The Slackening

Forget getting fired through Slack. Consider getting hired into a new Slack. Congratulations! And what fun — different slackbot responses, new channels, and — unlike an IRC channel, where you can only see messages from the time you connect going forward — a whole lot of scrollback. And if you work for a real company, which you should, it’s probably a paid Slack, with full access to the channel’s entire history. It is a truth universally acknowledged that an individual in possession of an archive of his peers’ commentary will type his own name into the search bar in the upper-right-hand corner.

Slack is dangerous for many reasons, not least of which is that, as Awl alumnus Matt Buchanan tweeted (and will inevitably and wisely delete), it’s a place you can “low-level LARP your job…while you wait to get to the office to perform it at a higher level.” Thanks to instant messaging clients, work qua work has become more social than ever. On a sociological level, Slack is a fascinating product, but on a personal level, it can be a horrifying one, because after all, these are logs of chat. Chatter! But also corporate chattel. Not handwritten (lol) correspondence, not carefully drafted emails, and certainly not something you’d expect a poor first-year at a white-shoe firm to have to wade through during doc review. In the wake of Hulk Hogan v. Gawker trial, former Gawker editor-in-chief Max Read wrote for New York:

The rise of workplace chat software — Slack, HipChat, Campfire, and even Google Hangouts — has been a boon to many tech and media companies. Lowering the threshold of communication eliminates productivity-costing energy expenditures like “standing up and walking over to someone.” Problems can be dealt with more efficiently, questions can be answered more quickly, and gossip can flow much more freely than ever before.

Which might be fine, if all that gossip wasn’t being archived in a searchable database. We’ve gotten so used to talking with our co-workers over Slack that we tend to forget it has an essential difference compared with in-person conversations: permanence. The ephemerality of face-to-face communication is a feature and a bug. The usefulness of being able to search your conversations with your boss to figure out exactly what he’s asking for turns into a major liability when it also includes you bitching with co-workers about him in a private chat.

While I am loath to admit that Dave Eggers might have been right about anything, I do think The Circle hit on an important feature in our modern world, if not in form then in function. Possibly much more damning than the images we capture of every last horrible and wonderful thing that happens in the world, from a police officer shooting an innocent child to a couple embracing on Google Street View, is the increasing accumulation of raw, unfiltered commentary. Slack is one long backchannel, and the whole point of a backchannel is that it’s a room behind closed doors. But guess what, the room is bugged. Those of you who use Slack will recognize that when someone mentions your name or your handle, the software gives you a little yellow highlight, and possibly even a desktop notification. On mobile, maybe your phone buzzes in your pocket. What if that same code were to be applied anywhere your name appeared, even in someone’s private messages?

I walk around telling people I think privacy is an illusion, which is not to say I don’t think it’s a right. But the more of ourselves we put directly into the ones and zeroes, the easier it will be for them to betray us. We’ve never been closer to actual, literal mind-reading! (The grave danger here of course being a false equivalence of Other People’s Thoughts with The Truth.) I have always assumed that when I die, my children or relatives will gain access to my full digital archive, passwords or no. And I hope that when they do, they will forgive me my inconsistencies, my typos, and all of my least charitable thoughts. But that time may come sooner for some of us, and it will be our employers looking instead of our families and friends. There, among the links shared, code pasted, and work products delivered, will be all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly, and horrible-looking stuff, and a whole lot of GIFs of dragons fucking hatchbacks. What will they find, and how forgiving will they be? And what will it say about me?