As I've mentioned before, Critical Miami is one of the best new Miami-based sites around. Unfortunately, Alesh has also broken (to my mind) new ground, in that his writing resulted in his firing from a job before he started work there.

Critical Miami has been very interested in the "coming soon" Miami Performing Arts Center for quite a while. He has given insight into why this is important to Miami, and while he has been a bit frustrated with some of the directions the project has taken, he has been enthusiastic, almost to the point of cheerleading. Given all this, I wasn't at all surprised to find out that he had interviewed for and received a job at the MPAC.

But I was taken aback to find this morning that he was fired right before he was hired, based entirely on his writing about the center. Rather than retell the story, read what Alesh has to say about it here: Critical Miami: Miami Performing Arts Center says NO.

What is fascinating to me about this saga is that he told them up front about his site, going so far as to list it on his resume, and they didn't bother to read it until he was about to start work. And even in that final "interview," they didn't correct any of the alleged inaccuracies in his reporting. I guess the simple fact of having an opinion and a web site is enough to scare away an employer, particularly if you're an employer with fat government contracts who will need to suck up to Miami politicians every moment of your miserable existence just to survive.

Corporations are just figuring out how to handle the Internet on a commercial level; they are years away from dealing with it on a social and human resources level. My own (deliberately unnamed) employer has a policy that employees are never allowed to discuss their employer or job in less than glowing terms in any forum, whether private party or televised interview. While the Internet isn't explicitly named in the policy, it's clear that it, too, is forbidden.

Frankly, I don't have any illusions about my anonymity. I use my real name here, and any recruiter worth a damn will Google an executive-level candidate just to see what comes up. And Florida's a "we don't need a reason to fire you" state, anyway, so they wouldn't even need to mention Hidden City as security walked me to the door.

Which is pretty much the state of Corporate America, anyway. The nature of the world is such that you surrender most of your civil rights as soon as you accept employment, and increasingly the disintegration of those rights extends outside the workplace and into your private life, as long as you are an employee. Not all diabolical contracts are signed in blood, you know.