The office-space empire WeWork was founded eight years ago in New York. It currently leases 240,000 square metres of real estate in London alone, which reportedly makes it the city’s largest user of offices after the British government. The basic deal is simple enough: you can either pay to put your laptop wherever there is space, or pay a little more for a more dependable desk or entire office — and, in either case, take advantage of the fact that, with operations in 20 countries, WeWork offers the chance to travel the planet and temporarily set up shop in no end of locations.
The WeWork idea, though, is that a place to work is only part of what is on offer. As well as your workspace, there will be free beer, regular yoga and Pilates sessions and more. As the working day goes on and such distractions — along with the necessity of meeting other footloosehotshots, and comparing “projects” — take up more of your time, a couple of questions might come to mind: what is work, and what is leisure? And does the distinction even matter much any more?
Other customers may be troubled by an even more fundamental problem: where is their workplace — and what, by contrast, is home? WeWork is slowly expanding into a new project called WeLive. It’s operating now in New York and Washington, DC, will soon open in Seattle and is also planned for Tel Aviv. If accommodation is hard to find, and your life as a freelance means you have no permanent workplace where you can meet like-minded people, here is a solution: tiny studio flats and slightly bigger apartments, built around communal areas, kitchens and laundrettes — in the same building as WeWork office space.
Always working
Miguel McKelvey, one of the company’s two founders, has said that the idea is partly aimed at people who are “always working or always semi-working”. The mountain of press coverage about this innovation includes a comment from one euphoric resident in Manhattan: “You just roll out of bed, go down the elevator and get to work.” This, apparently, is the future. Despite its slow start, WeWork’s chief executive, Adam Neumann, insists that “WeLive is going to be a bigger business than WeWork”.
Four years ago, we heard stories of employees who worked up to 90 hours a week and lived in camper vans at Google’s HQ in northern California. Now, a WeLive lifestyle will presumably be established at a new Google campus nearby, which will be located among 10,000 new “housing units”. Up the road, Facebook’s Willow Village seems about to offer something similar. Meanwhile, for tech high-flyers lucky enough to have no fixed employer or workplace, there is an even more attractive option: a start-up called Roam, which is aimed at “digital nomads” and offers flexible “co-working and co-living” spaces in London, San Francisco, Miami, Tokyo and Ubud in Indonesia. For around $500 a week, such people can now wander around the world, mixing life and work — “two activities that quickly become indistinguishable within Roam’s confines”, as The New York Times writes.
Always “on”
It is significant that this blurring of work and leisure, and the disappearance of any meaningful idea of home, is reflected at every level of the tech industry — ranging from shared houses that double as start-up “incubators” (see the hit US comedy Silicon Valley), through the co-working and co-living spaces springing up in urban China, to the factories in the same country where workers producing iPhones sleep in dormitories. The erosion of any barrier between work and downtime is reflected in big tech’s insistence that we are “on” at all times — checking our feeds, sending emails, messaging colleagues. You see the same things even more clearly among rising numbers of networked homeworkers — translators, CV writers, IT contractors, data inputters — whose lives are often a very modern mixture of supposed flexibility and day-to-day insecurity.
Marx and Engels said that the bourgeoisie could not exist “without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society”. Tony Blair told us that the world of globalization has “no custom or practice”, and gives rewards only to those “swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change”. And here, perhaps, is the ultimate proof. After a couple of centuries during which capitalism has repeatedly tried to kill the inconvenient human need for domestic spaces where people can escape economic demands (witness workers’ hostels and old-fashioned company towns), that same tendency is being newly dressed up as a matter of aspiration and personal freedom. So what do we do? God knows, there will always be a market for expensive fads: prices for WeLive studios start at over £2,300 (about €2,600) a month. But, as proved by other developments in the US and China — and an innovative project in London where rooms and access to a workspace can be had for a relatively affordable £245 a week — the worldwide push towards mixing up co-working and co-living highlights a big issue: the extreme shortage of affordable urban housing.
More generally, the need for a distinction between work and downtime should enter the political vocabulary as a fundamental right, and the organizations trying to support it — especially the network of small freelance unions across Europe and the US — need to be supported and assisted.
It is time, too, that we began to understand that the great wave of popular resentment sweeping across advanced societies is partly about the way the modern economy destroys some of people’s most basic emotional attachments. We all know the modern rules: millions of people have to leave the place where they grew up to find dependable work; and they find that creating any kind of substitute home somewhere new is impossible. For people at the bottom of the economic hierarchy, life proves to be unendingly precarious and often itinerant. For those slightly further up, the best available option seems to be a version of the student lifestyle that extends well into your 30s.
Modern families
While some people seem to enjoy the weightlessness this creates, it is surely no way to spend any sizable share of your adult life. And what if you want to start a family? It is a sign of the surreal future some people want to push us towards that WeWork may have the beginnings of an answer to that question, at least for the few people who can afford it. The company has recently created an educational branch called WeGrow (so far focused on a private elementary school in New York) that teaches kids a range of skills, including mindfulness and “conscious entrepreneurship”. But the idea is apparently to put WeGrow schools in WeWork properties across the world, so digital nomads can carry their disorientated children from place to place, and ensure they have just as flimsy an idea of home as their parents do. Not for the first time, you may□ well read all this and wonder: whose utopia is this anyway?