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=== Kyla Scanlon’s argument ===
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?
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>


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.  
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.


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


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.
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.


So, have things really changed? Since many businesses now deliver services rather than making things in a factory, jobs ''can'' be delivered remotely.  
We can, and should, embrace the new paradigm.


{{quote|
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.
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.
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.  


But, okay, fair enough, we should not accept our fate. The questions remains: ''Can'' we change? ''What''? And ''how''?
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.


{{quote|
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?
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 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?
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.
 
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]].
 
Is there something different, then, about Generation Z? ''Yes'':
{{quote|
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:
{{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.
 
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.
 
Boomers expect everyone to graft just like they did, as if hard work, and not ''smart'' work, is a kind of religion.
 
{{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. ... [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.
 
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.


=== Jemima Kelly’s argument ===
=== Jemima Kelly’s argument ===
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