The Factory Has Gone Digital

Techno-Feudalism at Work: On the Performance of Productivity and the Metrics That Watch Us Back

This is a story about a mouse that moved, a screen that watched, and the quiet return of something we thought we’d left behind. Because before the algorithm, there was the foreman. Before the dashboard, there was the clock. The names have changed — but the pressure hasn’t.

The False Mirror by René Magritte (1929)

Green Status, Red Flags

It was a Thursday afternoon. The kind of grey, middle-of-the-week stretch where you’ve already drained the good coffee in the office, re-read the news headlines, and rearranged your desktop folders in a desperate bid to feel productive. I’d finished all my work by Tuesday—my manager was one of those drip-feed types, handing out tasks like breadcrumbs to a flock of pigeons. Except in this case, the pigeons had degrees and existential dread.

The manager hadn’t responded to my Teams message or the email I’d sent after submitting the analysis she requested—urgently, of course. We’d worked late to get it done. But by Thursday, radio silence. She wasn’t online (Teams status: Off), and she hadn’t been in the office, despite insisting we had to be.

So, naturally, I became a digital investigator. Not the trench coat and magnifying glass kind — the Teams-and-tabs kind. First stop: her Outlook calendar. Bare. Like, desert-bare. A few phantom meetings she clearly hadn’t attended. No updates. No notes. Nothing to suggest she’d been working or thinking or even pretending.

That’s when my work bestie wheeled her chair over, already knowing. No words needed. She cracked her knuckles. We were in this together now — the confusion had curdled into quiet rage. If we were being made to show up, we were damn well going to find out why she didn’t have to.

SharePoint next. We scanned the folders she was supposed to be reviewing — untouched. No recent activity. Nada. Then the team strategy files — not a single update past Q3. The silence was loud.

“Maybe she updated Asana?” I questioned, already doubting it as the words left my mouth.
A beat. Then we checked.

Quick aside: Asana, for the blessedly uninitiated, is what happens when a spreadsheet drinks a green juice and gets promoted to middle management. It tracks who’s doing what, by when, how long it took, what was delayed, who caused the delay, and who watched the delay happen without commenting. Everything is colour-coded and tagged and timed. It’s meant to create visibility — but mostly it creates a quiet fear that you’re not keeping up. Collaborative accountability. Or soft power with a cheery interface. Potato, potahto.

There was nothing in there either. No risk logs. No updates. No comments. No tasks assigned. Just the digital equivalent of tumbleweed and a smiley face icon.

And then — it happened.

She walked in.
Two rows away. Direct eyeline. No time to think. No time to breathe.

The SharePoint folder was still open on my screen, glowing like a digital confession.

My bestie and I locked eyes. Panic. Instant, mutual, silent. We smiled — the kind of stretched, unnatural smile only forged in fear and British politeness. I scrambled to close the tabs, hands suddenly too slow, too loud on the keyboard. But I left the folder open — just enough to monitor her movements.

She logged on. Cursor live. A little green dot.
Click. Click.
Right into the files we’d been snooping through.

My heart? Evacuated. Full-body horror. She was retracing our steps like it was UNO Flip and she’d just reversed the emotional damage.

We performed focus like our jobs depended on it. Fake typing. Slight nodding. An occasional squint at the screen. Office theatre at its finest.

Then — she stood up.
My stomach dropped. Steps approaching.

But no. She grabbed her coat, her cigarettes, and walked straight to the lift. No eye contact. No comment. Just silence, filtered through filtered aircon.

She left.
We exhaled — but we didn’t speak. Not yet.

The Feeling of Being Watched

I used to think timesheets were intrusive. A half-day summary, typed and filed, boxed and billed. It felt like a soft shackle. But in hindsight? That was mercy. Because at least it asked.

The new surveillance doesn’t ask. It listens. It counts. It never logs off.

You begin to understand that visibility is no longer passive. It’s something you perform. A mouse that must move. A message that must ping. A green dot that must stay lit, like a little neon plea: I'm here. I'm useful. I'm working.

And still, I always feel like—“Somebody’s Watching Me”

You know the song. It’s bright, it’s weird, it’s catchy. But underneath the synth-pop smoothness is something uncanny. That creeping vocal echo, the twitchy beat, the high-gloss paranoia — it’s theatrical, but also a little too close to home.

It’s a song about being watched while doing nothing particularly wrong. About being visible but not in control. About asking: Who’s watching? And why?

That it came out in the 80s, the era of neoliberal hustle, early digital systems, and the illusion of infinite progress, makes it even more fitting. That feeling? Of being turned into a product, a profile, a datapoint? It was already in the air. Synths just made it danceable.

Because when you add race, class, and office dynamics into the mix (when you're a young Black professional in a white, glass-box office) visibility becomes radioactive.

You’re not just observed. You’re interpreted. Translated. You feel your presence being managed before you even speak.

So you learn to smile. To nod. To stay in green. Not just to survive, but to soften the edges of your existence.

And yet, none of this is new.

The Machinery of Control

If the modern workplace feels like a performance, it’s because it is — but the script isn’t new. We’ve just updated the set design.

Detroit Industry Murals by Diego Rivera (1933)

During the Industrial Revolution, surveillance wasn’t hidden in metrics or green dots. It stood in plain sight. Foremen on the floor. Whistles cutting through the air. Clocks hung like commandments. Your value was your output, and your body was the machine.

Management didn’t need algorithms — it had presence. Authority was physical, visible, and loud.

