In a world of digital nomads, we will all be made homeless
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Hell, it's even good for family, which the author seems hung up on. You know what you're not doing while driving home from work for forty five minutes? I would accept an arbitrarily short commute to work. If there were reasonably priced dwellings in the building I work at, I would live there. More time to play with my kid, cook dinner, or whatever else.
And then he goes on to complain about affordable urban housing. Well, is it sinister to live near work, or isn't it? I agree that WeLive's prices are very high for someone who intends to stay put. But . . . that's not what they're for? Should we get rid of hotels too?
I mean, it's kind of silly to imagine a small cluster of Google employees in a metro of approximately 200,000 people, but at some point it has to sound less silly than some of the proposed ways of fitting more people into a metro with 3x-5x rent prices.
Additional stress would be put on people not in this arrangement as they would potentially have to spend more money to get at the same level. (Albeit there could be less pressure in the housing market.)
The next step in this slippery slope would be inheritance. Since company owns everything, your kids inherit little. Either that, or they inherit a position... Welcome to actual indentured servitude again. Company branded kids straight out of a few known dystopias.
Mostly because moving is a special kind of hell, especially with kids. Communities cannot form either way.
Some people like it, they're a minority though as far as I know.
With current US competition protections a cartel likely will happen a few times or more. Since there is "competition" between companies, even if all of them are doing the same thing.
Give it time. Besides, when there's as large a dependency as "I get my livelihood through the services they offer" it might as well be the other way around, as one can't just drop them that easily.
That division doesn’t really make sense now that industry isn’t really polluting and people are buying much of their things online.
Yes, as industry has changed and retail has changed, city layouts should change too. It’s not just suburban malls that are affect by changing retail.
the problem is workplace choice. I can walk from my house to Broadcom, EMC, drobo, Palo Alto Networks, Dell, citrix, and hundreds of tiny tech companies. 10 minutes in an uber takes me to google, facebook, linkedin, etc, etc,...
This means that switching jobs has a much lower cost.
The problem with small towns is that each one is only going to support one big employer. You often must move next time you want a new job.
My favored solution is to simply upzone near train stops. I'd be happy to abide by a rule that I couldn't own a car in the city if you would sell me a small condo without parking near a train station. (I don't have a car as-is, for that matter, though this will likely change once uber stops dumping)
Maybe we could build a large system that allowed rapid communication. We could include a software layer, so that not just verbal communication could happen, but even information in all sorts of other formats.
We could call it the GlobalSys. Then commutes would stop being a problem.
/s
I've been working from home, wherever I wanted that to be, since 2011. All of this nonsense could be avoided by simply optimizing for asynchronous cooperation via the internet.
We could also avoid some of the approximately 12% of total energy usage devoted to maintaining office space, and some of the 10%+ of urban land usage taken up by offices and parking. That's all leaving aside the approximately 50%+ of all driving miles done for commuting purposes, the maintenance and manufacturing of automobiles for commuting, etc.
But I've hired some incredible people that I totally wouldn't be able to afford in person who were able to be pretty effective working remote. I have worked with people who are absolute monsters when you leave them alone at home with a problem. Certainly, some people are far more effective working remote than working in the office. I'm just not one of them. In my experience... I am in the majority here.
(interestingly, I think I'm a better manager when managing remote than managing in person, the opposite of my effectiveness as an individual contributor. though I think that might also have had something to do with the sort of people I've managed.)
Right now, the market values people willing to go into an office who are able to communicate well face to face and get work done in that context a lot more than the market values people who are able to make themselves effective while working remote, though, and I think that's in part due to the preponderance of people who are more effective workers when they are physically near other workers? But... certainly part of that is that management is behind the times.
Remote work requires better ability to follow the money through the process and that kind of close accounting is very threatening to a lot of people.
I also think that if we invested similar sums of money to what we spend on office space instead on collaboration technology, you'd see the effectiveness differential between remote and onsite work go down substantially.
