Taylorism involved studying expert workers to codify their craft into a science owned and controlled by management. Today's AI achieves a similar end by training on expert data, concentrating knowledge and power with capital owners while devaluing individual artisan skills.

The time clock's lasting impact is not external surveillance from bosses, but our own internalized drive for efficiency. We have adopted the clock's morality as our own, becoming "our own jailers" who feel a constant, personal obligation to be productive and measure our output.

To process the data from punch clocks timing every task, Frederick Taylor's system required a "central planning office." This created a new class of employee whose job was not production but managing other people's time and data, giving rise to modern middle management.

The promise of scientific management was to save time. In reality, from factories to homes managed by "happiness minutes," these methods simply raised performance expectations. Saved time was immediately filled with more work or new tasks, rather than creating leisure.

The Bundy Clock did more than track hours; it created a new moral framework in the workplace. It framed punctuality as an objective, machine-verified measure of a worker's character and value, equating lateness with moral failure and unprofitability.

Meta is monitoring employee mouse movements and keystrokes to train AI agents. This practice mirrors 'Taylorism,' the historical method of measuring and optimizing factory workers' physical movements, with the modern parallel being knowledge workers training their own digital replacements.

The early 20th-century 'scientific management' of Frederick Taylor inverted society's values, making the system more important than the individual. This ideology is the hidden root of today's standardized education, one-size-fits-all processes, and the obsession with efficiency over human dignity and autonomy.

Excel is perceived as a tool of capitalist drudgery where employees are just numbers on a spreadsheet. Yet, its immense power inspires a passionate user community that creatively subverts its purpose, such as finding ways to watch movies within the application to trick workplace surveillance software.

Perception of time-tracking is shifting. Initially seen as invasive, remote employees now ask for it to prove their contributions, especially with non-traditional schedules. It has become a tool for employee empowerment and validation rather than corporate surveillance.