Your New Software Isn’t Helping. It’s Watching.
The unspoken truth about enterprise software: it’s rarely for you, often for surveillance.
Trapped in the Digital Amber
The presenter’s voice is a low, hypnotic hum, the kind of sound you’d use to sedate a nervous animal. His name is Todd and he’s been talking for 26 minutes straight. The blue circle with his initials, TS, is the only sign of life from his end. On my screen, there are 46 black squares, each with a white name typed neatly at the bottom. Cameras off. Mics muted. This is the mandatory 6-hour training for ‘Project Synergy,’ a platform that promises to revolutionize how we collaborate. It looks exactly like the old platform, but the logo is a different shade of blue and now every action requires at least two extra clicks.
We’ve all been here. Trapped in the digital amber of a webinar, a silent hostage to progress. You feel the weight of your own skull, the slight ache behind your eyes. Your real work, the work that actually requires your brain, is piling up in another tab. You’re not learning; you’re enduring. This isn’t a workshop. It’s a compliance ritual.
Beyond the ‘Solution’ Facade
The unspoken truth about this kind of enterprise software is that it’s not for you. It was never for you. It wasn’t designed to make your day smoother, your tasks easier, or your workflow more intuitive. It was designed for the person who approved the $236,000 expense.
It was designed to generate reports. It was designed to give management a dashboard, a god’s-eye view of every click, every keystroke, every pause. It’s a surveillance system disguised as a solution.
The Metrics of Control
The pitch is always about ‘data-driven insights.’ What that really means is quantifying your every move so it can be measured against a baseline. It’s about turning the messy, creative, unpredictable act of work into a series of clean, analyzable data points. We’re told this will help optimize performance.
Performative Work
Actual Value
But what it really does is create a culture of performative work, where the appearance of being busy becomes more important than actually achieving anything of value.
The Cost of Compliance: Arjun’s Plunge
I was talking to a friend, Arjun H., who edits transcripts for a podcast production company. For years, his process was beautifully simple. He’d receive an audio file, open it in a basic audio editor, open a text document, and type. He was fast, accurate, and everyone loved his work. Last quarter, they rolled out ‘AudioFlowPro.’ Now, to even begin a transcript, he has to create a ‘Project,’ assign it a ‘Tier,’ tag it with at least 6 keywords from a pre-approved list, and log his estimated completion time.
“
As he works, he has to timestamp every hesitation, categorize every ‘um’ and ‘ah,’ and assign each speaker a role from a dropdown menu that has 16 different options for ‘Host.’
Arjun’s Transcription Speed
36% Plummet
-36%
Speed Reduced
His actual transcription speed has plummeted by 36 percent. But his ‘engagement metrics’ on the platform are incredible. His manager is thrilled. Arjun is now producing less, but his *activity* is more visible. His work is no longer just the clean text file at the end; it’s the trail of digital breadcrumbs he leaves behind in the system. The company can now generate reports on ‘Mean Hesitation Frequency’ and ‘Host-to-Guest Interjection Ratios.’ This data is utterly useless for creating a better podcast, but it looks fantastic on a slide deck.
My Own Dashboard of Deception
I’d love to sit here on a high horse and criticize this impulse, but I’ve been guilty of it myself. I once managed a small team and I championed the adoption of a monstrously complex project management tool. I was seduced by the Gantt charts, the resource allocation heatmaps, the burndown charts. I thought it would give me clarity. Instead, it gave us chaos. It added 46 minutes of administrative work to everyone’s day. We spent more time updating the status of tasks than actually doing them. The beautiful charts I presented in meetings were fictions we all collaboratively maintained to appease the system I had forced upon us.
It was a disaster, and it was my fault. I fell for the lie that more data equals more control, which somehow equals better outcomes. It doesn’t. It just equals more administration.
Features vs. Fundamentals
It’s a strange contradiction. The other day I was Googling someone I’d just met-a habit I’m not proud of, a quick, shallow dive into the curated data they’ve left behind. We scrutinize these digital footprints for clues about a person’s character, all while willfully ignoring the real-time, mandatory surveillance system we log into every morning at work. One feels like a violation of privacy, the other is just called Tuesday.
Complex & Feature-Rich
236 tiny parts, wobbly outcome
🌳
Simple & Durable
One job, perfectly executed
This all reminds me of the things we choose for our homes. You can buy a flat-pack bookcase that comes with 236 tiny parts, an Allen key, and a 16-page instruction manual filled with cryptic diagrams. You spend an afternoon of your life fighting with it, and it always ends up a bit wobbly. Or, you can find an old, solid piece of wood that was made by someone who understood what a shelf is for. It has no features. It just is. It holds books. It’s the same with the things we buy for our families. You can get lost in features and complexity, or you can find things that are simple, durable, and do their one job perfectly, like high-quality Newborn clothing Nz that is just soft, warm, and well-made. The goal shouldn’t be to accumulate features; it should be to solve a problem with the least amount of friction possible. The best tools, like the best furniture or the best clothes, are the ones you don’t have to think about.
The Perpetual Beginner
The most insidious part of this constant software churn is that it creates a state of permanent amateurism. You never get to master a tool. By the time you’ve finally discovered the hidden keyboard shortcuts and figured out the workarounds for its most annoying bugs, the company announces they’re migrating to a new system. The cycle begins again. Everyone is kept in a state of perpetual beginnerhood, slightly confused and dependent on the next 6-hour training session.
An expert is a threat. An expert knows the tool’s limitations. An expert can confidently say, ‘No, that’s a stupid way to do this.’ An amateur, however, assumes the problem is their own lack of understanding. They blame themselves, not the tool. This systemic inefficiency isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. It ensures compliance and stifles the kind of deep expertise that leads to real innovation, or worse, dissent.
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