> google, facebook, linkedin, etc
Any of those qualify? That's what the parent post was talking about, and that's about a million people in the bay area alone that could skip a commute.
I did say some. The whole point is, for anyone who can telecommute, they should. As a matter of not just personal freedom but social responsibility.
This ignores the reality that a lot of people want to live in urban areas
But company housing, tenements, indebted servitude, working hours from can't-see until can't-see, is all a spectre from our not-so-distant past which we have mostly forgotten about. Well it's coming back. A labor revolution gave us such amazing leaps in dignity and basic humanity which were sorely lacking after the eruption of the industrial revolution. We take that entirely for granted now, like it can't come back and get us. It can.
People in America are just not educated enough about the horrors of the labor revolution. Our own, not the communist's overseas. Unions exist in this strange historical agnosticism, and people only know them as some kind of cartoon, a mob-ruled bureaucracy that enables hilariously lazy laborers to cite ridiculous rules and get in the way of progress. Well they weren't always that way. It is not common human decency that stops the captains of industry from merely hiring private police forces to mow bad workers down with rifles and artillery. That's our past as well as our cyberpunk future. That stuff can come back if we don't keep maintaining the levee between it and us.
People have an instinct to normalize and rationalize things which happen slowly compared to a human lifetime. Well there's a very real and disastrous difference today in how people work and maintain a decent living. It's becoming more and more like back when a decent living was only reserved for the insanely wealthy, the richest of the rich. Everyone else toiled in disease and squalor fourteen hours a day, breaking their bodies, without any possessions of their own; everything belonged to the company, and they worked just for the privilege to live a week at a time. It really wasn't that long ago. We like to hope that if it comes back we'll still be behind the fence of the upper-middle class, safe from the horror. But the vast majority of us won't.
Working is taking up more and more of our days. Gone is the 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours leisure. It's going back to "as many hours as you can physically go without sleep" once again. No benefits, no retirement, no healthcare, no affordable higher education, no affordable family housing aside from company closet tenements with communal utilities, next to a corporate campus but far from a town center. Out in the suburbs with one company store. That will come back in our complacence. Fewer opportunities than our fathers.
California and New York are not the whole world, and things are really great for raising a family in the Midwest. Both of those places seem like a dystopia borne of the city councils own design and people’s willingness to live in a bad environment.
And billionaires aren’t going to treat everyone super terrible because any billionaire knows if the peasants aren’t getting their bread instead they want the riches heads. That’s not really a great gambit if you’re ultra rich.
And, history shows pretty conclusively the supremely rich have no problem keeping the peasants from their bread, so to speak. The rich either crack the whip and the peasants knuckle under, or, the wealthy delude themselves in thinking all is well right up to the guillotine.
Unfortunately not all of us live in America :( 100k USD for a run of the mill web-developer is just not going to happen where I am (New Zealand), and housing is much more expensive too.
US $100k a year salaries are not the norm world wide.
I know it's pretty ridiculous for me to run out in the street and start chanting the end is nigh over a little change in our culture. But it's not just one little change. It's a sum of many changes which have added up over the last few decades and the trend that it represents. It's not about now, it's about where that trend is going in the near future. Believe it or not, things will not remain this good if we are apathetic about it. That is not the default state of society.
If you have read up on the history of what people have been through in this country and the world as a result of the first industrial revolution, you would also be wary of the second which is coming about right now due to automation. It's worth extreme vigilance.
For the record, I don't live in New York or California either. I'm in an industry which was once full of steady salaried jobs, but now it's entirely shifted over to gig-economy contracting. Getting insurance is a nightmare and eats up my margins. What was once a very livable job now hardly pays for an apartment. It's specialized work that requires technical skills. I work very long hours and practically every weekend. I am not proud of that, and I know I need a change of career, but once again--it's not about me, it's about statistics. It's naive to expect that everyone can change their career to whatever the best career is at the moment. You are being obtuse if you think everyone can get your job and be in your living situation, which I am happy for by the way. That's fantastic.
