The digital giants are infantilizing their workforces, treating them as permanent adolescents, shackling them to the sofas and table football games that have displaced the executive desk, the drinks cabinet, the executive washroom and the corner office as the signifiers of the desirable workplace. It’s the same in the million square meters of so-called start-up space around the world managed by the eight-year-old company WeWork.
They are characterized by chairs that do not match, grouped at kitchen tables made from salvaged driftwood crowded with laptops. They are full of sofas, sofas and yet more sofas, that stand on parquet floors and loose rugs, and coffee tables, lit by mid-century modern chandeliers. There is music and beer and partying, and a gym. There is even a British rival to We Work that calls itself Second Home to spell out the message in the most unmistakable way.
The open question is whether all those sofas and table football games really are about allowing those who work on and around them to be themselves, or are simply intended to put them in the position of playing a part, just as the desk and the corner office once did. Do they in fact represent an actual home for an individual, or just a generic ‘home’?
Despite its atavistic associations with the hearth and the rituals of domesticity, what we understand as the home is essentially a modern concept. It emerged with the rise of individualism starting at the end of 18th century. It is the product of a constant struggle between fundamentalists of various kinds who saw the idea of home triggered by a radical change in circumstances as a chance to impose their sense of how life ought to be lived on others. For some it was a political or moral issue, for others it was a matter of business. Some were radical politicians, others were architects. And some were both.
They offered competing ideas, from communal living to the ideal villa, elaborate decoration, and restraint. These conflicts are now still being fought out with Pinterest posts and by Ikea, the furniture giant that in response to market resistance set out to change not its own products but the tastes of its customers. It asked the British to chuck out their chintz, and mocked designers with the Van Der Puup advertising campaign.