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=== Kyla Scanlon’s argument ===
===== @kylascan =====
TikTok Girl has had her supporters. Notable among them is {{plainlink|https://kylascanlon.com/|Kyla Scanlon}}, a whip-smart “influencer” with a Bloomberg column, guest essays in the New York Times and the best part of half a million [[Followers|followers]] of her frenetic tiktoks,<ref>[https://x.com/kylascan/status/1704626243402895435 Here’s one].</ref> podcasts, [[Twitter|tweets]], blogs and so on. Being of Generation Z, ''just'', she has the [[lived experience]] to weigh in and recently did so.<ref>https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-tiktok-girl-is-right-modernity</ref>
Notable among TikTok Girl’s supporters was {{plainlink|https://kylascanlon.com/|Kyla Scanlon}}, a whip-smart “influencer” with a Bloomberg column, guest essays in the New York Times and the best part of half a million of her own [[followers]] on her frenetic TikToks,<ref>[https://x.com/kylascan/status/1704626243402895435 Here’s one].</ref> podcasts, [[Twitter|tweets]] and blogs. She took to {{Plainlink|https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-tiktok-girl-is-right-modernity|her blog}}.


Back in the day, she says, agrarian societies worked daylight hours only giving up their circadian rhythms when forced to by the industrial revolution. It took Henry Ford — not your ''classic'' Gen Z pin-up, but hey — to realise he would get more out of his workers if he paid them properly and gave them time off. So was born, apparently, the nine-to-five: visionary, but that was a hundred years ago.  
For context on the 9-to-5, Scanlon gave a potted history of industrial relations, starting with agrarian societies who worked “only” daylight hours (sounds fun, right?), until forced to give this up by “Big Machine” during the late industrial revolution. It was Henry Ford — not your ''classic'' Gen Z pin-up, but hey — who realised he would get more out of his workers by paying them properly and giving them time off. So, a century ago, the nine-to-five was born.  


''[[This time it’s different|Things have changed]].'' The nature of how we now ''are'' — networked, digital and [[onworld|online]] — and what we now ''do'' — delivering services like “B2B [[Software-as-a-service|SaaS]]” instead of making goods in factories — means [[this time it’s different|it’s different this time]].  
Scanlon asserted that things haven’t moved on, without really explaining why she thought that. She declared it was now time they did. The nature of how we now ''are'' — networked, digital and [[onworld|online]] — and what we now ''do'' — delivering services like “B2B [[Software-as-a-service|SaaS]],” instead of making old-fashioned widgets in factories — meant it is “time to progress again”.  


Let’s take this history as read and park questions — such as how TikTok Girl would have liked a regular agrarian day out in the fields, or ''who'' still uses the eight-hour day, since it definitely isn’t the financial services industry or its professional advisors<ref>The EU got so worked up about the long hours that it legislated the “Working Time Directive” in 1998, limiting weekly work hours to ''forty-eight''. Professionals have habitually opted out of it ever since.</ref> — but as we do, dispense a bit of tough parental love: an eight-hour day in an office downtown with a commute each side of it is, across the epochal sweep of human perseverance, ''no great imposition''. It might be ''dull'', sure, but that is not the question. You can’t cure boredom by working in your jim-jams from the kitchen table.
Let’s park our questions — such as how TikTok Girl would have liked an agrarian day out in the fields, whether one can sensibly compare factory production lines with modern offices, or just ''who'' is meant to have stuck with the eight-hour day, since it hasn’t been any service industry the JC has ever been involved in<ref>The EU got so worked up about the long hours that it legislated the “Working Time Directive” in 1998, limiting weekly work hours to ''forty-eight''. Professionals have habitually opted out of it ever since.</ref> — but as we do, we should dispense a bit of tough, parental love.  


