I made it halfway through this article but couldn't find any real takeaways. It's basically like The Office except everyone pays rent. What did you get out of it? I'm curious.
The steady march towards work-is-life, life-in-work concerns me, even as I take part in the problem... "Job stability" -> "Office drone" -> Office Space "New wave" -> open office plans, company culture -> Google, IDEO, Silicon Valley "The hustle" -> gig economy, independent contractors -> Uber, Instacart "The hustle 2.0" -> company culture but you don't work always work for a company (or that company lacks the former) -> WeWork Company/work culture as culture culture. Frightening.When I met McKelvey a few weeks later at WeWork’s Manhattan headquarters, he made it clear that the long-term plan was not just to make IBM a bit more like Google but something much more grandiose. The company’s CultureOS was about being “supportive to openness and conversation” and the “obligation we create to each other to be good humans to each other — to share a smile and some warmth.” We’ve learned the hard way from social media, he said, that “alignment along ideological lines is a shallow way of creating a human environment.” This, McKelvey said, is what he tells his team: “You’re not building work space. You’re here building a new infrastructure to rebuild social fabric and rebuild up the potential for human connection.” It was, he conceded, a “big leap.” But the company existed to give it a shot. “Who am I going to need in a disaster? The person I took a yoga class with versus the person I’m in the same Facebook group with?” The enterprise product could scale up that social infrastructure to unite millions and millions of people. On a hard-hat tour of WeWork’s new West Coast headquarters, in San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower, Adam Neumann told me: “Assuming we keep up our personal growth as a company, as individuals and as a company, there is no limit. Businesses, neighborhoods, cities — there are new cities being built around the world, and we want the call from those cities.”
Thanks for encouraging me to give it another look. I think the tone of the article threw me off; the author is ambivalent, but not in a "I'm not buying this" sort of way but in a "I'm not sure if I should say nice things or mean things so I'll kind of split the difference" sort of way. Your work-is-life, life-in-work concern is valid. What's interesting here though is that "shitty life/work balance" is WeWork's implicit product... and I hadn't seen it put so starkly before. Because really, they're taking the shitty "have a kombucha now get back to the galley and row, slave" aspect of working in tech and offering it up for rent. They're offering it up to you, as an individual "entrepreneur", and they're offering it up to your company, as a way of literally outsourcing their culture. Most everyone else has been pointing out that WeWork is basically a rental middleman, adding a layer of techy bullshit to existing leases and skimming off the top. This is an argument that really, they're a security blanket for people who need to feel like they have a job even when they don't. My wife had an office in eOffices. They've been around for 20 years. They own a building and they charge you month-to-month for everything WeWork will sell you... minus the "craft on draft" and "fresh fruitwater" and "micro-roasted coffee." But they lease offices. Month-to-month. And that's probably why they're three buildings on the west side of Los Angeles rather than some $47b fuckercorn. 'cuz hey. They can't get people to pay them $50 a day for a desk. Because you're right: they're pushing the idea that you just can't work for yourself without some fuckhead encouraging you to wear Hawaiian shirts every other thursday or some shit. And they're charging through the nose. And 20 years from now, when we're all mocking the shit out of the terrible ideas of the teens, I sincerely hope we've come to our senses about what a terrible idea all this is.
Exactly--right on the nose. Glad you took another look. Hear hear.What's interesting here though is that "shitty life/work balance" is WeWork's implicit product... and I hadn't seen it put so starkly before. Because really, they're taking the shitty "have a kombucha now get back to the galley and row, slave" aspect of working in tech and offering it up for rent. They're offering it up to you, as an individual "entrepreneur", and they're offering it up to your company, as a way of literally outsourcing their culture. Most everyone else has been pointing out that WeWork is basically a rental middleman, adding a layer of techy bullshit to existing leases and skimming off the top.
And 20 years from now, when we're all mocking the shit out of the terrible ideas of the teens, I sincerely hope we've come to our senses about what a terrible idea all this is.