Absurdity Shares Its Cubicle with Virtue

On November 18^th, 2020, my official Facebook page posted my interpretation of the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset,” based on its whitepaper which had come to mainstream attention. During the worst of government’s covidian lockdowns, I made some predictions about the future of commerce, and it seems that I was overly optimistic in one respect.

If you remember that year, the country had been at a standstill, and public commerce took on absurdist dimensions. If a restaurant remained open to the public, you had to enter wearing a mask, but when you sat to eat, you could remove the mask… since cøv1d could only infect people in the space twenty inches above your head when seated. If you visited some place like a museum which required a ticket’s purchase, “contact tracing” could expose you and every person you know to governmental inquiry if someone who visited that same museum was diagnosed with the koof, even if said person’s visit was subsequent to your own. Smartphones tracking users’ geolocation proximate to other uses would narc on these users since “super spreader” gatherings were against lockdown decrees… unless you were shoulder-to-shoulder in urban centers as a MostlyPeaceful® protester in favor of BLM.

Amongst all this absurdity, one of the measures which actually made sense given prevailing fears was for people engaged in certain professions to work remotely. Instead of risking exposure during commutes on mass transit and working cheek by jowl in cramped cubicles or “open offices,” many people were working from home, effectively fulfilling their tasks by way of an internet connection. Conferences through Zoom, Skype or other softwares safely brought co-workers together when collaboration was needed. Granted, some firms still insisted on remote workers – posing a threat of contagion to no one inside their homes – getting jabbed, but besides such absurdity, remote work or “telecommuting” got the job done. For the workers themselves, this modality allowed them to be around for their families, as many schools were also engaged in remote learning (though with less effective results overall).

It seemed that the world had adjusted to the modality of telecommuting, realizing a potential which many companies were already utilizing back in the 2000 aughts, but turns out that this lucidity was not to last. Since 2022 some companies began to entice workers back to offices. “Enticement” is the best word for it, since most remote workers instinctively understood what trade-offs were being asked of them; squandering cumulative weeks of their lives in pointless, stressful and expensive daily commutes, dropping thousands of dollars monthly in childcare which had been unnecessary during remote work, and even the $20 daily in designer coffee or other ready-mades. There were few upsides to employees for relocation back to the office, and they knew it. Initially companies tried persuasion, meaningless inducements like “ice cream parties” and “casual-you-pick-which-days.” Lately companies are leaning more into coercion, with Dell, Amazon and Tesla amongst others ordering workers back to their pods “or else.”

Undoubtedly some reader of mine will comment that it’s not coercion since the employee can always choose not to work at the company, but that misses the larger point. Presuming that the work can be effectively and efficiently accomplished remotely, it serves no worthy purpose to demand physical presence, especially given the absurdity that management onsite will just be interfacing with employees anyways by e-mail and incessant chatter via Slack and Discord.

A company’s arrangement of its workforce is solely the company’s prerogative, of course, and ultimately the individual employee will have to decide what arrangement makes sense for him, but everyone should realize the following objective truth:

A company can needlessly demand its employees’ physical presence in the office, knowing well all the megatons of carbon which such request will engender (i.e., employee commutes, workplace heating and cooling, etc.). A company can also outwardly claim to value sustainability.

But no company can do both.