The Dark Underbelly of The Remote Economy

The onlineification of work

Gentle Reader,

If you had told me ten years ago that I could do my job from anywhere in the world on a laptop, I would have laughed at you. I thought my working life would have been one of visceral, bodily presence, of hauling myself from one hospital and clinic to the next. Then it all changed, and I turned into a virtual avatar who carries out remote functions by tapping on keyboards and interfacing occasionally with others.

In ways, it is great. I’m living a dream which I once thought was impossible, and I’m enjoying the benefits of remote work which are so numerous as to almost defy itemisation, without resorting to what Beckett called “the comedy of exhaustive enumeration.”

Like many laptop workers, I prize the ability to wander between my house and the nearby cafe or even between this little island and warmer countries, while still being able to earn money. In my in-person days, it always seemed a sin, to me, to be stuck in dark dingy offices on rare sunny mornings and afternoons. Now, if it is nice at home, I can simply sit outside, if I have an outside, and drink a coffee in the comfort of my own garden. These little tricks of geography, micro and macro, are where remote work shines, and are easily leveraged by the sole practitioner who, with enough agency and money, can build his own experience and can bend his work his lifestyle.

This suits freelancers, solopreneurs, and certain personality types. But there have been negative repercussions too and, in this regard, the dark underbelly of the beast is beginning to reveal itself, especially for the class of workers who made a life out of commuting and meeting people and generally doing the things associated with being in the office. They made a social life, too, from their work environment, and they got used to the rhythm of rising, commuting, working, returning. When they came home in the evening, the hard graft was done – the demarcation between work and life was clear, and life had, above all, a certain rhythm to it.

Now, they do more or less the same thing, but from home, trudging around in slippers and comfortable pants. They have the same obligations such as meetings and targets and responding to emails. They know that 80% of office work is sort of futile, it’s a form of showing up, going through the motions. Now one must show up, albeit on Zoom or Slack, must go through the motions, albeit now with an added sense of futility, since the silly and unnecessary meetings now feel more silly and unnecessary than before, and those work friendships which were forged in the past now feel more like awkward acquaintanceships. Life, too, has lost its rhythm and, at the end of the day, one curiously feels dissatisfied, as if nothing has been accomplished. This is because online work, like juicing one’s vegetables, goes down all too easy, and lacks a certain fibre; it does not feel real. Granted, maybe the workers didn’t work so hard before, but all that rushing around, those chats at the water cooler, the meetings in board rooms – they felt like something, and amounted to a real working day.

They knew it was all bullshit. But when everything changed, the veneer of bullshit was wiped away with telling ease. The world of the laptop and the phone had already usurped upon our social lives, but we moved to the almost complete onlineification of work. On the face of it, it wasn’t a big deal – we already communicate with our friends and even meet new people via our phones and, other activities, like dating, now begin (and, sometimes, end) in cyberspace. And what happens online, does not happen offline – for example, since we have dating apps, fewer people are open to approaching others in the real world, since an online safe space has already been carved out for that.

Thus, it seems expediency is the order of the day. There’s an old phrase that goes:

Never attribute to malice that which can adequately explained by stupidity.

I always thought that expediency was a more impactful force in the world, so I would prefer to say:

Never attribute to malice that which can adequately explained by expediency.

And as with our social lives, so now with our working lives. But we lose something here, in this expedient transition. Nonetheless, we don’t know where we stand, as yet. Things are still developing, shaking themselves out – we are as yet in the first innings. But, like coastal erosion, most people don’t notice until something breaks and falls off. People are more burnt out than ever. A woman I know told me that she can’t even look at her laptop now. I believe her. She was like somebody with gastroenteritis who, if you mention food, feels instantly sick. It was that same visceral level of nausea. It seems that tensions are heightened, and the boundaries are falling away.

On the bright side, I know people who upped sticks for a month at a time and rented Airbnbs in exotic locales and worked from fancy houses in sunny places with nice swimming pools and cheap food and drink. They said it was great, and I’m sure it was. I would probably do the same thing if I had a good group of friends in the same remote boat. But, there are many lonely people out there, and the guy who was lonely at home and got a pleasant modicum of interaction at work, will now continue to be lonely at home in his small room, in his rented accommodation, moving digital post-it notes around a screen and talking (typing) about his ideal (online) work environment.

The same guy probably even made that choice and intentionally said: great, I won’t work in the office, I’ll move to The Canaries and sit all day in the sun. Or: I will move the countryside and save money. The human does not, however, always know what is good for him or her and even if we can move back to the office, the trappings of remote work will follow us there, and Slack will still exist, which can reach you here, there, and everywhere. It feels as if a line has been crossed, and we have moved into a more Orwellian and transgressive era.

The battle lines are still being drawn. Some will go back to the office, others to a hybrid model, some will never darken the door of a meeting room again. The workers are still deciding on their preferences, their allegiances, which will be fluid and job-specific, but for a large proportion of people, what we call remote work or what the Germans call Das Homeoffice or what the Italians call smartworking or what the French call le travail à distance, is here to stay, for good or for bad.

Even with minimal experience of company environments, I have seen enough to understand why remote work has its detractors. If we have a crisis of meaning in work, it’s being amplified by all of us tapping our keyboards in our little geographically diverse but often homogeneously featureless home offices, staring at what are effectively the same walls and ceilings and coffee stains. I’ve felt it too, when you can hear the wolves howling in the distance, when the soullessness of it all comes at you, like a great dementor trying to suck the spirit from you. Then, the throat becomes arid, the scrotum tightens, and a sort of fresh futility seeps into the frigid lake of your once-warm heart.

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