Tech platform Intuit® is doing its part to ensure its employees stay woke and sufficiently nervous by upping the ante when it comes to left-wing McCarthyism.
Intuit uses Slack, which if you have never heard of it is an in-house chat feature designed to let colleagues or coworkers communicate with one another and share files and documents. Microsoft has a similar feature which is used in another place I work. And yes, these systems can increase productivity but they can also be pipelines for lots of chatter, jokes, and memes. Meme after meme after meme. So they are also effective wastes of time when you want them to be.
The sensitive and enlightened minds at Intuit have created an AI bot that keeps an eye on corporate Slack channels. That’s not alarming in and of itself, since it is easy to get carried away on those applications during the day and management needs to step in now and again to remind everyone to apply noses and shoulders to the proverbial grindstones and wheels. However, Intuit’s bot is not designed to increase productivity. It’s there as to serve the corporate Thought Police.
The bot scans the Slack channels for non-inclusive language and politely suggests alternatives in a private message. What can get you a message from the bot? Any number of things including terms like “white glove” “black/whitelisted” and even “grandfathered.” As the Post Millennial points out, when it comes to languages in which words have genders, the bot could really turn writing a basic email into a veritable bull ride. And as you might have guessed, the company has a suggested reading list made up of the usual suspects. You can read the public version of the company’s policies here.
This would be a nightmare for a normal person who does not check all of the right boxes and just wants to put in their time and go out for a beer after work. But even for the woke employees, it has to be tricky, to say the least, to constantly avoid detection by the diversity drone and a subsequent knock on their cubicle from the company’s Ministry of Truth. Of course, there is a way to anonymously turn in coworkers who are not compliant. Maybe the informant gets to go to moderate the next diversity seminar/drum circle/struggle session, while the culprit has the choice of being fired or having an angry young woman in a car scream at them at the top of her lungs for a YouTube video.
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According to its website, Intuit “powers prosperity” with things such as TurboTax®, QuickBooks, Mint® Credit Karma, and Mailchimp. So chances are you have probably used their products before, or at the very least have come in contact with them a time or twelve. Probably even more than that.
Armed with this information, you could announce to friends, family, and whoever follows or trolls you on social media that you are no longer going to use these services. And that might hold their attention for about 4.5 seconds. 6.5 if it’s a slow day on the newsfeed. You might even pick up a few snotty replies and some thumbs-up emojis. You see that every time someone posts a story about Disney and everyone follows up with posts that they will no longer watch the movies or visit the parks and that Walt is spinning in his grave. Then it all goes away until the next related story.
But the truth is that boycotts can work and I, for one, am not opposed to them, although admittedly they are tougher to do in the age of the Internet of Things and corporate giants. Like Disney. But would it kill us to decrease our corporate footprint? Sure, It could be inconvenient as hell, but ask yourself how you feel about giving money to companies that don’t care about you and for that matter think you are a racist or a (fill-in-the-blank)-phobe? At this point in American history woke corporations are unavoidable to a certain degree, but why not make more informed and conscious choices about where you spend your money? Doing right is still doing right, even if it is on a micro, not a macro, level. A buck not spent on a woke corporation is a buck that at the very least can be used for the aforementioned beer after work.
And another thing — in the end, woke companies do not care about doing the right thing. They really don’t care about the “victims.” They care about making their money wherever possible, and maintaining as much economic power as they can when everything is said and done. Wokeism in the 2020s is the same as Swatches in the 1980s. A fashion statement. A status symbol. (As an aside, if you are too young to remember Swatches, you didn’t miss much.) And the fact is, if they can make a profit by kicking you in the head, so be it. And eventually, you will get your kick in the head. Hell, even Microsoft Word is monitoring content for inclusiveness now. As I used to tell my listeners back in the day, sooner or later, “they” will get around to you. The employees at Intuit know that now and eventually, you will, too.
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