#shitty social workers

[mueritos]

its crazy how coming into clinical social work, i really just thought I was up against systems and cycles of trauma....but it turns out i'm up against those two things AND other therapists. the amount of work spent correcting mistakes from other clinicians--whether with clients or during the classroom--is fucking crazy.

i totally get we're all on different journeys in terms of being clinicians. but it is insane finding out day after day of therapists and clinicians saying the worst things ever to clients. demeaning them, telling them "it's all in their head", the racism and the ableism and harm that is caused. like no fucking wonder people are afraid to seek therapy (on top of the accessibility issues). while i'm a little biased and think that at the very least clinical social work training focuses on viewing people within their environments (so not engaging in the medical/individualist models of practice that a lot of counseling programs focus on), that doesn't mean it gives every person the skills to be an effective therapist. i'm also not saying i'm the best clinician ever--I'm literally in training--but boy! it is jarring seeing how some of my peers interact in class and wondering...is that how you are with your clients??

my social work program at the very least also has a focus on anti-racism, but i know students from other programs and some of them don't even mention racism AT ALL and focus entirely on diagnosing people "correctly", or finding the perfect form of therapy to use on a client. but man, what none of these programs teach are basic life skills. wanting to be a clinician isn't enough, especially considering that an inhumane amount of people in my program are 1. so nervous about making mistakes that they lose scope of their practice 2. have so much internalized racism/white guilt to work thru 3. or they have absolutely no listening skills.

again, im not trying to make it seem like I am the number 1 clinician in the world ever. I don't even have a psych background or bachelor's in social work. my reasons for going into social work are quite selfish (I want a job that is very flexible, easily transferable, and can be done in different contexts), and the helping people part is just a plus. i'm just saying it's very jarring seeing other people in training and realizing they too are working with clients. i have conversation after conversation about these issues with other BIPOC/queer/marginalized clinicians, so I know i'm not the only person worried about some of the people that will be out of this program in a few years practicing on their own or with vulnerable populations.

[brettdoesdiscourse]

Just by the way. Always be wary around people who say, "it's the boss' job to pay you a fair wage" when discussing tipping.

Because while this is absolutely true, it's usually not coming from a good place.

People who say this very often don't mean, "it's the boss' job to pay you a fair wage and they aren't, so I'm boycotting supporting businesses that exploit their workers."

A lot of people who say this actually mean, "it's the boss' job to pay you a fair wage and they aren't, but I'm going to continue using this service and not tip because it's not my problem that your job is exploiting you."

Always be wary around people who say, "it's the boss' job to pay you a fair wage" because a lot of times, they're just using it to make themselves feel better about their choices.

[crimeronan]

GSAHJJhhhhh that's so fucked but so funny... i guess they'd figure out it was belos eventually but how long is hunter going to be running on the assumption that camila Evilly removed luz's memories for nefarious parental reasons. how hard is he going to want to throttle amity about this.

god. truly everything about the situation is awful but you're right, there IS some hilarity in amity temporarily being luz's Favorite. hunter -- who fully knows luz is under some kind of spell, and is trying So Hard to be gentle n not freak her out -- being like "blight. i know this isn't your fault. but i can't say it in front of luz. i have never wanted to kill you so bad in my LIFE,"

[fvckw4d]

My roommate when she was ordering food 3 times a day: hey I know you're disabled and have to cook all your meals, but when are you gonna move heavy boxes out of the way for me? Why didn't you mop the floor? Why are there still dishes in the sink? That's so gross. Yeah I'm just the kind of person who needs to clean dishes immediately after making food, otherwise it bothers me. You know we need to all clean out the fridge and pantry together. Are you going to get this thing I didn't buy for the household when my other roommate moved out? Can you get something at the store for me?

My roommate when she had to cook herself dinner: yeah Im sorry I didn't pick up weed for you like I offered, I didn't even bother going out because I realized I had to choose between cooking and errands. Next week, ok? Also, I piled all my big pots and pans in the sink without rinsing them out, I was just so exhausted. I didn't bring in the trash can either.