The United States was once a country about building physical things, manufacturing and construction and mining. People made a good, dignified living off that for a while. That time is obviously gone, and contrary to what certain political parties think, it just won't be coming back. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube as they say--or rather you could if you had a toothpaste packing machine, but they're on the other side of the world and they're automated now anyway, so it wouldn't matter if we did bring them back. That work is gone.
I think what people don't often consider is that making software, networks, apps, content, websites, etc. is our new labor. A huge portion of our society is now doing this, as everyone here knows. A few decades ago, it was super-specialized, highly educated, protected work. That is changing.
We are the new labor, and our work is the weft and warp of the middle class in several cities and communities in this country. But that shouldn't be taken for granted. We are soon going to be treated as laborers are traditionally treated if we don't take steps to secure a dignified living.
There's no evidence at all that industrial revolution era working conditions can return.
The dominant force shaping working conditions was and is labour productivity.
Before industrialization, low labour productivity meant short brutish lives.
The 12 hour work days of the industrial revolution were a relative improvement, because they provided a more reliable source of sustenance than the substitence farming of previous eras.
As productivity increased, the number of hours of works, especially very dangerous and streneous work, declined, as the risks of such work started to outweigh the risks of foregoing the additional income of taking on that work.
This decline had next to nothing to do with any concerted social effort.
Just because our productivity has risen doesn't mean industries wouldn't demand even more production from an increase in hours. Publicly traded companies in fact must continuously grow and increase productivity endlessly so as to increase shareholder value. It's almost a tropism. It's not somebody's conscious conspiracy or mustache-twirling evil plan, it's just the nature of these societal mechanisms we're living with.
And people lived brutal lives for many more reasons besides low labor productivity. I feel like that's a correlation fallacy on your part or something.
I'm a TA in advertising who specializes in motion graphics, rigging, and 3d rendering. My work has shifted from permanent employees to contractors over the last few years, along with the loss of protections that implies. Predictably, working hours have expanded vastly. It's very stressful work and I have virtually no security. This is happening to steadily more people in more industries, including ones that were thought to be too highly educated to be vulnerable. It's a trend that will continue if nobody does anything about it.
You say there's no evidence those conditions can return, but that's a weird negative proof situation. What kind of evidence am I supposed to provide for that, a crystal ball? Trends are already moving in that direction. The decay of the middle class is already happening. Even with all our increases in productivity, people on average just can't afford the benefits that previous generations had, and are less likely to be upwardly socially mobile. And it's only getting worse.
That, combined with the fact that society often defaults to immense wealth divides in multiple cultures all throughout history--transforming the vast majority of people into paupers and serfs--should be proof enough. The secure, prosperous lives we enjoy in the developed world are not the default state. The privileges we take for granted are the result of blood and toil from labor and civil rights movements over the centuries.
The mandated 8 hour work week came as a result of concerted political effort, but the reductions in work hours were happening anyway, due to independend economic forces.
Just to give one example, Henry Ford instituted a 5-day work week in 1922. He instituted an 8 hour work day in 1926:
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-factory-wor...
Moves like this had competitive implications, which forced other employers to do the same.
Today employers are exploring 4 hour work days. None of this is driven by top-down mandates imposed through legislation.
>>Just because our productivity has risen doesn't mean industries wouldn't demand even more production from an increase in hours.
This comment belies a basic misunderstanding of the leverage held by employers.
First of all, their profitability declines if their employees are less productive per hour of labor as a result of longer work days. That's saying nothing of the health implications of longer work days, and the higher rates of worker turn-over.
Second, employers are competing with each other for a limited pool of workers. They have to offer attractive terms to recruit quality employees.
They are not in a position to demand anything they want.
We would be in a sorry state if the only force that improves labor conditions and compensation is top-down mandates that regiment the range of acceptable employment contracts.
