Beware Silicon Valley and its tech dreams. But you (hopefully) already knew that. What else? Or, perhaps, what (aside from the obvious) falls under the Valley’s scope? For one, the eerily dystopian utopia of its Ted Talks and its free beer and free dinner in recently gentrified utopian spaces. And for another, the young, disaffected men currently embracing Andrew Yang‘s UBI snake oil. Any discussion of coworking spaces starts here.
But it hardly ends here. What comes next?
What is Coworking?
Coworking sounds deceptively simple. People lack shared workspaces. Some of those people are business owners or freelancers. Others are scientists without a lab, desk jockeys without a desk, or home-based workers without a home office. They’re workers who lack the company of others they need to be happy and productive. And so, they have needs coworking satisfies.
That’s the story, anyway. Is it accurate? The story isn’t totally amiss. Coworking spaces materialized everywhere in major – sometimes even minor – cities through the 2000s and 2010s. If we visit those spaces, we’ll find those types of people. But we’ll find others, too. We’ll find people who escaped the comforting effluvia of the corporate office for the terrible freedom of precarity. We’ll find temp workers, part-timers, freelancers, and white-collar workers whose employers decided they didn’t merit a cubicle among the office’s dwindling supply.
Give it all a few more cycles of the corporate executive churn. Eventually we’ll find one who eliminates even more office space as a short-term cost-cutting measure. They’ll ride those savings to their next company, victory in hand, getting out before the negative fallout and failing up to their next job.
That’s how it’s done!
Productivity
And so, productivity lives in the heart of the coworking space, or at least its rhetoric. The company takes care of business on one end, and the coworker uses their newfound space to take care of business on the other. And there’s a loftier aspect of this I’ve left out. Doesn’t it feel good to get more done? Doesn’t it help both the company and ourselves, the elusive ‘win-win’? Can’t we be more social, get more done, collaborate more effectively, network with others, and advance our careers via coworking?
We look busy when we’re coworking. Toiling away in modern parodies of industrial warehouses, making things in gentrified remnants of spaces where, as the story goes, Americans used to make things.
But let us not romanticize our industrial past. In that past, we made consumer products and a ‘middle class’. And we also made instruments of death, from tanks and bombs to cars. What did you think we were churning out of those Detroit factories? Despite the underappreciated downside, at least we made something tangible in those spaces. What do our gentrified warehouses make now? Perhaps project plans and workflows. Certainly software. We can’t fire these things at civilians, which is nice. But it’s oddly unfulfilling.
The Science of Productivity
Then the other shoe drops. The science of productivity gives us surprising little that justifies the corporate rhetoric. And, in fact, it’s worse than this. The science gives a beating to the open office concept, and coworking spaces operate according to that very concept.
What do studies say? We can look at the coverage of individual studies in the business press, or we can look at the lit reviews. They say these spaces suck in just about every way they can suck. These spaces lower productivity and reduce happiness and job satisfaction. They also fail to promote effective collaboration and networking.
Why? That’s less clear, but we can start by citing constant social pressure and surveillance. People react to pressure by shutting out others, by retreating to private space or emails. People prefer private offices to open offices. They even prefer home offices or cubicles.
Why Open Offices?
O.K., so if it doesn’t work and people don’t like it, why does coworking exist? For that, we have to look at financialized capitalism. The first reason is cost, an obvious reason. Companies want to save money on office space, whether in the form of utility costs, insurance costs, et al. Thus, they farm out these things. And for individuals, coworking spaces are the cheapest way to gain office space.
But I think there’s a second and more interesting reason. The tech world invented coworking, as I pointed out. Especially the tech world as it existed in a particular time and place, namely Silicon Valley in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And tech relies heavily on venture capital. So, what does venture capital like? Workers who look busy! And who looks busier than workers toiling in a warehouse?
Suppose we’re venture capitalists. We’re probably middle aged white guys seeing all these kids with their inscrutable tech wizardry, and we’re holding the purse strings. With the right investments, we can make the cash flow through those Internet tubes, and we can deskill and demoralize middle income workers to boot. Take that, teachers, health care workers, and cab and truck drivers! The kiddies probably don’t remember the glory days of US industry, but we do. We know what work looks like, us Finance Boomers. Well, those kids are conducting a stage performance just for us. And it’s a Tony Award winner.
And so, I think that’s what’s happening here. Despite the fact that open office plans and coworking spaces make people miserable and less productive, they’re great theater. Like SAFe Agile much later, the tech world exported it to the rest of white-collar America.
Gregg’s Counterproductive
To be honest, I’ve never quite understood tech optimism. Yeah, yeah, I’m a sci-fi fan and I know it exists in those circles. But I find the downside to tech patently obvious.
With those thoughts in mind, I recently read Melissa Gregg’s book, Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy. Gregg’s no glib tech optimist. In fact, her approach to science and technology is broadly similar to my own. She sees the ideology of financialization in corporate life, especially those areas (mistakenly) believed to be under the management of the worker. But she sees coworking as a possible site of resistance.
How’s that supposed to go?
Gregg points out the coworking space is a shared space, an aspect of the sharing economy ripe for worker takeover and management. The thought is that workers suffering from precarity come into serendipitous contact through these spaces. Perhaps contact outside the surveillance network of the boss.
And I guess that’s possible, but I find it difficult to overcome the deeper issues of cost-cutting and precarity. People hoping to organize the tech world can and should use these aspects of it. I’d point out in reply, though, that it’s difficult to make these kinds of connections under these kinds of circumstances. At least without a much deeper theory and practice of organizing the workforce, not to mention a full-time organizing staff.
