Home Sweet Workplace

You ain't gotta go to work, work, work, work

Bzz. Bzz. Bzz.

Your eyelids flutter, letting in the day’s first drops of sunlight. The last few frames of your dream play out: 13 people in India have been killed by mobs because of a video that’s going around. Do something about that.

Bzzz. Bzz. Bzz.

You need to make sure a stranger is notified that a person he hasn’t spoken to in years is selling a bookshelf. He needs to know. Tell him now. 

Bzz. Bzz. Bzz.

You roll over onto your belly. You recall when this used to crush your erection, before the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative developed a vaccine for morning wood.

Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. 

You arch your shoulders and wipe away the eye smegma with your wrists. What a strange dream…

Wait, that’s not your alarm clock buzzing -- it’s your phone! And that wasn’t a dream… it was your boss giving you shit to do. You work from home for Facebook now, like 25,000 other employees. 

Facebook, the world’s second most successful enterprise originally founded to get pussy (after NASA), announced that it would begin allowing 50% of its employees to work from home over the next five to ten years. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a bunch of radio parts and potato batteries stuffed inside a Weißwurst casing, unveiled this decision Thursday. Other tech companies followed with similar plans shortly after. The initial response was positive, with many calling it a great step forward for workers. 

Truth be told, I do not know much about working for a large company. I’m more interested in the world’s oldest profession (marrying into generational wealth). But anytime a large company likes this seems to offer a major concession for workers, you should look at it with skepticism. The problem with a place like Facebook is the staff often lacks a deeply ingrained sense of laziness and opposition to exertion. Fortunately, I have that.

Working from home removes the limits on the time and place in which you do labor. For instance, let’s say you work for Facebook’s video department. A popular account, vlogger Toby Jumps, is having trouble uploading his latest video in which he pranks essential workers by jumping them in a dark parking garage at night. Previously, your boss might have had to wait until you arrived at work for the day to ask you to handle this issue. Or, if you had left the office for the day, it would have waited until tomorrow. Working from home exposes your whole life to Facebook. 24 hours a day, you are on call, whether it’s optimizing an algorithm to make the friendships in a Cutest Animal Friendships Compilation 25% cuter or boosting clicks on a policeman’s front-facing video about how Häagen-Dazs is an anagram for “Allahu Akbar.”

Almost all benefits provided by tech firms exist to wring more labor out of the workforce. In the mid 2000s, Google began offering bus service to the company campus in Mountain View. Those buses have WiFi. Employees are then expected to work during their commutes, eking a few more hours of productivity out of their days. Could you imagine if this became commonplace across the country and commuters ceased to drive themselves? Who would call into morning sports radio? The government must hold Big Tech accountable to protect Mike and The Mad Dog. 

Facebook already offers a number of questionable benefits to their employees. For starters, there’s the impressive food spread available for all three meals. Coincidentally, this reduces the number of employees who leave for lunch and keeps them at their desks for longer, ideally enough of the day to include breakfast and dinner as well. The same goes for beer on tap at the office, which encourages staff to stay later. The more people who work from home, the less the company has to spend on onsite services like these. Then there’s Facebook’s onsite dry cleaning service. Where do you think all the bodily fluids were coming from for the Human Genome Project? Facebook also provides a generous $4000 stipend for fertility treatments and egg freezing. Sounds nice, until you see Zuck popping ova into his mouth like cashews for a protein-packed snack. 

It gets worse. In order to make mass work-from-home feasible, the apparati of surveillance capitalism will expand. Of course, the free computer and phone from your company will have the standard keylogging and recording software enabled. Perhaps camera and microphone permissions will be enabled as well. But wait, where did you go for twelve minutes at 10:15 yesterday? You were taking a shit? For twelve minutes? Because you had panang curry last night? Likely story. We’re going to need to see what you do in there, just to check (and we’re not accusing you) if you’re doing something enjoyable during the work day. 

While we’re at it, since you’re not using our office fitness center anymore and we want to make sure you stay in shape so you don’t take too many sick days, let’s get access to your FitBit and Apple Watch. Plus, we’ll tie a portion of your bonus to your physical fitness as an incentive! Screw it, give us access to your sleep tracker too. We’ll even set your alarm for you! And then part of your earnings will be tied to how quickly you wake up and how early you go to bed! You’ll be so healthy! This is a benefit! 

Oh, and good luck unionizing Facebook when you can’t speak to your coworkers in-person. The C-suite will love seeing your “how much do u make?” texts come over the internal messaging system. It won’t be Pinkertons busting unions in this Gilded Age; Sheryl Sandberg will just laugh, click the “Fire This Employee” button, and pour herself another Soylentini.

There is one person who should be excited about this development: whoever owns those Instagrammable swings over the jungle in Bali. Most likely, many Facebook employees will not work from “home”, but as digital nomads, trading in their Patagonia fleeces for elephant pants and their VR pornography for sex tourism. In this article about the effects of AirBnB on Barcelona, a researcher describes a “consistent demographic of tourists, interchangeable with one another in their cosmopolitan tastes and habits of consumption, [which] expects to find wherever it goes the café culture of Melbourne, the industrial lighting of Brooklyn, and the Internet speeds of Stockholm.” These LinkedIn vagabonds traipse around the world, corroding the feel of neighborhoods and globalizing local life. If Facebook’s dream was to connect the world, unleashing a bunch of well-compensated nerds upon the world’s cities will accomplish that by homogenizing it. Even worse, thousands more people will describe themselves as “New York based.”

Welcome to the office of the future. Your annoying boss is an app dinging you awake, the weird smell in the break room is your hostel roommate barfing in the corner, and your secret work hook-up is a sex toy taped to the underside of your standing desk. There really is no such thing as a free lunch.