On the false emancipation of working from home

2021-10-25

I've always told people, even before the pandemic, that working from home combines the worst parts of both jobs and homes, which is why I didn't like it. But this was never quite accurate. It's more that, the way I see it, working from home takes the good things about each and perverts them, twists them into something worse. You've still got the job itself: alienating, pointless, mind-numbing, though useful in that it offers a wage and the occasional sense of having accomplished some small thing. But all that now conveniently happens in the same place I rest and relax, talk with my partner, fuck, and fail to improve at chess. I am alienated from my own home while I am still inside it for eight hours each day. It's true that temporarily stopping that alienation is as simple as closing the lid of my laptop, much easier than the hour commute that was previously required, but the flip side is that I can just as easily step back into it by opening the laptop up again, without ever leaving my bedroom. My job — and therefore my managers, my co-workers, my deadlines — now live with me, full-time. And I don't particularly want them to.

This isn't to say I think that the millions of people who are refusing to return to the office are wrong to do so. The fact that remote work is experienced by so many as a marked improvement is alone enough to endorse it. But I don't think we've done enough to articulate exactly what remote work means, or the possible fucked-up futures it enables.

The benefits are obvious enough. You are no longer forced to endure the stifling atmosphere of an office: the sickening Keurig, the all-too-close coworker eating tuna while clacking away at a mechanical keyboard, the hovering manager, the constant passersby peeking at your screen and ensuring your disciplined attention to an utterly banal responsibility. You get to spend more time with your kids or cats. You get to create whatever working environment you want. No one's around to wonder why you took a 20-minute shit. There's no commute, no traffic, no late trains. No one's there to stop you from making a sandwich at 2 p.m. No one's there to tell you not to dick around on your phone for an hour while you wait for a response from someone else who is also dicking around on their phone. In short, there's a dramatic increase in your own personal autonomy and dignity. You can behave as you like even while you work, which is great.

While autonomy, control, dignity, and comfort are the terms usually used to describe the advantages of remote jobs, I think there's actually something else there: A hidden demand to simply work less. Most of the things we recognize as improvements over on-site jobs are really ways of not working at all. The sudden revolt against the office is really a demand to work less period and spend more time living your life however you want to live it. Many people don't necessarily see this covert demand. They see workers with cushy jobs that just got even cushier. This is even true, to a certain extent. But once the matter is framed not just as one of conditions but also one of time, it's a much more powerful and universal demand, one that's recognizable and extendable even to non-office workers.

Except that it was never really a demand, was it? All of this is the result of a deadly accident of history, and a desperate (successful) attempt to keep the economic gears turning and avoid a much more serious reckoning with capitalism that might have occurred. Remote jobs were forced upon employers by circumstance and a fear of the alternative, a true shutdown. There was no labor movement pushing for remote work, which means that there's no movement to defend the gains of remote work either. And employers are organized in a way that laborers — perhaps especially office laborers — simply aren't and haven't been for nearly a century. Even recognizing remote jobs as a material gain does not mean that we'll be able to keep those gains. While we may have a little bit more autonomy for now, we are still subject to the wage labor system, same as we ever were, and we're still renting out our life for a paycheck, same as we were before: except than now we're letting our employer crash on the couch indefinitely. The fundamental situation has not changed, the unimaginable asymmetries of both power and organization remain.

The bosses will get hip to this all this soon enough. Plenty of corporations are trying to push people back into the office, but they'll wise up and realize the great opportunities now afforded to them. Most people don't recognize what the trade-offs are for remote jobs, and there are a very real trade-offs. Your home (or more likely your tiny apartment) is now functionally the boss's capital at least part of the time. What was once a place where you lived is now a direct site of production. Your desk, your lights, your internet, your entire home — these are being used for the benefit of your boss, even if your boss doesn't own them (yet). And your boss doesn't pay a dime to use your home, they get to use it rent free each and every day. Of course, this has always been somewhat true, reproduction and production have always been linked, but not to this degree or on this scale. The distinction between job and non-job, between personal life and your company's private property are getting blurrier and blurrier.

From the perspective of a perceptive monopoly capitalist, remote work is an opportunity to link things that have previously been unlinked in ways analogous to employer-provided health care. Why not rent company-owned homes to employees instead of building or buying an expensive office? You don't even need to build a company town to do this (though huge corporations like Google and Amazon are indeed trying to do this), you just need to start buying up existing homes _a la_ BlackRock and make them available, perhaps at a discounted rate, perhaps not. Or why not sell employees the homes they will work from, at least to the increasingly few that can actually afford to buy a home? In either case, you can directly recoup the wages you paid them, and even if they leave their job, they'll still be paying their former employer on a monthly basis, which means taking money from a competitor more or less directly. Sounds great, if you're an employer. This takes a lot of capital, but then there's more capital in the hands of capitalists than there's ever been. Or just invest in BlackRock and own your workers' homes indirectly. All of these things are already being done or at the very least contemplated, they just needs to be scaled, as they say. In many ways, working from home means you're already living in a company town, it's just not very developed yet.

In terms of work time, many remote workers now live in halcyon days of afternoon naps, but employers will find ways to make you work, even if they choose not to force you back into the office. You might not be able to see the panopticon anymore, but that doesn't it's not there. There's nothing to stop your manager from constantly harassing you via Slack, texts, or (gasp) even phone calls, and you would be wise to answer if you plan to keep your job. New monitoring tools will be installed and new rules enforced. Even without special software, it's relatively easy to track more or less everything you do on your job's laptop (though there is plenty of software that makes this much easier). Every program you open and how long it was used, every time you open or close your laptop, every website you visit, every time you sign in or out; all of these are dutifully logged somewhere on your computer, and not necessarily as a form of intentional surveillance, but simply for the proper functioning of the computer itself. All anyone needs to do is take a look at those logs, which any competent IT worker can do. We're not even talking about always-on cameras or microphones here, though these too are sure to be forced upon us more than they already have been.