So, have things really changed? Since many businesses now deliver services rather than making things in a factory, jobs ''can'' be delivered remotely.  
An eight-hour day in an office, even with a commute at each end, across the great sweep of human endurance, ''is not that much to ask''.<ref>By the way, TikTok Girl herself mainly complains about the commute: she seems to accept the working day isn’t so bad. But — perhaps against her intention, she is a lightning rod for this bigger question.</ref>


{{quote|
In any case, Scanlon imagines a continuity in the nature of work from Henry Ford to Steven Schwartzman that really isn’t there. {{quote|
Every time you talk about a change in the workforce, it’s a typical response of “I can’t envision a world different than the one I inhabit personally, therefore, nothing is possible” or some variation of that.... The pea-brained nature of those that can’t envision a future different than the present are the problem.}}
Every time you talk about a change in the workforce, it’s a typical response of “I can’t envision a world different than the one I inhabit personally, therefore, nothing is possible” or some variation of that.... The pea-brained nature of those that can’t envision a future different than the present are the problem.}}


But is Scanlon’s conception of what her generation, in general, can reasonably expect from professional working life any less informed by the world ''she'' inhabits personally? Hers is a trajectory few twenty-somethings can sensibly aspire to. Look, if they could be financial services influencers, they would. Wouldn’t we all? But the market is small.
But the nature of work — ''what'' we do, ''how'' we do it, and ''who'' does it — has changed out of all recognition — in forty years. “White collar” occupations, reserved as they were for a highly-educated upper middle-class elite, were hardly hard work.<ref>Thus, the {{plainlink|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-6-3_Rule|3-6-3 rule}}: borrow at 3 percent, lend at 6, on the tee at 3pm.</ref> In the 1980s this remote professional enclave exploded into a [[military-industrial complex]], in which the traditional professions were joined by a slew of new ones — [[audit]], accountancy, engineering, [[marketing]], branding, [[human resources]], [[design]], architecture, [[technology]], [[Management consultant|management]] and [[operations]] and a brand new category of labour [[Emergent|emerged]]: the business administrator.<ref>Many of these are what [[David Graeber]] might call “[[Bullshit Jobs: A Theory|bullshit jobs]]”.</ref> It was its own [[complex system]] of work, with its own evolving criteria, customs, conventions and modes of operation. It ''continues'' to evolve: lockdown was only its latest stress-test.  


But, okay, fair enough, we should not accept our fate. The questions remains: ''Can'' we change? ''What''? And ''how''?
But Kyla Scanlon’s question still remains: ''Can'' we change? ''What''? And ''how''?


{{quote|
{{quote|
Line 24: Line 24:
:—''Anon''.}}
:—''Anon''.}}


In a sense Kyla Scanlon is right: if it comes to it, we can, ''en masse'', deliver services remotely. [[COVID-19|Covid]] proved it. But this is a bit like saying we ''can'' eat peas with a knife. The nature of corporate work is inherently collaborative, in the way social media influencing probably isn’t. Is the ''best'' way of delivering services to have staff sequester themselves in their box rooms and interact solely through the medium of Slack, Zoom and Teams?  
In a sense, Scanlon is right: if it comes to it, we can, ''en masse'', deliver services remotely. [[COVID-19|Covid]] proved it. But this is a bit like saying we ''can'' eat peas with a knife. Work in modern professional services is inherently collaborative. Is the ''best'' way of collaborating to sequester your staff in their private box rooms, letting them interact solely through Slack, Zoom and Teams? Or is there something different about Generation Z that makes it more suited to this different rhythm? 


Seeing as digital communication constrains us to formal, metered, monitored channels, this should at least not be taken for granted. See last week’s piece on the [[org chart]].
“''Yes'',” says Scanlon:
{{quote|
“Gen Z grapples with an evolving definition of work. Unlike previous generations, they face unprecedented challenges: climate change, an uncertain economy, ballooning student loans, and the struggles of identity and purpose in a digitised world.”}}


Is there something different, then, about Generation Z? ''Yes'':
Scanlon says, we mustn’t laugh at the kids, but when they things like this is it hard not to, as we put these “unprecedented challenges” into a bit of perspective. Were there really no equivalent challenges faced by young workers in the sixties, seventies and eighties?
{{quote|
{{quote|Such civil rights, gay rights or women’s rights as there were, the boomers won them. No-one had even ''thought'' of trans rights.  
The younger generation, notably Gen Z, grapples with an evolving definition of work. Unlike previous generations, they face unprecedented challenges: climate change, an uncertain economy, ballooning student loans, and the struggles of identity and purpose in a digitized world.}}