Karl Marx called it alienation: the moment labour becomes disconnected from meaning.
Michel Foucault, later, would name it the panopticon — a design for a prison where inmates behave as if they’re being watched, even when they’re not. Surveillance not as force, but as architecture. As feeling.

Back then, the goal was obedience. Predictability. Efficient muscle.
Today? The body has been replaced by behaviour. But the logic is still control.

Soft Power, Hard Control: The Metrics That Mould Us

If the foreman once stood by the line, stopwatch in hand, today he lives inside your browser. Inside your workflow tools. Inside your keystrokes.

We’ve entered what Shoshana Zuboff calls the age of Surveillance Capitalism — but that term doesn’t quite sting the way it should. It sounds theoretical. Distant. Cold.
The reality? It's intimate. Emotional. Invasive.

In the factory, they extracted muscle. Now they extract behaviour. Thought. Emotion. Every pause. Every hesitation. Every open tab.

Your digital exhaust is hoovered up, repackaged, and resold — not just to advertisers, but to employers. You are optimised before you are understood.

Zuboff calls this your behavioural surplus — the unspoken residue of your online activity, analysed not to reflect who you are, but to shape who you might become.
It’s prediction as power.

This is no longer surveillance in the classic sense. You’re not just being watched — you’re being modelled.

Your inbox response time becomes a measure of commitment.
Your calendar density becomes a proxy for value.
Your “focus hours” become a dashboard widget.

Tools like Viva Insights, Microsoft MyAnalytics, or productivity scoring systems gather this data not to understand you, but to convert your behaviour into a forecast.

And forecasts can be monetised. Compared. Scored. Discarded.

In the factory, labour produced value.
In the open-plan office, data does.

The cruelty is quieter now. There’s no yelling foreman. Just gentle nudges, glowing metrics, and monthly performance reviews conducted with a smile.

The coercion has been rebranded as culture.

But make no mistake: this is extraction. And it’s worse than before — because it hides behind wellness webinars and soft power language.

At least in the factory, you knew you were being used. But the hierarchies? Still intact. The working class just has better Wi-Fi.

Reflection: On Being a Working Class Hero

John Lennon wrote a song that continues to resonate with those worn down by systems too vast to name — it was called:

“Working Class Hero”

As soon as you're born, they make you feel small.

By giving you no time instead of it all.

That’s not just a lyric — it’s a blueprint. From the moment we enter the world, systems and expectations wrap around us before we even speak: education, employment, debt, retirement.
Efficiency replaces curiosity. Metrics replace meaning. A life broken into segments and tracked by milestones.

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years.

Then they expect you to pick a career.

And when you finally enter the workplace — already frayed, already performing — you’re told to choose. As if there’s freedom in choosing which system will extract you.

The stress isn’t just in the work. It’s in the optics. The need to be seen working. Smiling. Delivering.
The performance of productivity becomes a kind of second skin — one that tightens the more you try to breathe.

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school.

They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool.

'Til you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules.

It’s not just exploitation. It’s fragmentation. By the time we enter the workforce, many of us are already so disoriented — by pressure, by pain, by contradiction — that we don’t know how to exist outside the system that breaks us.

This is the emotional toll no software measures. The performance of productivity. The erosion of trust.

The modern workplace has perfected this cycle. You’re rewarded not for your freedom, but for your compliance.
You’re not asked to think, only to respond. Quickly. Politely. Within the window of acceptable delay.

The cruelty isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s ambient. It’s in the tone of the feedback. The absence of support.
The systems that label you a “low performer” for being tired. Or quiet. Or different.

The cruellest part? The illusion of autonomy.

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV.

And you think you're so clever and classless and free.

But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

That’s the real trick. We’ve been made to believe we’ve escaped.
That this new world (with its glass walls and flexible hours and curated company values) is meritocratic.

That we’re professionals now. Knowledge workers.
That we’ve chosen this life.
That we are chosen, not coerced.

But the structure hasn’t changed.
It’s just been rebranded.

We work longer hours under softer lights.
We smile while being stripped for data.

There's room at the top, they are telling you still.

But first, you must learn how to smile as you kill.

And so we smile.
In check-ins. In stand-ups. In reviews where the feedback is vague and the anxiety precise.
We learn to say the right thing, at the right time, in the right tone.
We learn to be likeable, agreeable, available.
We learn to kill the parts of ourselves that resist.

And all the while, we are watched.
Not out of malice, but because our behaviour is valuable.
Our fatigue is data. Our hesitation, a risk flag. Our performance? A product.

Working Class Hero is something to be.

It's not an anthem.
It’s a reckoning.
A reminder that the system’s brilliance lies in its subtlety.

The old tools of domination — the ruler, the cane, the coal-stained factory — have been replaced by status updates, KPIs, and “How are you feeling today?” surveys.

We’re watched more closely than ever.
Not out of cruelty, but out of curiosity.

Because our behaviour is valuable.
Because our fatigue is monetisable.
Because our resistance is a risk metric.

And still—

Working Class Hero is something to be.

Not because it’s noble.
But because it’s inescapable.

The worker has changed.
The factory has changed.
The foreman is now an algorithm.

But the system?
Still watching.
Still extracting.
Still winning.

Where the Foreman Lives Now

I wiggled my mouse that afternoon to look busy.
She never said anything about the snooping.
Maybe she didn’t care.
Maybe she knew.

But I remember the moment — not because I felt caught.
But because I realised I’d become my own foreman.
And the factory floor?

It’s right here.
In the screen.

P.S. If this made you feel seen (or surveilled), say so.
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