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+===== @kylascan =====
+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}}.
+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 [[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 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.
+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>
+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.}}
+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 Kyla Scanlon’s question still remains: ''Can'' we change? ''What''? And ''how''?
+{{quote|
+I eat my peas with honey<br>
+I’ve done it all my life<br>
+It makes the peas taste funny<br>
+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-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?
+“''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.”}}
+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|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.
+{{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?}}
+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|
+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 [[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.
+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?
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 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.
-===Working in your jim-jams===
+====Final points====
-I have, throughout this piece mischievously referred to home workers in their jim-jams, eating ice-cream from the tub in a onesie on the sofa whilst dialed into a conference call and generally insinuating that remote workers might be, well, phoning it in. (That is, literally, the origin of the expression, “phoning it in”.)
+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.
-This provokes outrage among some,l. I freely admit it is intended to.
-“It is just wrong for you to imply that people who work from home necessarily take it easy. Some people have family commitments and personal circumstances being their control which mean they have to work from home. And look, dammit, this is not the nineteen fifties. We are not living in a some episode of ''Mad Men''. Smell the coffee, JC. Some people, frankly, just choose to work from home. They work better that way. We have the tools and capabilities, so why the hell ''shouldn’t'' they? They can be just as effective as the most grinding tube-jockey. It is grossly unfair of you to generalise.”
-Now every word of this is true. But not one grasps the point, which is that this can all be true while a significant portion of home workers do take the Mickey , but more to the point, many office jockeys, deep in their blackest heart, will harbour this conviction. Punters actually do think this. It might not be fair, but they do. People are human: they justify themselves, like any pattern-matching generaliser, they make generalisations. Such as all other things being equal the more committed people ''turn up''. (This is literally what it means to say, “I don't know what happened there. The Aresenal just didn’t turn up”.)
-These metaphors tell us something deep about our cultural values. “He put a shift in”. “She really stood up.” “They represented.” “She went missing in action.” “he was awol”. “she seemed distant and uninvolved.” “She had real ''presence''.” “This is all a bit remote”.
+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.