Fortunately it is not the only force. In fact, such laws are worse than useless, in removing options from the market that would otherwise be in everyone's best interests to exist.
>>And people lived brutal lives for many more reasons besides low labor productivity.
It was almost solely down to low labor productivty, as a consequence of the economy having very little physical capital.
The United States economy in the mid 19th century had per capita GDP comparable to some of the poorest countries in the world today.
The story of development is one of private investment generating capital, which boosts output, which enables higher volumes of investment. It's a long-term process that can transform a society from a state of extreme primitivity, to one of great opulence over the course of a few generations.
>>I'm a TA in advertising who specializes in motion graphics, rigging, and 3d rendering. My work has shifted from permanent employees to contractors over the last few years, along with the loss of protections that implies. Predictably, working hours have expanded vastly. It's very stressful work and I have virtually no security.
That's a consequence of an increase in the supply of people with your skillset relative to demand. Restricting work hours and mandating long-term employment in your field would greatly reduce the demand for the services you provide, because it would cost employers more to procure said services.
The second order consequence of this would be less of these services being consumed by society, meaning the price paid by consumers increasing, and fewer people being able to make a living from providing these services.
I thought we were talking about the big silicon valley companies that are talking about building housing here? at those places, a guy without a college education can pull down more in two days than your fast food worker makes in a month. And these jobs come with better food, a sweet gym, and a bunch of other perks.
I mean, I'm all for unions for the oppressed, but when you start saying that the facebook engineers are being oppressed... well, you kinda lose some credibility.
If we let it slide for members of the middle class then it will eventually lead to an ever greater portion of the population unable to earn a dignified quality of life for their work.
Engineers, web developers, etc. are paid very well now, sure, but as more and more people enter that industry and those skills become more commonplace, do you really think things will remain that way? As more of the industry is able to be automated, do you think as many people will be able to stay in the middle class?
And when people in the middle class start accepting things like company housing, contractor jobs over salaried employment with benefits, longer working hours, etc. what do you think that will do for the lower classes of society? I think we're starting to see that now with pseudo-jobs like Favor and Uber, which have even less security than the service industry has traditionally had.
It's not just about facebook engineers or whatever, it's about society as a whole. The problems faced by society are largely the same, different only in degree; we shouldn't separate them up and devolve into infighting because these yuppies or whatever can afford something like the quality of life an average worker a couple generations ago could have, and that's considered fabulously well-off now. If industry starts treating middle-class people badly, they're treating lower-class people worse for the same reason. The whole scale slides.
A strong middle class with strong labor rights helps all of society. We can't do this crab bucket thing where we say it's foolish to defend people with some amount of privilege because there's people over there who are worse off--what is the ultimate end of that strategy, a search for the most downtrodden person on earth and delay all progress until we work our way up the list?
How about we start with someone who is below the 50th percentile?
From TFA:
"It is time, too, that we begin to understand that the great wave of popular resentment sweeping across advanced societies is partly about the way the modern economy shreds some of people’s most basic emotional attachments. We all know the modern rules: millions of people have to leave where they grew up to find even halfway dependable work; and they find that creating any kind of substitute home somewhere new is impossible. For people at the bottom of the economic hierarchy, life proves to be unendingly precarious and often itinerant."
Back to the article, though: the idea of 'Roams' where travelling contractors hang out and ply their trade, IS a new and a intriguing development. Pretty much the opposite of a cubicle & commute life.
No, stop making the workforce into indentured slaves, in regular print.
If it was just for those that "like it" it would be fine (and not under discussion -- people could work like that in 1985 too, if they were so inclined).
The troublesome part is the whole culture that grows around this, and infects work relations and expectations even from unwilling people.
(It's the same notion as undercutting).
I was making a point, akin to "wage slave".
Just because you entered a contract doesn't mean you weren't coerced into it (the inverse is the perennial argument of those OK with no minimal wage and sweatshop labor).
