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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. | 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. | |||
====Songs of innocence and experience==== | |||
It is tempting to blame the call back to the office on the older generation. Jemima Kelly blames “the usual grumblings of old age”. Kyla Scanlon derides “pea-brains” who “can’t envision a future different than the present”. | |||
But, over the long term by which this cultural shift will be measured, Generation X won’t have much of a say, and the Boomers none: they’re at retirement age now. If a system effect will draw people back into offices it will come from the bottom. Not, that is, from grumpy boomers, nor management, but from ''people wanting your job''. | |||
{{quote| | |||
Oh what a multitude they seem’d, these flowers of London town! <br> | |||
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own.<br> | |||
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,<br> | |||
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.<br> | |||
:— William Blake, “Holy Thursday”, from ''Songs of Innocence'' (1789)}} | |||
We are not fixed in time and space. Each of us is on a private life journey. At the start, we sing a song of innocence: we have little to offer but energy, effort and longevity. But then we learn. We practice. We get better. We get experience. By degrees, our relative value shifts from ''energy and time'' to ''wisdom and judgment''. | |||
''We get old''. | |||
{{quote| | |||
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,<br> | |||
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,<br> | |||
And mark in every face I meet,<br> | |||
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.<br> | |||
:— William Blake, “London”, from ''Songs of Experience'' (1794)}} | |||
By the end, we sing songs of experience. The boomers have almost gone now. Generation X — short years ago a bunch of scrappy, stroppy, hungry upstarts — are now worldly-wise, world-weary and valued not for energy but experience. They have little left to prove: what advancement they stood to gain happened, or didn’t, but the ship has sailed. They have little further need for their elbows. (Those with the sharpest elbows are already out of sight). If someone will pay them a decent wage to work from home, then happy days. These are not the cohort trying to force anyone back to the office. Why ''would'' they? | |||
Consider again the dynamic at the front end of the labour curve: here what you have to offer is energy, enthusiasm and graft. Nuance comes later. Now the organisation needs to fund people who will offer that graft. Bear in mind, culturally, how we symbolise energy: ''those who are prepared to turn up''. | |||