The WeWork Manifesto: First, Office Space. Next, the World
nytimes.com
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I spent ample time in these places during my "startups are amazing!" phase, it ultimately was disheartening. The people are kind, and they make some gestures towards D&I, but those are limited, and the end result are places like WeWork. The end result is a bland, upper class niceness. The beer is craft, the sandwiches are tasty, the countertops are marble and the bulbs are always Edison. But the ideas they generate, they're just... normal. They're not really strange or weird or delightful.
Furthermore, it's hard to escape the notion that places like this consume more resources than they create. What's the cost of hundreds of well groomed people with impeccable design? I'm not sure, but I'd suspect their carbon footprint is through the roof. But the real cost is that our society has to bend to support them, and that society has fundamental inequities.
I wouldn't expect any meaningful revolution to come out of a WeWork, not because they're not smart people, but because they're people for whom this society works well already, so there's no need for a revolution. What ideas do come out of these spaces? We've seen them already, they're ideas titled towards optimizing your life, because of course, your life is already about as well oiled as you can get. Fine for a small subset of people, but hardly world conquering.
Well said - and further to this, it creates homogeneous environments which leads to innovation only towards your own community. On this note, I've been advising my younger friends to do two degrees (or chase two desires) on completely different subjects towards the same goal: the most interesting people I know have more than one core interest.
>but because they're people for whom this society works well already, so there's no need for a revolution.
it's very hard to convince someone for whom a system is working that there's potentially something immoral about perpetuating that system. the feeling is that since they're not proximally personally culpable that it's not a moral failing to participate but this is true
>But the real cost is that our society has to bend to support them
capital and resources allocated for wework is capital and resources that could have been allocated else where if our cultural priorities were different and therefore it's to the detriment of "abnormal" peoples that wework exists and persists.
i know i'm basically recapitulating everything you've said but (clearly) i think it merits emphasis.
this prompts the question: how do you do it? i think i'd be interested to know how you became sympathetic or partial if you're not from a marginalized community yourself (and we can take that offline) but this is hopeful as well
>But the ideas they generate, they're just... normal. They're not really strange or weird or delightful.
normative practices by definition normalize status quo. if in 50 years you still want to be wearing plaid, drinking craft beer, and listening to lcd soundsystem then go ahead and continue to exult in wework et al but otherwise you should try to include people that look very much different from you.
At risk of playing armchair psychologist, this is something I notice in American debates on diversity: people seem to be looking for what's in it for them. What's the hidden music genre I can turn into a trend and profit greatly? Will this traditional African dress make me less like some backwards bumpkin?
I don't share the objection to "cultural appropriation" (I like sharing and remixing of cultures). I know it's not an exclusively American phenomenon. But it seems that people are always selling something, and I'm out of money.
Through my own twisted path of self-discovery, I think I’d pretty well stumbled into Nietsche’s concept of the child. Shedding most of society’s weight, but not turning from its value entirely and sinking into nihilism. Life is fun. Work literally feels like a game I’m playing each day. But my wife asked me what the meaning of my life was to be.
She said it felt haphazard and accidental in ways, and seemed to lack a cohesive directive. She was thinking more in terms of career aspirations, but it was a good question more generally.
I’ll spare you the explanation I gave her, but say that in a nutshell it was personal success with a desired socially positive impact. Probably fairly common.
The episodes outlined above made me rethink the level of impact I am responsible for. Prior to them, I thought doing some good and as little harm as possible was enough, if not exceptional.
Listening to them made me feel the weight of what needs to change, and the responsibility that I have to help bring about that change. It’s not a small undertaking, and I’m probably not even crawling yet, but it’s a game I’m excited about playing.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. - MLK
Perhaps you should rethink your life choices when you're making offices "diverse", read exotic, for rich people to enjoy themselves in.
To try and fix original sin by making it into original virtue ends up in a new apartheid.
There are no black people, there are no white people. Anyone who calls themselves a leftist should be pushing this line as hard as possible.
Race is a construct of the capitalists to divide the working class. That the American 'left' is the most enthusiastic promoter of race today just show what a wonderful return on investment the bourgeoisie got from privatizing the universities and then funding the research in social sciences that benefits them most: cultural, sexual and racial theory/criticism.
Or as Marx put it:
All industrial and commercial centres in England now have a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who forces down the standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he feels himself to be a member of the ruling nation and, therefore, makes himself a tool of his aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.
He harbours religious, social and national prejudices against him. His attitude towards him is roughly that of the poor whites to the niggers in the former slave states of the American Union.