High paying job, LCOL area: 6 months, 21 working days per month at 9.5 hours per day is 1197 hours per year.
Mid to low paying job, LCOL area: 11 months, 21 working days per month at 8.25 hours per day is 1905 hours per year.
It is a choice to make. Spend an extra hour each evening with your family or spend every other month completely with your family. The magic of geo-arbitrage.
That isn't the argument though. The argument is that people who don't want what you like are forced to do it.
>Listen, some people want a short commute.
This is like the "would you like to help the disabled" line that people selling things on the street say.
>Hell, it's even good for family, which the author seems hung up on. You know what you're not doing while driving home from work for forty five minutes? I would accept an arbitrarily short commute to work. If there were reasonably priced dwellings in the building I work at, I would live there. More time to play with my kid, cook dinner, or whatever else.
I had to live below a family with 3 kids for a year. There was constant running on my ceiling. "thump thump thump" all day and night. Apartments are not really designed for kids. In fact, they aren't really designed for anybody, which is why everybody buys houses where it is possible. I don't feel like I have any privacy here because there are always people very close to me. Most people just shut all their windows and pull the blinds down. Living in a windowless box is not ideal.
>Well, is it sinister to live near work, or isn't it?
I think he is complaining about the fact that you have to move away from where you grew up and that the options available for housing are basically a dorm room.
For craftsmen and merchants, seems they typically lived in the same building as their shop.
I didn't see anyone complaining about that as somehow degrading the human experience.
Seems like no big deal, just what is the most practical living/working arrangement in a given situation.
Oh, how rich. As if this is new.
More of that American ideal (aka delusion) that a 1950s style lifestyle is The Natural Order Of Things. It's not. It's very much an anomaly.
It's a terrible article that very much throws the baby out with the bathwater. As someone who likes moving around and did so a lot as a military wife, the sneering tone of the article that frames anyone who moves a lot as some kind of victim who has been denied a real life really does not go over well with me.
There are, no doubt, genuine criticisms to made of the current trend towards jobs with long hours and no benefits and the like. This has really nothing to do with the trend towards digital nomads.
Further, some of what he criticizes likely falls under the heading of "Excess student loans are ruining the lives of modern Americans" rather than the heading of being a digital nomad per se.
There is a real need for genuinely affordable housing. But if you are a single parent, working from home -- the way most of humanity basically did for thousands of years -- is a boon, not a problem. It allows you to take care of family and also make some money.
I just have nothing good to say about this article. I'm also personally offended at the use of the term homeless in the title to basically mean something like rootless or without a real sense of belonging. It is a really inflammatory and misleading title.
Wealthy young digital workers aren't paying premium prices for shiny work/live accommodation in Bali because they're been deprived of opportunities for housing and employment in Slough, they're doing it because the lifestyle appeals to them and they're amongst the few wealthy enough and flexibly-employed enough to be free to do so.
Yeah in the US it seems just about everything gets compared to the post-war years like it's some kind of baseline. Seems like a recipe for perpetual disappointment.
Main thesis seems to be “millions of people have to leave where they grew up to find even halfway dependable work;“
Ok, the entire premise of the “digital nomad” is that work can be done from anywhere. The exact opposite of what is being argued here - if the work can be done from anywhere, then you can compete for that work from the comfort of your familiar settings. Or if you so choose, from anywhere in the world. That’s digital nomadism, not herding people into ever smaller spaces to make things more efficient.
A huge part of today’s digital work can be done from any well equipped home office or even a bench with a good internet connection and a power supply reserve. The fact that we MAKE remote work difficult is our own doing (me included) and will require a culture change that is well on its’ way.
It's in the Opinion section in the Guardian; this shouldn't be a huge surprise.
I hate how news sites -- and the Guardian are particularly guilty of this -- mix opinion and news in very similarly styled layouts. The Guardian seemed to have started this with "Comment is Free" back in the day. The Guardian is very authoritative for news, and often pretty worthless for columnists / opinion pieces.
