IT’S a strange experience: to see your own, somewhat stubborn character traits slowly become a whole new social norm. Thus it is with “co-working”. The term describes the rise of comfortable, convivial spaces where freelancers can do their gigs and tasks without the sense of being chained to a particular desk or organisation (or its culture).
This week, we heard that one of the rising vendors of these spaces, WeWork, hires nearly as much office space in London as the UK Government. Whitehall has just asked the US company to redeploy offices emptied by Brexit (meaning the European Medicines Agency’s recent move across the channel to Amsterdam). But more on the terrifying, totalistic ambitions of WeWork later.
A few months ago, I met a friend and colleague in one of these WeWork warrens. Big tables, free coffee, large windows, vast sofas, hipster and motivational art everywhere. Yet with everyone sitting in a devotional posture before their laptops, and secluded from interaction by their ear buds, I couldn’t see much “co-” going on. More like “working apart together”.
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My friend – a louche, former diplomat anarchist – wasn’t impressed with the community spirit of these stacks of solopreneurs. “Everyone just has their head down, pounding away,” he lamented.
For myself, I’ve never looked for a sense of community when working in a public, non-occupational space (which I started to do with a PDA and a wobbly mobile phone connection in the late 1990s).
A feeling of propinquity, perhaps – meaning proximity, closeness, nearness to others. But no assumptions about shared values, no need to burst your bubble (or open up mine). I’m a bit alarmed by my reaction – but I must admit to being somewhat cramped by current co-working culture. It assumes that we’re all fragile ideas-entrepreneurs, precarious chancers in it together, constantly needing mutual support. While using a number of Glasgow and Edinburgh co-working spaces,
I have grimly stared away keen enquiries about “what I’m working on”. “Something requiring silent, focused concentration, pal,” I’ve muttered inside, as I ostentatiously escape to the loo.
Please blame my 50-something, overly-individualist, post-punk tendencies. In my early adulthood, I struggled mightily against falling into the usual occupational categories (teacher, lawyer, civil service, manager).
Battering out articles and lyrics on your concrete slab of a Compaq, lurking at the back of some croissanterie, trying to race ahead of your rapidly depleting battery? This was an act of defiance, of stick-it-to-the-man-itis.
Yet today’s young workers have known nothing much other than precarity. It’s all temporary contracts, performance-based payments, the need to cultivate your charisma, connections and various forms of capital.
So their needs are perhaps the reverse of mine. They seem to be actively looking for some kind of solidarity or commonality. But one that recognises the Sisyphean struggles of their gig-centric, incessantly on-demand lives.
WeWork is completely (if chillingly) fascinating, as you observe their massive ambitions to cater for this generation. (Their first Scottish endeavour, eight floors of clacking keyboards on George Street in Edinburgh, is launching soon).
Just like Apple’s Steve Jobs and his “i” appellation – iPhone, iMac, iPod – these people want to smear their definition of “We” across more and more areas of our lives.
Their opening gambit “WeWork” is ambitious enough, with its slogans “create a world where people work to make a life, not just a living” and “do what you love”.
“Our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than on a multiple of revenue,” its co-founder, Adam Neumann, told Forbes magazine.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported Neumann as saying “what we are doing is making a capitalist kibbutz” (the entrepreneur was partly brought up in one). The old egalitarian dream of kibbutzim was that the working and non-working life could be fused together. WeWork turns that promise into a social honeytrap for insecuritised freelancers.
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Many wellbeing services are bundled into a WeWork monthly subscription (incidentally, the Edinburgh prices start from £350 a month). A London branch recently offered guided meditation, a “boxbiz” session, a candlelight yoga class, even a “jar and fern terrarium” workshop.
Thus it makes sense that the companies next projects are called “WeLive” and “WeGrow”. The first adds residences next to the workspaces; the second integrates an advanced kindergarten into the previous two. “If you really want to change the world, change kids when they’re two,” Neumann quips. Eeek.
There have been several reports from the WeLive housing complexes (currently operational in the US, but coming here soon). They’re pretty poignant. GQ’s feature last year presented a tableaux of eager, puppyish “digital nomads”, perching amidst the cosy furnishings, spontaneously helping to fix your computer and fold your laundry.
As demand for their skills flickers across the employment networks of the US, it appeared that these soft millennials liked landing in a WeLive space – one that understood (or exploited?) the emotional demands of such mobility.
“The currency of employability is to never be bereft of a project, and co-places offer the tools and resources to assemble this projective life”, say the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello.
With WeGrow, the WeBros are even suggesting you can bring your family along with you, as you navigate the flows and tides of modern working.
It’s easy to scrape away at the surface textures of the WeEmpire, and see what’s beneath. “When we imagine a future for both WeWork and WeLive and the other things that we’re doing”, says Neumann’s co-founder, Miguel McKelvey, “it really is about unlocking people”.
The GQ writer notes: “In tech-speak, that means they’re setting out on a conquest of Napoleonic scale, for a monopoly over the entire breadth of its customers’ primary needs.”
So is time to raise the pitchforks against everything “co”? Hold on a minute. There is a kernel of something genuinely radical here.
Governments and states generally face an extremely demanding future: the evisceration of work by AIs on one side, and the hard limits of climate breakdown on the other.
But rather than hunker down against change, wiser statespersons might see this co-everything generation as an opportunity, rather than a problem.
If they are indeed much more interested in “access” than “ownership”, in “experiences” than “products”, then they might well embrace, even flourish in, a
post-consumerist, post-carbon, post-capitalist world. Their values might help us all rethink what we regard as valuable about being distinctively human, and how to thoughtfully shape our actions in the light of a planetary emergency.
But I don’t think we should leave it to the tender mercies of American capitalists to set this new social contract.
Governments – Scottish, British or otherwise – are constantly being urged (by green lefties like me) to consider a suite of progressive policies. For example, universal basic income and services; or a new wave of public housebuilding; or a reduction in the working week; or “beyond GDP” measures of value in our economy and society.
In response, politicians’ hands are often waved aloft, alarmedly. How can we bring in any of these while our ship is so unsteady, while we can still be so punished by electorates?
However, maybe these policies make more sense if we see them as supporting the gentle, creative, pro-social behaviours of this “co-everything” generation.
At the very least, and with some urgency, experiments in these new forms of “flexibly collective” living/working should be supported – and by public policy, not just left to the market.
If you see a torn-faced, slighty-battered 50-something frequenting some of these spaces, best not approach him. But inside, he’ll be happily co-creating with the best of them.
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