Scanlon says we mustn’t laugh at the kids, but when they things like this is it hard not to. Here, kids, is what you missed:
South Africa was apartheid, Berlin partitioned — the whole of Europe was partitioned, come to think of it — and there were international wars in Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel, civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda and ''multiple'' military ''coups d’état'' in each of Bolivia, Uganda, Sudan, Ghana, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.  
{{quote|There were barely and civil rights, gay rights or women’s rights you’d recognise, beyond suffrage, until the boomers won them for you. No-one had even ''thought'' of trans rights. South Africa was apartheid, Berlin was partitioned, there were hot wars in Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel and of course the big Cold one between East and West. There was widescale nuclear proliferation: people built fallout shelters in their basements and schoolkids planned how best to lose their virginity in the event of a four-minute warning. There were civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia and Uganda (plus a famine which only Boomer Geldof could fix) and ''multiple'' military coups, in Bolivia, Uganda, Sudan, Ghana, Afghanistan, Pakistan and plenty of other places, and revolution in Iran. There were genocides in Cambodia, the Balkans and Uganda, military juntas in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, and meanwhile across Europe, Marxist and Republican terrorists murdered athletes, assassinated politicians, blew up buildings and hijacked planes. The 1970s were also the worst decade of most industrialised countries’ economic performance since the Great Depression: there was the Oil Crisis, a crime wave in America, New York went bankrupt and there was a catastrophic war on drugs, rolling strikes across Britain and Europe and economic malaise culminating in a series of severe financial recessions, crashes and then neoliberal monetarist experiments around the world, while eastern Europe slowly failed under oppressive, coordinated, communist regimes. There were student loans back then, too. The prevailing pandemic, AIDS, killed anyone it infected, while the environment was was wrecked with industrial pollution, acid rain, a hole in the ozone layer, the threat of nuclear winter, Dutch elm disease, peripheral fallout from Chernobyl and Fukushima reactor meltdowns and anxiety from Three Mile Island. In the mean time, we were supposed to wear corduroy, polyester, acid wash, flares, permanent waves and listen to disco and new romantic music, the architecture and urban planning, with brutalist housing estates, sucked —  and there was ''no internet''.}}


Things were ''really'' shit in the decades before you were born, kids. The boomers and generation X sucked it up. Now it’s your turn.
There were genocides in Cambodia, the Balkans and Uganda, military juntas in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, and while Marxist and Republican terrorists murdered athletes, assassinated politicians, blew up buildings and hijacked planes, across the western world a “Cold War” jacked up an out-of-control nuclear arms race, people built fallout shelters in their basements and teenagers planned mercy-dash bonk routes should there be a four-minute warning.  


Why don’t we change, then? Scanlon attributes this to intransigence, and a little bit, to embittered generations who themselves went through the meatgrinder, and don’t see why the next generation shouldn’t too.
The 1970s were the industrialised world’s worst economic decade since the Great Depression and until the 1980s: there was the Oil Crisis, a crime wave across British housing estates and American projects, rolling strikes across Britain and Europe, New York went bankrupt, the subway was a warzone, the number one record was called ''Never Mind The Bollocks'', there were catastrophic multi-front wars on drugs, and general economic malaise culminating in inflation, severe financial recessions, market crashes and then neoliberal monetarist experiments around the world, famine in Africa, while Eastern Europe slowly went to pieces under oppressive, coordinated, totalitarian regimes.


Boomers expect everyone to graft just like they did, as if hard work, and not ''smart'' work, is a kind of religion.
The prevailing pandemic, AIDS, killed everyone it infected, while the environment was was wrecked with pollution, acid rain, a hole in the ozone layer that was frying Australasians, the woodlands of northern Europe were devastated by Dutch Elm disease, fallout from Chernobyl and Fukushima reactor meltdowns fell across large tracts of Europe and Japan, and there was a near miss in the US at Three Mile Island.  


