Slacking might feel stressful sometimes, but it never sounds that way. The irony - Slacking at work! - is too obvious to be actually funny, but it still suggests an appealing baseline attitude. Did they get that taken care of? Yeah, we Slacked. Slack, though, was the one that became a verb. Slack was not the first company to offer workplace chat and instant messaging: Before Slack, there was Campfire there was HipChat. The question is, what does this intrusion do to the delicate diplomacy of office life? What happens when we bring our digital selves to work? For better or worse, it makes work life more like digital life, albeit a digital life where you can also smell what everyone else is eating for lunch. It also makes the line between work and not-work blurrier than ever - the constant scroll of maybe-relevant chatter in your chosen Slack channels registers at times like the background noise of any other newsfeed. Like Facebook or Twitter, Slack induces the same anxious, attention-hungry rhythm in its users, the same need to endlessly refresh, and gives off the same illusion of intimacy in an ultimately public space. At some point over the last year, it started to feel, at least in a certain kind of office, as ubiquitous as those other social-media giants. Slack, first released in 2013, has essentially ushered employer-sanctioned social media into the workplace.
And yet, at the same time, Slack was also the obvious place to do it. It was a very, very stupid way to air grievances. But the medium made that gossip searchable and public to anyone who knew where to look. “But I think people were pretty embarrassed.” “As far as I know, nobody lost their job over it,” Laura says. The last thing to see in the chat record was the account managers’ boss entering the room. The fight-or-flight impulse was not particularly useful here: They could make the channel disappear from their own view of Slack, but running away did nothing to delete its history. And, “people were getting called ‘dumb sluts’ left and right.” At first, as salespeople started reading, the talk continued, but then the account managers noticed who was joining and began to flee. “There was some borderline racist stuff,” she remembers. “It was eight account managers, and it was pretty much dedicated to just bashing everybody in sales, from the top, top people, all the way down.” Within two hours, word had spread to the entire sales team, which spent a Friday afternoon reading the channel’s history start to finish. She found a public Slack channel, says Laura (not her real name). One day last summer, a saleswoman was looking for a conversation she’d had with an account manager, so she typed her own name in Slack’s search bar. Such was the case in Laura’s office, where the salespeople, who are generally more senior, use Slack less than the account managers, who are generally more junior. It’s also easy to use on your phone - not so different from sending a text - and perhaps because of that ease, or because of the bright Silicon Valley affect it shares with services like Facebook and Instagram (Slack’s headquarters are in San Francisco), it tends to foster a dashed-off, emoji-laced vernacular. In which case, some explanation: Slack is a workplace messaging app that lets co-workers easily carry on an assortment of group and individual conversations, some private and some public, all organized in a simple user interface it’s chattier than sending an email, less of a hassle than scheduling a meeting. Her office uses Slack, which is likely either as integral to your workday as email or you have never heard of it before. Laura works in ad sales at a well-known tech company.
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