
According to Wired, the version of VAR in use at this year’s World Cup “represents some of the most advanced uses of adjudication tech to date — not just in soccer, but across all high-level sports.” One important and especially controversial dimension is the “digital twin” technology with which replay officials simulate everything on the field to determine the exact position of a player, down to their shoe size, relative to the ball, other players, and boundary lines. “You would find it difficult to find a true fan who thinks this goal should have been disallowed,” former Premier League referee Andy Davies wrote of a last-minute score by Colombia in group play overturned because centre-back Davinson Sánchez’s digital twin was found to be offside by the tip of his foot.
As Max Hancock explained in The Drift last year, however, the contemporary craze for digital twins goes far beyond FIFA — and has made its way into both industrial and white-collar workplaces. Enticed by promises of drastic improvements to productivity and efficiency, bosses have so far realized only marginal gains from digital twins, but their main effect has been the intensification of surveillance and discipline for ordinary employees. “Simulations aren’t coming to steal your job,” Hancock writes. “They’re coming to make your job worse.” Just ask Davinson Sánchez.
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.