Reading the article “TeleSUR and the Anonymous” by Eduardo Rothe made me cringe for a number of reasons.
For one, his argument is so divorced from the realities of office life that I can’t help but wonder whether the author has ever worked for a prolonged period of time in a large office setting.
Secondarily, he ascribes a sacrosanct aura to TeleSUR as a revolutionary organization and Venezuelan labor law that is a wretched form of fetishism and dogmatism.
Third he denies the necessity of a formal inquiry into charges that have been repeatedly made despite the ease which such an investigation could be accomplished.
Fourth, he conjectures that those expressing discontent in regards office policy may be “manipulated by the enemy” – exactly the type of stigmatization that makes a creative, constitutive enterprise like TeleSUR become stagnant and filled with ideological automatons that can recite the part catechism without missing a word but may not have the right skills to do good work.
The Realities of Office Life
Only someone that has never witnessed or experienced increased adversarial behavior by management or shunning by one’s co-workers for fear of being associated with them following a comment made that contests the correctness of management’s decisions, or something along that line, could make such an argument.
Eduardo Rothe’s criticism is so absurd as to also ignore the realities of changing jobs and the power that management has as a result of their recommendations and references for that person.
Black-listing of workers deemed problematic has long been a way of enforcing beliefs and disciplining workers. The black-list is not always of a quality wherein it is some secret document shared or comment made by management, but in the case of a media organization like TeleSUR becomes something that becomes discoverable by those doing due diligence before a hire.
It’s because of just such publicly available documents that I was able to create these biographies of the people that work at TeleSUR. It’s this document, for instance, that allowed me to connect the director of TeleSUR English, Pablo Vivanco, to RPRPR RPRPR of Time Magazine – and thus explain how such factually baseless news that reads more like an advertisement to be disseminated.
This sort of behavior is done in places where any murmur of discontent leads to major stigmatization by management. Anyone who receives such a mark of Cain suddenly has their entire manner of relating to others at work changed.
It means that people avoid talking to you in the office kitchen lest management sees or gets a report. It means you don’t get invited out to lunch or drinks with the same people lest management gets a report. One starts to wonder if their criticism about a new policy or deadline is going to make its way through the office grapevine, where a write up of insubordination or some other trivial cause now means that you are on the path out the door.
In a meeting, your voice may not have the same aura of authority; your insights – no matter how beneficial – may be categorically dismissed. You become the embodiment of why one should not speak up as people may make morale-killing wisecracks about your actions
In a media outlet that describes itself as wanting to be a constitutive force it sure is ridiculous that they’re not able to do more in order to create that. What normalizing such workplace behavior does is to limit the availability to attract highly skilled talent as those that have professionally developed themselves to fit such a role can easily find opportunities elsewhere, in a place where one need not fit a particular ideological mold.
The Aura of Unassailable Authority
It is the height of absurdity to state that because a law exists and means for investigating claims that laws were broken exists that such violations need not be publicized. A correlative to the above point, once someone submits information to the Ministry of Labor they are now on record as being someone that is a “problem”.
Furthermore, it’s the nature of government institutions to cover up the misdoings of other institutions. This is not some peculiarity of post-Chavez politics in Venezuela but is something that happens in the United States frequently. Police refer to it as the blue line, and its often times not until such a public furor happens – like in Ferguson – that suppressed realities become clear.
It’s for this reason that Rothe’s claim that the people who wrote the article to which he is responding are arguing for abstract principles completely misinterprets them. They are expressing a means of exercising a greater degree of control over their work through an onsite organization as they feel that the means by which they have to appeal are insufficient.
The Ease of Investigation via Digitization
Addressing the third issue, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, given the digitization of work and work schedules making an inquiry into the charges made by the anonymous employees does not take a significant amount of time. It not only becomes a means of determining whether or not these charges are true, but it allows for the objective identification of those that act contrary to a positive work environment. With this process in place, those identified as potential trouble sources can either receive more training on how to better do their job, be reassigned to some other position, or be told to leave if the problems found are significant.
Creating an Authoritarian Workplace
It’s exactly what Eduardo Rothe describes as desirable that extensive studies have shown to be exactly what makes workers dissatisfied, disengaged and unappealing to those that view authority in meritocratic terms. It’s why, in the United States, the private sector often finds it easier to attract highly skilled workers in various industries.
Innovation occurs when traditional methods for doing something and established boundaries are pushed. An enterprise such as TeleSUR, whose mission is the propagandizing towards the formation of a new type of political subjectivity by very definition requires such persons to resist the bureaucratic rationalizations that may look good on reports but on the ground have little to no import.
Twitter log in could have worked
In English, the benefits are:
Some of these sock puppet profiles even list Instagram accounts which, perhaps unsurprisingly, don’t have any posts.
