Comment by knbrlo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by knbrlo | Hacker News Reader

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This is exactly it. When you see story after story from corporate news outlets, pushing the idea that work from home causes all these mental health issues for everyone, work from home is isolating, work from home is bad for the company. It’s all because there is a vested interest somewhere. When you understand their base motivations, you understand why certain stories are ran on the news and others are not. Their base motivations are always money.

For some organizations, they do care about money, and people which is a shocking thing and yes it can be done. If employees are making their performance requirements, and the choices left to the employee that seems like the best case to support people and profit. It’s when that choice is taken away from people that you know the pure motivation is a vested interest in commercial real estate somewhere.

Also, no amount of complaining online is going to change any of this. News outlets have armies of reporters and endless amounts of money to run story after story until the narrative becomes what they want it to be. So, stepping out of the negative mindset for just a minute, just go work somewhere else that’s remote.

Do you have any actual, hard, direct evidence to support the claim that there is some deliberate, large-scale campaign by the media to propagate such (alleged) false narratives? If there were, it would have to be a conspiracy involving hundreds of people across (or within) a large number of news outlets; there would be no way to keep that a secret.

It's quite possible that people have good-faith reasons for disagreeing with you and writing stories expressing perspectives that you dislike.

The question doesn't really make sense though. Who is going to come out and admit to this? It's a subjective topic that's been carefully crafted to avoid backlash, so you're not going to get actual hard direct evidence.

Ever read the "work-life" articles for this topic on the BBC website? They are so obviously hit pieces against remote working that it almost forces you to think there's a campaign against it, whether you want to believe it or not.

Why do they need to hide it? It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy! There’s no law that fund managers have to look out for employee preferences. This whole idea of a vast conspiracy has zero support for it other than paranoia.

> it would have to be a conspiracy involving hundreds of people across (or within) a large number of news outlets

Do you eat when you're hungry? Oh, you do?! Guess what? I do, too. And so do everone I know of. But have we all met before and arrived at this surprising consensus?

In the same vein, when some sort of global consensus is observed, one possibility is that it's driven by innate needs of actors, instead of due to explicit agreement, or it's some form of "social pressure".

Granted, it's just a hypothesis. But considering that corporations amassed huge profits while WFH scheme was in place, but now want to undo all that without any other rationale (yeah, I'm not buying the "collaboration" and productivity shit), you'd wonder if this driven by some nth order profit motive alone.

You don't need a conspiracy, just converging interests.

I don’t think this is a conspiracy as much as motivated people with deep pockets making sure reporters, legislators, etc. keep hearing that message until they start thinking it’s newsworthy. Many of the stories have involved things like studies on productivity or health, or surveys of what businesses intend to do or have found to be productive – and those almost inevitably were funded by commercial real estate or retail business groups. Those groups have a ton of money to spend on PR teams who’ll keep their talking points in circulation and are constantly looking for new ways to link it to other things in the news. This can be self-reinforcing: write a “study” saying that working from home leads to people getting less exercise (oops, we meant their cars), make sure it’s covered in as much of the business press as you can, make sure every local official hears about it, and then you can repeat the whole process by running a survey finding that business leaders have heard that WFH is unhealthy. Since there isn’t a WFH trade group, there’s no counterbalance in those stories or a spokesperson getting asked to provide a response.

A lot of this comes back to the new to write new stories constantly. Remember a few years back when you’d see stories in news outlets about how cryptocurrency would transform daily life or a certain activity like going to concerts? That was the same mechanism: nobody really believed that, and nobody’s boss told them to write the story or they’d be fired, but a heavy promotion effort meant that journalists kept hearing about it until some of them wrote stories in case it turned out to be a real trend.

Anytime someone is appealing to your emotions you should be suspicious.

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