I appreciate the Economist having started 1843 Magazine, which appears to be a specific counter to that. It's promoted by their social media outlets, and yet it's clearly a separate brand.
They regularly have an article damning France and its dirigism.
Have you ever asked yourself why there isn't a wall Mart or Starbucks of housing? Why are all houses not owned and rented out by a small group of wealthy entities? Just like every other market, it should trend toward consolidation right? Perhaps it just hasnt been given enough time.
Anyway, I think we will see these high prices continue for a long time and demand for cheaper housing, combined with new sat internet, driverless cars and other things, will grow and eventually spill over into a massive flood of cheap housing outside city hotspots.
Wework is massively overvalued, is engaging in borderline fraudulent bonds with high interest rates. Nobody wants their creepy day care centers or to live in their foxconn dorms and I predict that a good many of their bonds will go into default.
It's happened. In many small and medium sized cities, there's one dominant landlord.[1] So far, nobody is big enough to do this to a major city. Blackstone may be getting close. "Blackstone is now 'the largest owner of real estate in the world'"[2].
[1] https://righttothecity.org/cause/rise-of-the-corporate-landl... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/blackstone-is-largest-owner-o...
This has been quite the opposite of my experience.
Personally I'd feel happier if I grew up on a community surrounded by people that I knew and cared for, instead of being routed around like a tinder hookup, endlessly bidding for cheaper container storage.
I think that's something worth sacrificing a little bit of algorithmic efficiency for.
One of the most attractive parts of 'digital nomadism' to me is that it doesn't require one to be a nomad. I could just as easily freelance from the small Kansas town I grew up in as from a van somewhere in SF.
From the perspective of having children and wanting them to experience actual physical community I see the trend towards remote work and freelancing as a boon. Instead of having to live in suburbia and commute to work everyday there's actually a viable path to living in a small community where cost of living is low and getting to actually spend time with my family. My kids can experience the independence of riding their bikes to the playground, I can be a part of their education and model something other than disappearing for 10 hours at time M-F and being tired all weekend.
Of course the trend could continue towards the majority moving as close to their regional hub as possible and spending their every waking moment glued to a screen, but I suspect that there will be at least a large minority of us who choose to embrace the possibilities that open up when one is not tied to a metropolis for work. Home ownership and physical community being two of those possibilities.
Sounds great as long as it's affordable. I've often wanted to stay a few months in a new location to feel more immersed than a two week vacation, but not ready to sign a 3 month lease on a furnished apartment. Sounds like this would fill the gap between hotels and renting.
Why not? We are many people who don't want to start a family, ever.
But let me ask you: has it been any different for many, many of the freelancers out there, without the help of WeWork and such?
Blaming an affluence of commodities generally only found in well paid big corporate jobs, or short commutes for the danger of never really stopping to work as a freelancer is at best ignoring the work reality of many, if not most, as it is already now.
The reality (even if its just the starting years) more often is: you get out of bed and over to your desk, and everything around you is work and distraction at the same time.
Beeing able to jump into a place of likeminded people with a certain level of comfort & leisure and being able to afford infrastructure and ressources generally inaccessible to a one-human-show is invaluable, and working amongst peers will do A LOT to keep you from burning out in the first place.
To stick to a schedule and stop working at the end of the day is something you'll have to learn no matter the environment!
You can't get much cheaper than this. When people talk about the rise in housing prices, it's invariably speaking of not only the most populated, but also the most economically prosperous and desirable areas in the country. And in these places - no, housing and land prices will likely only continue to increase as demand is unlikely to waver anytime in the foreseeable future, yet supply is strictly limited - even when expanded.
[1] - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...
This isn't just skill - it also can include things like willingness to work in uprootive work like the military, long haul trucking, or offshore oil rigs.
Hopefully the complaint of the author is VALID and he'll be left complaining to no one but the support ticket system and blog someone else wrote, douchebag.