Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future, The Atlantic, Ed Zitron, July 29, 2021

I understand both sides of the debate over remote work, from questions about the impact it will have on cities (I’ll be doing a post soon about that!), to the question of advancement and career-building (an argument for the physical office) versus focusing and having a little more personal time to boot (an argument for working remotely.)

This piece is a forceful argument for remote work. Zitron suggests that for jobs that are amenable to remote work, there isn’t really much to recommend mandatory, physical attendance to an office.

Remote work lays bare many brutal inefficiencies and problems that executives don’t want to deal with because they reflect poorly on leaders and those they’ve hired. Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line.

Read the whole thing. I tend toward Zitron’s view here. I fact, I’ll go further. Here’s one: given their fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, and given that in two years productivity has held constant in many companies, maybe managers have a responsibility to cut the needless expense of physical offices, and invest those savings in their business or return them to shareholders!

Are You Staying in South Bend?, WEST.SB, Jacob Titus, January 3, 2022

It didn’t matter that I had been on a plane precisely once and could only afford to attend college in Bloomington thanks to state aid programs. My life, as I understood it, was a one-way train from South Bend to anywhere else—as long as that elsewhere had at least a million warm bodies.

A really great, thoughtful piece. I won’t say much—just read it. But I will say that the way a lot of folks talk, including even some urbanists, you’d think the vast majority of the United States is not worth living in or paying attention to. Obviously, that’s wrong. Just realizing that changes how you think about these things.

The new normal is already here. Get used to it, The Economist Leaders, December 18, 2021

Remember how the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 began to transform air travel in waves. In the years that followed each fresh plot exposed an unforeseen weakness that required a new rule. First came locked cockpit doors, more armed air marshals and bans on sharp objects. Later, suspicion fell on bottles of liquid, shoes and laptops. Flying did not return to normal, nor did it establish a new routine. Instead, everything was permanently up for revision.

I suspect that this is correct. But it’s not good. There hasn’t been a genuine pandemic of this scale since the 1918 flu—which the article later notes—so it seems odd to upend life permanently over a once-in-a-century event.

Also:

The desire to return to a more stable, predictable world may help explain a 1990s revival. You can understand the appeal of going back to a decade in which superpower competition had abruptly ended, liberal democracy was triumphant, suits were oversized, work ended when people left the office, and the internet was not yet disrupting cosy, established industries or stoking the outrage machine that has supplanted public discourse. That desire is too nostalgic.

I dunno. It’s an interesting thing how this article nearly states, as positives or at least inevitabilities, the exact things a lot of people are afraid of. I’ve been happy to observe the COVID-era precautions and I think most of them are or were necessary. But I think it’s also necessary to insist that we try to return to a pre-pandemic normal when the threat passes.

Today’s fourth entry is tweet that sparked a lot of thoughts and memories. I’m curious how you’d answer this, if you grew up in the era indicated:

Anaïs Mitchell @anaismitchell

People who had analog, pre-cellphone childhood or young adulthood, I’m tryna write an essay, what do you miss about those before times?

January 1st 2022

2,960 Retweets27,525 Likes

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