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September 08, 2004
Self censorship
We have an internal alias at Sun for people who are blogging, mostly people who are blogging at blogs.sun.com I guess. It's a pretty high traffic alias.
On one hand, this is a sort of encouragement to let it all hang out. Everything that's good for Sun, anyway. On the other hand, there's a whole lot of mind control going on.
Mostly the mind control is voluntary self control. People into their jobs enough to blog about them are likely to show enthusiasm about the company and what they're doing, to fall well within the boundaries of what we're permitted to think about. Some minor criticism of the system will come in entries like what Dave Levy wrote about Maximising Creativity, wherein Dave very mildly criticizes "hard arse" managers, and enourages them to let their employees think for themselves instead. But that's not exactly incendiary.
Some of the mind control comes from the authorities like Tim Bray. Tim's come out on more than one occasion to remind us vaguely of the bad things that might happen to employees thinking too far outside the box when blogging on a sun.com site or elsewhere. So we don't share inside information, and we don't air dirty laundry.
Those little reminders go a long way, no doubt. After all, we work under free-market capitalism, so nobody's afraid of losing his job. Not only that, but we all think it's normal to have signed contracts whereby Sun Microsystems, Inc. owns our thoughts and controls what we say and write. All of us believe unreservedly that power to the hierarchy will always remain the ultimate solution to governance questions, and that people higher up or having managed to gain control first should hog and hold sway over available resources. We live under democracy, not fascism, although we often hear at work -- the place we have to go to scrabble together our livelyhoods -- that, "This isn't a democracy."
Just gets you all fired up to work hard, doesn't it?
Posted by Mark at September 8, 2004 10:25 PM