A ‘what if’ piece of speculative fiction
// As more and more components of life go online, what might result from it?
// 2040. A small corporate meeting room like millions of others, with two people typing on laptops.
Melinda looks up from the laptop - “Hey Eleda, looks like we have a level 9 incident, that may involve mobilizing the black bag team. I know you just shipped up and are still learning the ropes, so walk me through what we are doing from the top.”
Eleda straightens their corporate suit and rubs their eyes. “Roger that. We’ve got the deployed systems monitoring workers output. Code submissions, corp chat interactions, corp video conference participation, as well as general corp hardware usage, both phone and laptop. Then on a separate system, we’re monitoring the top Discord, Slack, and Telegraph groups where there may be union discussions.
“We then compare unknown account activity with work activity, as a way to filter down possible employees participating in union activities. If we see any ongoing correlations between union activity and non-work activity, we tag the accounts for next level analysis.
“Next level analysis involves correlating any crypto or other pseudo anonymous accounts and seeing if the people are participating in union-organizing DAOs or donating to union efforts.
Melinda - “Great first order analysis. How do we avoid detection?
Eleda - “We’ve got tens of thousands of sock puppet accounts. Most are newly created in the last few years, masquerading as early 20-somethings disgusted with the gig-economy. There is also a portfolio of older accounts that we’ve acquired over the years, some through simple phishing attacks, others through the purchase of exploits and password leaks. A handful we’ve done full pen-test attacks against.
Melinda - “So what does this level 9 alert mean?
Eleda - “This means we’ve found a match for active union organizing. Time to send an update to their employer who is paying us for ‘efficiency monitoring’.
Eleda looks out the magnified viewscreen image of Earth from the Akari Heavy Industries Space Station at Lagrange Point L4. - “I just wish this was all legal on Earth so we didn’t have to do the computation and analysis out here.”