{{quote|
We had student loans back then, too. In the meantime, we were supposed to wear corduroy, polyester, neon, acid wash, pleated pants, permanent waves and listen to Phil Collins and Level 42, while post-war brutalist architecture and urban planning sucked — 
“Every time you talk about a change in the workforce, it’s a typical response of ‘I can’t envision a world different than the one I inhabit personally, therefore, nothing is possible’ or some variation of that. ... [but] to be unable to envision a future different from the present is pea-brained.”}}


And that seems to be it: beyond saying we shouldn’t mock younger generations (I’m not sure why not: they seem happy enough to mock older ones) and we shouldn’t close our minds to new ways of working, which is certainly true, but those new ways of working really need to be different.
And there was ''no internet''.}}


None of Scanlon’s reasons are new. Circadian rhythms have been out of whack since threshers collapsed in a heap in front of the fire in the seventeenth century. Max Weber’s “iron cage” of hierarchy, rules, and process has been with us since, well when Weber noticed it, in 1904.
Things were ''shit'' in the decades before you were born, kids. Not worse, but not better either.


=== Jemima Kelly’s argument ===
===== @jemimajoanna =====
Somewhat against the run of play, the FT’s Jemima Kelly — who prides herself on “sarc and snark” — sided with TikTok Girl, too.
{{quote|
{{quote|
Why shouldn’t she be upset that this is what notching up tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of debt securing a college degree gets you? Why shouldn’t she take her happiness and quality of life seriously? Why do we need to keep glorifying the daily grind as if it were an inherently worthy or virtuous way to live?
Why shouldn’t she be upset that this is what notching up tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of debt securing a college degree gets you? Why
  }}
 
shouldn’t she take her happiness and quality of life seriously? Why do we need to keep glorifying the daily grind as if it were an inherently worthy or virtuous way to live?}}


Good questions, but again: this time isn’t different. No-one — except maybe Steven Schwartzman — glorifies the daily grind. Like greed, it isn’t actually good: it is inevitable. We have configured the way we work, the complex system that is the grand game of financial services pass the parcel, so that it is this elaborate game of formal hoop-jumping and box ticking. We have between us consented to the flawless execution of form as the highest art, the highest aspiration of professional life.
Good questions, but again: is this time different? Who really ''glorifies'' the daily grind? We have configured the way we work — our grand game of [[Agency problem|financial services pass the parcel]] — to be an elaborate ritual formal hoop-jumping, box ticking and ticket-clipping. We have between us consented to the flawless execution of ''form'' as the highest aspiration of professional life. That’s the deal.


{{quote|
{{quote|
Line 59: Line 60:
}}
}}


This, too, may be our fault for giving them false expectations, or a function that, as social conditions improve, incidence of neuroticism necessarily increases.  
This, too, may be their parents’ fault — we of Generation X — our fault for giving unrealistic expectations
 
But here’s the thing. If the highest plane to which we could aspire really ''was'' the flawless pursuit of abstract [[form]] then, and only then, ''remote working would be perfect''. Form-fillers need no ad-hoc interactions. Bureaucrats are there to ''prevent'' unplanned interactions. But we — and, I dare say, Generation Z too — hold on to the hope that professional work is something ''more'' than that.  


{{quote|
After all, full-scale [[Bring your own premises|remote working]] is the [[reductio ad absurdum]] of outsourcing philosophy. COVID was the chance to prove it out.  If this really were how business worked best, overheads would be slashed, infrastructure outsourced to staff, and the risk of bumptious worker-drones like you and me having destructive bright ideas and dangerous flashes of inspiration would be eliminated. It would be some wonderful, {{Plainlink|https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/|''Brazil''-style}} autocracy, everyone chained to their own Ikea table, paying their own rent, clicking buttons while being overwatched by loving telescreens.
We need to work out how to get the balance right between the Zoomer-style coddling and the Boomer-style stiff upper lip — that’s tricky.}}
 
Or not: the JC is fond of the quotable Nietzsche, but it is no more than seeking out antifragility. Along that axis, if the choice is between coddling and stiff upper lip, it ''is'' easy: stiff upper lip.
If depression and anxiety is skyrocketing among teenagers and young adults — I have no reason to disagree — then will letting them fester in isolation really help? Isn’t community and interpersonal interaction just what they need?
 
====Summary====
COVID has given us a vision of an adjacent possibility: a diffused, networked virtual working world where we no longer need to slog into a centralised “in person” office space. Is this the future of work, or an aberration?
 
Commentators fall into two camps: yes, this time it's different, and we should embrace our online world, and no, things ought to revert to their precovid mean, and if they don't, we should make them.


The former view, often advanced by millennials, linkedin [[thought leader]]s, and run of the mill futurologists, gets more play.