[piplupod]

i feel a feeling that is genuinely intolerable and go "okay what do i do with this"

therapist brain says "feel ur feelings, its unhealthy to suppress all the time." rational brain says, "hi if we sit with this emotion then we are going to either be bleeding or dead in approximately ten minutes. so whats another option." therapist brain goes "wellll i guess in that case maybe u can distract urself idk, that can be a coping strategy sometimes." rational brain glances at emotion, shakes its head and shoots back "yeahhhh no can do there bud. this one's a real whopper and distractions ain't gonna cut it this time."

both sections of the brain shrug at each other and then The Disorder brain raises its hand smugly and simpers out "hiiii remember me? yeah this is the reason i exist teehee :) give me five minutes and I'll have an amnesia wall erected and another part of the brain shoved into the forefront and then we'll be right as rain! and this emotion can go rot in the locked cabinet of horrors until another part accidentally stumbles upon it again in the future or until the lock breaks. :)"

[cheeseburgersinparadise]

man I rly wish society valued social workers and didn’t raw dog em from every available orifice and then throw a dirty dollar bill at them as compensation

[dokyeomini]

i got so much new information through the grapevine (my friends) my brain is sore

[marmett]

also i think the person concluded that u should have been a social worker instead. which like.... i dont rlly like how so many ppl are like we dont need cops!!! replace them w/ social workers!!! as if social workers arent also involved in shitty oppressive practices. i have classmates (and professors!) who think institutionalization is ok and have worked in psych hospitals. also in the US social workers supported eugenics.

[robertsbarbie]

do you know what drives me batshit fucking insane??? is that my ex is a fucking game designer, and no not programming he actually designs like the actual artwork and it’s like! what the fuck! what the fuck! how are we going into similar fields! why the FUCK are we somehow going down similar paths when neither one of us even HINTED to doing design work like just what the fuck!

[stonersolana]

people who choose to stay with shitty people annoy the crap out of me

[the-adas]

people love to be loud and wrong about tech and people who work in it

[thelikesoffinn]

Switching from a high-stress job into a chilled out one is a good idea...

...but maybe not for everyone.

I don't think it was one for me.

Was I tired while working my old job? Yes. Was it difficult? Also yes. Did I suffer? A bit, yeah. But did I still enjoy it? Also yes.

And now? Now I'm just BORED all day. I feel like I don't use my brain at all. I just stand around, clean up, change nappys and make sure that kids don't kill each other.

I love my colleagues and I like the kids, but damn it's boring. I'm wilting as we speak.

Needless to say, I don't think this job really is for me and I think I'll need to keep looking for something else - sigh.

[dead-pidove-do-not-eat]

When people say they’re okay with AI and machines taking over jobs that are overly cumbersome, tedious and annoying for humans, I really hope they mean something like data analysis where it’s used as a tool to save time for the analyst when there’s a lot of working parts, and not like customer service jobs, like a cashier, because corporations won’t implement the very fucking simple quality of life policy that they won’t tolerate customer’s abuse towards their employees.

[liberty-spiked]

i will rip my healthcare insurance companies head off i swear to god.

so they switched my main care provider which i was already pissed about to someone that doesnt take patients in my town?? do they even TALK to the fucking doctors they assign people to?

so now i have to risk it, go to a doc in my town and might pay that bill myself because those fucking useless pieces of shit cant do their fucking job right.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

"Don't spy on a privacy lab" (and other career advice for university provosts)

This is a wild and hopeful story: grad students at Northeastern successfully pushed back against invasive digital surveillance in their workplace, through solidarity, fearlessness, and the bright light of publicity. It’s a tale of hand-to-hand, victorious combat with the “shitty technology adoption curve.”

What’s the “shitty tech adoption curve?” It’s the process by which oppressive technologies are normalized and spread. If you want to do something awful with tech — say, spy on people with a camera 24/7 — you need to start with the people who have the least social capital, the people whose objections are easily silenced or overridden.

That’s why all our worst technologies are first imposed on refugees -> prisoners -> kids -> mental patients -> poor people, etc. Then, these technologies climb the privilege gradient: blue collar workers -> white collar workers -> everyone. Following this pathway lets shitty tech peddlers knock the rough edges off their wares, inuring us all to their shock and offense.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

20 years ago, if you ate dinner under the unblinking eye of a CCTV, it was because you were housed in a supermax prison. Today, it’s because you were unwise enough to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for “home automation” from Google, Apple, Amazon or another “luxury surveillance” vendor.

