Puppet mastering fast-food staff by phone

This is the voice of control: a McDonald's worker was tormented and humiliated for hours in a back room, all by a voice on a phone.  It turns out this is a longstanding criminal genre, with cases going back at least a decade, and across states.  Puppet mastering is in a growth phase, apparently:

The first report of such a call came in 1995, in Devil's Lake, N.D.; another came later that year in Fallon, Nev. The caller, usually pretending to be a police officer investigating a crime, targeted stores in small towns and rural communities -- areas where managers were more likely to be trusting.

Most were fast-food restaurants, where the male and female victims were young and inexperienced, and assistant managers were likely to be working without supervision.

An interesting point in this case is that a surveillance camera recorded events in that room for the entire time.  Did that component strengthen obedience, not to mention performance desires in the others involved?

Discussions also have touched on the psychological dynamics (why obey? why not revolt?), the social (what were the coworkers doing?), and the political (Abu Ghraib references). 

The voice on the phone mobilizes all of these levels, then races across cultural boundaries, as we've seen before.  Notice how accounts of this story swirl around layers of concealing and revealing sexuality - which acts performed, what described or shown by journalists.  Note as well the fetishizing and undermining of authority, the leap across age barriers (one 18, the other 41).  The phone is becoming what the automobile was in 1920s America, a tool and icon for social anxiety and derangement.  The mobile phone is just more so.

(via MeFi)

Comments

[blamb]

I'm at a loss to add anything, other than to note that the cumulative psychic mojo of this story (and spin-off sub-stories) is as deeply insane as anything I've encountered in a long time.

Though now that I think about it, a few other of your recent posts are in the running.

[Mike]

Take that for a video security. Now a lot of people are now finding it real hard to play around when videos are there, or if they are aware that they are there.