----
It found its articulation recently in a forlorn post from TikTok girl, a tearful generation Zer struggling with the strictures of a commute. Defenders  leapt to her cause, not really paying it a great deal of attention, but reading into it a wider charge of complacency among corporate leaders in not recognising legitimate complaints: the daily grind is not for for purpose. In fact TikTok girl was only really complaining about her commute — but still.


Her video shorts are never earnest: she saturates them with state-of-the-art memery and ''velocity'': everything gallops between with frenetic jump cuts, Burroughs like cut-ups and frame shifts that speak to the easily-distracted multi-channel, hyperlinked, always-on dot-dot-dash attention spans of the digital native but don’t necessarily make sense. Well, not to me, at any rate: they are often far too quick for this old codger to make out, let alone follow, and they’re gone before you get a chance to mull over or analyse for content.  
We can, and should, embrace the new paradigm.


In our view having overstated TikTok girl’s argument,  her defenders tend to overstate their case. Actually, modern line in an office isn't too bad. Comparatively, Generation X have it pretty good.


In any case you can’t help but admire, and maybe be sucked in by, the energy and brio of the delivery. You wonder what it would be like if you got to slow it down and treat it like an old-fashioned, boomer thought piece.
And nor is it embittered gen Xers who want to compel everyone back into the office. Far from it. Most of them loved lockdown, and are among the strongest refuseniks.  


Well, Scanlon lets you do that, too. Her Substack is almost as popular as her TikTok, and definitely a lot more popular than this one! 
Was lockdown a dry run for an alternative future, or a weird, ''sui generis'' aberration where usual rules were briefly interrupted, before the system began to reorganise around them? The benefits of lockdown ''to the organisation'' began to fade, even while employees hung onto their personal upsides of home working.


Scanlon is unrepresentative of her generation in other ways, too. Her expectation for some
We should not be surprised that established staff prefer working from home. That is not the question that businesses have to answer.  That is, is preferring the on-world to the off-world in the firm’s best interest?


That same lazy, boomer categorisation of millennials as “attention-depleted dilettantes who conduct their self-absorbed lives through social media” isn't generally true even of the metropolitan liberal cohort we have in mind, let alone the rest of the world's twenty-two year olds, of whom the “digital native” stereotype is starkly atypical.  
We have written elsewhere about the “great delamination” between our nuanced, open-ended, ambiguous, opportunity-laden infinite analogue world, and the finite, historical, polarising online world. They are not equivalents and to assume they are is to make a dangerous category error.


----
====Final points====
formal versus informal: remote working is at its best for work-to-rule people. applying policies, following rules, where interaction is not needed or even necessarily desirable.


Ambitious kids work like tyros, wherever they are. And are the progeny of the professionally qualified upper middle classes of London, New York and California necessarily as driven and (figuratively) hungry as poor kind in Nairobi, Damascus or Kyiv? The JC has no data, but he doubts it. Who is more likely to complain about burnout after a nine to five?
but these are the people who are most at risk of technological redundancy: those are the jobs that really can, and should, be carried out by machine.

Latest revision as of 14:54, 6 November 2023

@kylascan

Notable among TikTok Girl’s supporters was Kyla Scanlon, a whip-smart “influencer” with a Bloomberg column, guest essays in the New York Times and the best part of half a million of her own followers on her frenetic TikToks,[1] podcasts, tweets and blogs. She took to her blog.

For context on the 9-to-5, Scanlon gave a potted history of industrial relations, starting with agrarian societies who worked “only” daylight hours (sounds fun, right?), until forced to give this up by “Big Machine” during the late industrial revolution. It was Henry Ford — not your classic Gen Z pin-up, but hey — who realised he would get more out of his workers by paying them properly and giving them time off. So, a century ago, the nine-to-five was born.

Scanlon asserted that things haven’t moved on, without really explaining why she thought that. She declared it was now time they did. The nature of how we now are — networked, digital and online — and what we now do — delivering services like “B2B SaaS,” instead of making old-fashioned widgets in factories — meant it is “time to progress again”.

Let’s park our questions — such as how TikTok Girl would have liked an agrarian day out in the fields, whether one can sensibly compare factory production lines with modern offices, or just who is meant to have stuck with the eight-hour day, since it hasn’t been any service industry the JC has ever been involved in[2] — but as we do, we should dispense a bit of tough, parental love.

