Watching. Workers, innovators, demons.

But let’s be honest: the office isn’t merely a place to do work—it can also be the place to be observed doing work. Which is why a significant number of companies whose workforce has recently gone remote have enlisted the help of surveillance software, also known as “tattleware” or “bossware,” to know what their employees are doing.

Safi Bahcall: Not long after I started the biotech firm, my father was diagnosed with a rare type of leukemia. We were a cancer-focused company and I figured I could do something to help him. Unfortunately, nothing I could do made a difference and he died not long after. Over the years, as the company grew and went public, I spent a lot of time with R&D companies of all sizes and kept noticing how promising ideas, including ones that could have helped my father, remained trapped inside these organizations’ basements. That stayed with me.

The vampire served a function similar to that of many other demonic creatures in folklore around the world: They were blamed for a variety of problems, but particularly disease, at a time when knowledge of bacteria and viruses did not exist.