Northeastern’s Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) is home to the “Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute,” where grad students study the harms of surveillance and the means by which they may be reversed. If there’s one group of people who are prepared to stand athwart the shitty tech adoption curve, it is the CPI grad students.

Which makes it genuinely baffling that Northeastern’s Senior Vice Provost for Research decided to install under-desk heat sensors throughout ISEC, overnight, without notice or consultation. The provost signed the paperwork that brought the privacy institute into being.

Students throughout ISEC were alarmed by this move, but especially students on the sixth floor, home to the Privacy Institute. When they demanded an explanation, they were told that the university was conducting a study on “desk usage.” This rang hollow: students at the Privacy Institute have assigned desks, and they badge into each room when they enter it.

As Privacy Institute PhD candidate Max von Hippel wrote, “Reader, we have assigned desks, and we use a key-card to get into the room, so, they already know how and when we use our desks.”

https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578048837746204672

So why was the university suddenly so interested in gathering fine-grained data on desk usage? I asked von Hippel and he told me: “They are proposing that grad students share desks, taking turns with a scheduling web-app, so administrators can take over some of the space currently used by grad students. Because as you know, research always works best when you have to schedule your thinking time.”

That’s von Hippel’s theory, and I’m going to go with it, because the provost didn’t offer a better one in the flurry of memos and “listening sessions” that took place after the ISEC students arrived at work one morning to discover sensors under their desks.

This is documented in often hilarious detail in von Hippel’s thread on the scandal, in which the university administrators commit a series of unforced errors and the grad students run circles around them, in a comedy of errors straight out of “Animal House.”

https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578048652215431168

After the sensors were discovered, the students wrote to the administrators demanding their removal, on the grounds that there was no scientific purpose for them, that they intimidated students, that they were unnecessary, and that the university had failed to follow its own rules and ask the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to review the move as a human-subjects experiment.

The letter was delivered to the provost, who offered “an impromptu listening session” in which he alienated students by saying that if they trusted the university to “give” them a degree, they should trust it to surveil them. The students bristled at this characterization, noting that students deliver research (and grant money) to “make it tick.”

[Image ID: Sensors arrayed around a kitchen table at ISEC]

The students, believing the provost was not taking them seriously, unilaterally removed all the sensors, and stuck them to their kitchen table, annotating and decorating them with Sharpie. This prompted a second, scheduled “listening session” with the provost, but this session, while open to all students, was only announced to their professors (“Beware of the leopard”).

The students got wind of this, printed up fliers and made sure everyone knew about it. The meeting was packed. The provost explained to students that he didn’t need IRB approval for his sensors because they weren’t “monitoring people.” A student countered, what was being monitored, “if not people?” The provost replied that he was monitoring “heat sources.”

https://github.com/maxvonhippel/isec-sensors-scandal/blob/main/Oct_6_2022_Luzzi_town_hall.pdf

Remember, these are grad students. They asked the obvious question: which heat sources are under desks, if not humans (von Hippel: “rats or kangaroos?”). The provost fumbled for a while (“a service animal or something”) before admitting, “I guess, yeah, it’s a human.”

Having yielded the point, the provost pivoted, insisting that there was no privacy interest in the data, because “no individual data goes back to the server.” But these aren’t just grad students — they’re grad students who specialize in digital privacy. Few people on earth are better equipped to understand re-identification and de-aggregation attacks.

[Image ID: A window with a phrase written in marker, ‘We are not doing science here’ -Luzzi.]

A student told the provost, “This doesn’t matter. You are monitoring us, and collecting data for science.” The provost shot back, “we are not doing science here.” This ill-considered remark turned into an on-campus meme. I’m sure it was just blurted in the heat of the moment, but wow, was that the wrong thing to tell a bunch of angry scientists.

From the transcript, it’s clear that this is where the provost lost the crowd. He accused the students of “feeling emotion” and explaining that the data would be used for “different kinds of research. We want to see how students move around the lab.”

Now, as it happens, ISEC has an IoT lab where they take these kinds of measurements. When they do those experiments, students are required to go through IRB, get informed consent, all the stuff that the provost had bypassed. When this is pointed out, the provost says that they had been given an IRB waiver by the university’s Human Research Protection Program (HRPP).

