Editor’s note: It hasn’t been a good year for public stupidity. In May, a Hydro One employee was fired for on-air harassment of a television reporter following a professional soccer game. Soon afterward, a TC Transcontinental employee was suspended after heckling a comic at an awards show. Both cases have raised interesting questions about the public and private self, as well as an employer’s responsibility to govern the latter at the expense of the former.
Today, Western News offers two takes on the topic.
Faculty of Information and Media studies professor Mark A. Rayner explores the notion through an original piece of fiction.
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By Mark A. Rayner
At the GruntWerx Board of Directors Meeting:
As you know, GruntWerx is the premier human relations solution provider to the world. Our products and services help the globe’s most influential companies maintain, improve and oversee their workforces.
As CEO, my personal mission has been to bring ridiculous value to the shareholders. And I have.
Before I reveal our latest plans, let’s step back, and see how I’ve accomplished this wonderful increase in the worth of our shares.
Over the past decade, we’ve seen a general decline in the privacy protections of the average consumer and worker: This has been helpful to our corporate mission. Concurrently, GruntWerx scientists and developers have created new technologies that have earned GruntWerx geometric share value growth since we went public three years ago.
Share value doubled when we unveiled our patented SocialWerx software. For those of you too busy to read the executive summary, let me explain. SocialWerx enables our corporate clients to crawl through every bit of personal data on the Internet and social networks, regardless of TOS contracts, to identify hiring risks, and problem employees.
Share value doubled again when we implemented our FaceWerx technology – a patented system that combines facial recognition software with the SocialWerx engine, enabling corporations to use imaging from any photographs or video posted online to identify hiring risks, difficult employees, and importantly, worker behaviors that are deemed problematic. We have the computing power to spider the Net in almost real time.
The best thing about FaceWerx? It does not rely on the vagaries of social media and virality. FaceWerx catches all behaviours deemed undesirable by our corporate clients.
It’s not up to us to decide what behaviours our corporate clients target. It’s up to them. It’s their right to decide. If they want to fire someone for behaving like a sexist idiot, they can. Same goes if they don’t like someone’s politics, or religion, or the weird flash fictions they write online. We just provide the tools.
Last year, we introduced the OptionWerx system, which allows wealthy individuals the opportunity to be omitted from our searches. We have set this premium so high that only the wealthiest of executives can afford to pay, and so, our overall products are unaffected. (And I hope you enjoy your complimentary membership in OptionWerx, you scamps.)
But onto the future of GruntWerx. Our R&D has yielded results again.
It is my great pleasure to introduce to you, for the first time, our new ThoughtWerx line of products. Yes, now we can read the thoughts and intentions of consumers and workers everywhere. Can you imagine how much our clients will be willing to pay for that? And the share value?
Investors are going to lose their minds.