The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of English rule in Ireland.
This antagonism is kept artificially alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling class. This antagonism is the secret of the English working class’s impotence, despite its organisation. It is the secret of the maintenance of power by the capitalist class. And the latter is fully aware of this.
https://archive.org/stream/MarxEngelsCollectedWorksVolume10M...
They'll find the combo of snacks, distractions, booze, socializing, workspace and ideology that results in the best tech worker: the most standardized, replaceable, productive and affordable to employ worker it is possible to produce.
Because what exactly they are optimizing for when they "optimize your life" is a important thing to consider, and your employer is their customer - not you.
Why grow infinitely until you fail when you could just get really, really good at a few things for a long time (Oh that's right. VCs and their desire for unsatiable "growth").
I'd much rather work for a company that focuses on one or two core competencies than one that tries to everything ok.
Go outside and yell out, "Hey world, I'm good! You can stop evolving now, thanks!"
These things don't have an inherent direction, they are aimed in a direction. The point being made here is about the direction they are being aimed, not stopping them.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-...
https://www.marketplace.org/2016/06/09/economy/price-profits...
https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...
There is a choice.
Do they, though? And for this reason?
The recipe is to grow exponentially and dominate the market, then to do fun world-changing ventures.
Microsoft made killer software and that was basically it for the first like 15 years of their company. If a company can last 15 years and be a behemoth, by all means, start venturing for new green fields... but WeWork becoming an owner of a Kindergarten... what?
Elon Musk is a person, not a company. And all of his companies tie into a core vision (Advance humanity).
WeWork is just starting a school because it... uh... involves a building? I can excuse WeLive because hey, that's a great idea and actually dovetails with WeWork nicely.
https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-be-as-great-as-Bill-Gates-St...
More than most companies, WeWork promotes the consumption of alcohol as an inherent virtue. Posters on the wall encourage people to have a drink. There are wine tastings at WeLive. Company parties feature top-shelf liquor. Mr. Neumann has a well-known penchant for tequila, and a well-stocked bar is prominent in his office.
On a recent Tuesday at 4:07 p.m., the community manager of a WeWork in Midtown Manhattan sent an email reading: “It’s time to get your creative juices flowing! Join us on the 5th floor to drink some wine & paint a beautiful picture.” Just after noon on Valentine’s Day, there was an invitation to share wine and cake in the common area.
Though alcohol is a social lubricant for some, it can be off-putting to many others. Many women have shared stories of feeling uncomfortable with what they described as a frat house culture at some WeWorks, prompting some to leave."
So office space AirBnB for a bunch of frat boys. No thanks.
It also turns out that the reason is because that’s what most people do anyway. Remember college? Most people were out drinking to socialize. These companies are jus trying to mimic that but with their employees instead of a group of friends hoping it will case friendships and better team cohesion to form. Also because they had a tough week and want to get smashed in the company dime too.
Back in reality it's a very, very common social lubricant, and is a pretty good... Add-on(?) to we-work that attracts people. Alcohol isn't expensive if brought through a distributor, but most people attach a high 'bar' price to it, so see it as an expensive freebie when really it's not.
Just because some people don't drink means we-work is bad? Also not sure if 'wine tasting' screams 'frat boy'....
See this, what does this mean? Elementary education seems the furthest thing from their space. Why not start hotels or restaurants or hospitals or grocery stores? Those have about as much overlap with WeWork (uses physical space) as elementary education does.
The only thing that seems to make sense is that parents at WeWork can more easily drop their kids there? But it seems like daycare would be 10x more useful, since it’s already expensive and hard to find in big cities, whereas elementary school is universal and free. Granted, some people are going to want to pay for private school but that’s a minority of parents, whereas basically all parents of infants and toddlers are paying for childcare one way or another.
I don’t get it.
I should have made myself clearer by explaining what "space" I was referring to. I wasn't referring to any sort of educational space, I was strictly referring to the abundance of co-working spaces these days, especially "cool" ones. WeWork is the archetype of the cool (and expensive) co-working space.
The area I live in has an abundance of these types of workspaces. It's almost comical. One of the newest (it hasn't completed construction yet) is advertising a creche. I thank my lucky stars that I'm in a privileged enough position that I (currently) earn enough that my partner can stay home and be the primary carer of our daughter whilst I go and work in my studio/workshop in an unfashionable (but surely up-and-coming) part of our city.
Am I the only one who found this a bit weird?
Is it something like Uber & Amazon? A huge revenue growth trajectory despite being already huge with an ever shrinking loss trajectory?