Now a prof gets in on the action, asking, pointedly: “Is the only reason it doesn’t fall under IRB is that the data will not be published?” A student followed up by asking how the university could justify blowing $50,000 on surveillance gear when that money would have paid for a whole grad student stipend with money left over.

The provost’s answers veer into the surreal here. He points out that if he had to hire someone to monitor the students’ use of their desks, it would cost more than $50k, implying that the bill for the sensors represents a cost-savings. A student replies with the obvious rejoinder — just don’t monitor desk usage, then.

Finally, the provost started to hint at the underlying rationale for the sensors, discussing the cost of the facility to the university and dangling the possibility of improving utilization of “research assets.” A student replies, “If you want to understand how research is done, don’t piss off everyone in this building.”

Now that they have at least a vague explanation for what research question the provost is trying to answer, the students tear into his study design, explaining why he won’t learn what he’s hoping to learn. It’s really quite a good experimental design critique — these are good students! Within a few volleys, they’re pointing out how these sensors could be used to stalk researchers and put them in physical danger.

The provost turns the session over to an outside expert via a buggy Zoom connection that didn’t work. Finally, a student asks whether it’s possible that this meeting could lead to them having a desk without a sensor under it. The provost points out that their desk currently doesn’t have a sensor (remember, the students ripped them out). The student says, “I assume you’ll put one back.”

[Image ID: A ‘public art piece’ in the ISEC lobby — a table covered in sensors spelling out ‘NO!,’ surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.]

They run out of time and the meeting breaks up. Following this, the students arrange the sensors into a “public art piece” in the lobby — a table covered in sensors spelling out “NO!,” surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.

Meanwhile, students are still furious. It’s not just that the sensors are invasive, nor that they are scientifically incoherent, nor that they cost more than a year’s salary — they also emit lots of RF noise that interferes with the students’ own research. The discussion spills onto Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NEU/comments/xx7d7p/northeastern_graduate_students_privacy_is_being/

Yesterday, the provost capitulated, circulating a memo saying they would pull “all the desk occupancy sensors from the building,” due to “concerns voiced by a population of graduate students.”

https://twitter.com/maxvonhippel/status/1578101964960776192

The shitty technology adoption curve is relentless, but you can’t skip a step! Jumping straight to grad students (in a privacy lab) without first normalizing them by sticking them on the desks of poor kids in underfunded schools (perhaps after first laying off a computer science teacher to free up the budget!) was a huge tactical error.

A more tactically sound version of this is currently unfolding at CMU Computer Science, where grad students have found their offices bugged with sensors that detect movement and collect sound:

https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387909329710366721

The CMU administration has wisely blamed the presence of these devices on the need to discipline low-waged cleaning staff by checking whether they’re really vacuuming the offices.

https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387426812972646403

While it’s easier to put cleaners under digital surveillance than computer scientists, trying to do both at once is definitely a boss-level challenge. You might run into a scholar like David Gray Widder, who, observing that “this seems like algorithmic management of lowly paid employees to me,” unplugged the sensor in his office.

https://twitter.com/davidthewid/status/1387909329710366721

This is the kind of full-stack Luddism this present moment needs. These researchers aren’t opposed to sensors — they’re challenging the social relations of sensors, who gets sensed and who does the sensing.

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

[Image ID: A flier inviting ISEC grad students to attend an unadvertised 'listening session' with the vice-provost. It is surmounted with a sensor that has been removed from beneath a desk and annotated in Sharpie to read: 'If found by David Luzzi suck it.']

[renthony]

There's a local performance venue in my town that's getting shut down, and across local social media, the reaction is polarized between "omg I loved going to see all the bands, how could we lose such a major venue?" from eventgoers, and "FUCK those assholes, they never paid the performers, good riddance!" from local artists.

The one gig I did at that venue paid $30 for weeks of prep work, rehearsals, and a five-night run of our show. And I don't mean $30 a night, I mean $30 total. And I'm one of the few people I know who ever made a dime off this venue, despite how hard they marketed themselves as "local talent."

Anyway, I'm feeling petty about the whole situation, so let this be a reminder to performing artists: A shitty venue is the exact same as a shitty commissioner offering to pay in "exposure." The venue doesn't exist without the artists. Don't let them fuck you over in the name of "maintaining the local performance scene." If they can't pay the talent, they deserve to close, just like any other shitty business that mistreats their workers.