The future of office work: Difference between revisions

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 I know I’m being like so dramatic and so annoying, but this is like my first job after college and i am in person, and I am commenting in the city, and it takes me forever to get there ... I get on the train at, like 7:30 and I don’t get home until like 6:15, earliest. ... Nothing to do with my job, but the nine-to-five schedule in general is, like, ''crazy''.}}
+In the defensive lists is, prominently, Kyla Scanlon, of the internet, and Jemima Kelly, of the FT.
 ==== It isn’t COVID any more ====
 Working from home during COVID was, for white-collar types of a certain, middle, age — a revelation. We reacquainted ourselves with our local neighborhoods, clapped the NHS, ate out to help out, got to know green spaces, avoided the tube and still by most measures, our productivity ''rose'' during lockdown. But COVID was a weird, ''[[sui generis]]'' time:
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 ==== Deep cultural layers don’t change overnight. ====
 {{Quote|Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. ''Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power''.
-:— {{author|Stewart Brand}}, ''[https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2 Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning]''}}1
+:— {{author|Stewart Brand}}, ''[https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-brand/release/2 Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning]''}}
-[[Stewart Brand]] has a fabulous insight to see a complex systems developing through the interaction of concentric layers, the outermost being the most provisional, erratic and fast-moving, and the deepest being the most stable, reliable and slow. It applies as well to a biome as to a society.
+[[Stewart Brand]] has the fabulous insight to imagine the onward progress of a [[complex system]] as if were the interaction of revolving concentric layers, the outermost being the most provisional, erratic and fast-moving, and the deepest being the most stable, reliable and slow. This “[[pace layering]]” metaphor works as well for a biome as it does for a society or a market.
-In a society the outermost might be fashion, then commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture and at the innermost biology and geology.
+The “layers” are sets of abstract impulses, grouped by the way in which they act upon the system as a whole. In a society, for example the outermost layer might be “fashion”, then successively inside that “commerce”, “infrastructure”, “governance”, “culture” and finally “biology” and “geology”. Fashion moves the fastest, geology the slowest.
-The layers interact with each other. The outer layers pull, the inner ones resist. Perhaps because we can see it moving, we are captivated by fashion but, perhaps because it doesn’t seem to, we are less fixated about our cells and the soil structure.
+Adjacent [[Pace layering|pace layers]] interact with each other: the “fast” layers pull, the “slow” ones resist. The fast moving layers command our attention, but the slow-moving ones should command our ''respect'', because they are the store of system knowledge.
-But a fashion must persist a while before it will move the commercial system, which must stay moving even longer to influence infrastructure and governance. We can see the effects of the changed infrastructure on the internet, and commerce and fashion. These infrastructural changes of course enabled the extraordinary pivot to remote working at the onset of COVID — has they not been made, the lockdown response may well not have been possible.
+A fast fashion must persist before it influences the commercial system, which must in turn persist even longer to influence infrastructure and governance. The consumer computer revolution started as a fashion — ZX81s and Apple IIes — but gradually picked up commercial momentum, and after long enough began to influence the development of infrastructure. These infrastructural changes — laying a ton of fibre cable around the world and across the Atlantic in the late nineties (bless you, Global Crossing) — enabled the extraordinary pivot to remote working at the onset of COVID. Had that cable not been there, the lockdown response may well not have been possible.
-The argument is often put that COVID was the black swan that opened the world’s eyes to an adjacency it hadn’t realised was possible  Once that door is opened and we have moved into it the range of adjacent possibilities changes forever.
+The argument is often put that COVID was the [[black swan]] that opened the office working world’s eyes to an adjacency it hadn’t previously realised was possible. Once we moved through that door the range of [[Adjacent possible|adjacent possibilities]] changes forever.
 But this is to make an assumption that layers below the infrastructural have shifted in the meantime too, and that's some veil had concealed this alternative better way of working from the collective hear the two. For the technology and infrastructure to permit remote working is not new. It has been there, in plain sight, in regular use, for a couple of decades. Putting its further deployment down to top down stigma would need evidence, and an explanation of why those who did did not feel the same stigma  given the avowed purpose of rightshoring.