An eight-hour day in an office, even with a commute at each end, across the great sweep of human endurance, is not that much to ask.[3]

In any case, Scanlon imagines a continuity in the nature of work from Henry Ford to Steven Schwartzman that really isn’t there.

Every time you talk about a change in the workforce, it’s a typical response of “I can’t envision a world different than the one I inhabit personally, therefore, nothing is possible” or some variation of that.... The pea-brained nature of those that can’t envision a future different than the present are the problem.

But the nature of work — what we do, how we do it, and who does it — has changed out of all recognition — in forty years. “White collar” occupations, reserved as they were for a highly-educated upper middle-class elite, were hardly hard work.[4] In the 1980s this remote professional enclave exploded into a military-industrial complex, in which the traditional professions were joined by a slew of new ones — audit, accountancy, engineering, marketing, branding, human resources, design, architecture, technology, management and operations and a brand new category of labour emerged: the business administrator.[5] It was its own complex system of work, with its own evolving criteria, customs, conventions and modes of operation. It continues to evolve: lockdown was only its latest stress-test.

But Kyla Scanlon’s question still remains: Can we change? What? And how?

I eat my peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on the knife.

Anon.

In a sense, Scanlon is right: if it comes to it, we can, en masse, deliver services remotely. Covid proved it. But this is a bit like saying we can eat peas with a knife. Work in modern professional services is inherently collaborative. Is the best way of collaborating to sequester your staff in their private box rooms, letting them interact solely through Slack, Zoom and Teams? Or is there something different about Generation Z that makes it more suited to this different rhythm?

Yes,” says Scanlon:

“Gen Z grapples with an evolving definition of work. Unlike previous generations, they face unprecedented challenges: climate change, an uncertain economy, ballooning student loans, and the struggles of identity and purpose in a digitised world.”

Scanlon says, we mustn’t laugh at the kids, but when they things like this is it hard not to, as we put these “unprecedented challenges” into a bit of perspective. Were there really no equivalent challenges faced by young workers in the sixties, seventies and eighties?

Such civil rights, gay rights or women’s rights as there were, the boomers won them. No-one had even thought of trans rights.

South Africa was apartheid, Berlin partitioned — the whole of Europe was partitioned, come to think of it — and there were international wars in Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel, civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda and multiple military coups d’état in each of Bolivia, Uganda, Sudan, Ghana, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

There were genocides in Cambodia, the Balkans and Uganda, military juntas in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, and while Marxist and Republican terrorists murdered athletes, assassinated politicians, blew up buildings and hijacked planes, across the western world a “Cold War” jacked up an out-of-control nuclear arms race, people built fallout shelters in their basements and teenagers planned mercy-dash bonk routes should there be a four-minute warning.

The 1970s were the industrialised world’s worst economic decade since the Great Depression and until the 1980s: there was the Oil Crisis, a crime wave across British housing estates and American projects, rolling strikes across Britain and Europe, New York went bankrupt, the subway was a warzone, the number one record was called Never Mind The Bollocks, there were catastrophic multi-front wars on drugs, and general economic malaise culminating in inflation, severe financial recessions, market crashes and then neoliberal monetarist experiments around the world, famine in Africa, while Eastern Europe slowly went to pieces under oppressive, coordinated, totalitarian regimes.

The prevailing pandemic, AIDS, killed everyone it infected, while the environment was was wrecked with pollution, acid rain, a hole in the ozone layer that was frying Australasians, the woodlands of northern Europe were devastated by Dutch Elm disease, fallout from Chernobyl and Fukushima reactor meltdowns fell across large tracts of Europe and Japan, and there was a near miss in the US at Three Mile Island.

We had student loans back then, too. In the meantime, we were supposed to wear corduroy, polyester, neon, acid wash, pleated pants, permanent waves and listen to Phil Collins and Level 42, while post-war brutalist architecture and urban planning sucked —

And there was no internet.

Things were shit in the decades before you were born, kids. Not worse, but not better either.

@jemimajoanna

Somewhat against the run of play, the FT’s Jemima Kelly — who prides herself on “sarc and snark” — sided with TikTok Girl, too.

Why shouldn’t she be upset that this is what notching up tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of debt securing a college degree gets you? Why

shouldn’t she take her happiness and quality of life seriously? Why do we need to keep glorifying the daily grind as if it were an inherently worthy or virtuous way to live?

Good questions, but again: is this time different? Who really glorifies the daily grind? We have configured the way we work — our grand game of financial services pass the parcel — to be an elaborate ritual formal hoop-jumping, box ticking and ticket-clipping. We have between us consented to the flawless execution of form as the highest aspiration of professional life. That’s the deal.

Gen Z, the generation born between around 1996 and 2012 — have concerns about their mental health, and are bringing those into the world of work. And for good reason: depression and anxiety among teenagers and young adults has skyrocketed.

This, too, may be their parents’ fault — we of Generation X — our fault for giving unrealistic expectations.

But here’s the thing. If the highest plane to which we could aspire really was the flawless pursuit of abstract form then, and only then, remote working would be perfect. Form-fillers need no ad-hoc interactions. Bureaucrats are there to prevent unplanned interactions. But we — and, I dare say, Generation Z too — hold on to the hope that professional work is something more than that.

After all, full-scale remote working is the reductio ad absurdum of outsourcing philosophy. COVID was the chance to prove it out. If this really were how business worked best, overheads would be slashed, infrastructure outsourced to staff, and the risk of bumptious worker-drones like you and me having destructive bright ideas and dangerous flashes of inspiration would be eliminated. It would be some wonderful, Brazil-style autocracy, everyone chained to their own Ikea table, paying their own rent, clicking buttons while being overwatched by loving telescreens.

If depression and anxiety is skyrocketing among teenagers and young adults — I have no reason to disagree — then will letting them fester in isolation really help? Isn’t community and interpersonal interaction just what they need?

Summary

COVID has given us a vision of an adjacent possibility: a diffused, networked virtual working world where we no longer need to slog into a centralised “in person” office space. Is this the future of work, or an aberration?

Commentators fall into two camps: yes, this time it's different, and we should embrace our online world, and no, things ought to revert to their precovid mean, and if they don't, we should make them.

The former view, often advanced by millennials, linkedin thought leaders, and run of the mill futurologists, gets more play.

It found its articulation recently in a forlorn post from TikTok girl, a tearful generation Zer struggling with the strictures of a commute. Defenders leapt to her cause, not really paying it a great deal of attention, but reading into it a wider charge of complacency among corporate leaders in not recognising legitimate complaints: the daily grind is not for for purpose. In fact TikTok girl was only really complaining about her commute — but still.

We can, and should, embrace the new paradigm.

In our view having overstated TikTok girl’s argument, her defenders tend to overstate their case. Actually, modern line in an office isn't too bad. Comparatively, Generation X have it pretty good.

And nor is it embittered gen Xers who want to compel everyone back into the office. Far from it. Most of them loved lockdown, and are among the strongest refuseniks.

Was lockdown a dry run for an alternative future, or a weird, sui generis aberration where usual rules were briefly interrupted, before the system began to reorganise around them? The benefits of lockdown to the organisation began to fade, even while employees hung onto their personal upsides of home working.

We should not be surprised that established staff prefer working from home. That is not the question that businesses have to answer. That is, is preferring the on-world to the off-world in the firm’s best interest?

We have written elsewhere about the “great delamination” between our nuanced, open-ended, ambiguous, opportunity-laden infinite analogue world, and the finite, historical, polarising online world. They are not equivalents and to assume they are is to make a dangerous category error.

Final points

formal versus informal: remote working is at its best for work-to-rule people. applying policies, following rules, where interaction is not needed or even necessarily desirable.

but these are the people who are most at risk of technological redundancy: those are the jobs that really can, and should, be carried out by machine.

  1. Here’s one.
  2. The EU got so worked up about the long hours that it legislated the “Working Time Directive” in 1998, limiting weekly work hours to forty-eight. Professionals have habitually opted out of it ever since.
  3. By the way, TikTok Girl herself mainly complains about the commute: she seems to accept the working day isn’t so bad. But — perhaps against her intention, she is a lightning rod for this bigger question.
  4. Thus, the 3-6-3 rule: borrow at 3 percent, lend at 6, on the tee at 3pm.
  5. Many of these are what David Graeber might call “bullshit jobs”.