CELEB AUTHOR MALCOLM GLADWELL GETS ROASTED FOR DUMB (AND HYPOCRITICAL) TAKE ON REMOTE WORK:
Celebrity author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell is getting roasted online—and for good reason. He attacked remote work during a recent podcast interview, and his remarks went viral over the weekend.
“It’s very hard to feel necessary when you’re physically disconnected,” he said. “As we face the battle that all organizations are facing now in getting people back into the office, it’s really hard to explain this core psychological truth, which is we want you to have a feeling of belonging and to feel necessary.”
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There are so many problems with Gladwell’s argument, which is unfortunately shared somewhat widely among the elite class, that it’s hard to know where to begin.
Malcolm Gladwell is a Work-From-Home Hypocrite
Firstly, it’s worth pointing out that Malcolm Gladwell himself has a long history of working remotely.
In fact, New York Magazine reported in 2010 that despite living just miles away from his publication’s office, Gladwell almost never went into work:
“He is a well-known figure around his neighborhood, fond of tapping away on his laptop in coffee shops and cafés. His writer’s life is part anachronistic, part futuristic. His Lexus IS—a car, he concedes, he rarely drives—is parked down the street in the space he pays a small fortune to lease. A couple of miles north in Times Square are Gladwell’s editors at The New Yorker, who don’t see him in the office very often—owing to his self-professed ‘aversion to midtown’—but who grant him a license to write about whatever he chooses and accommodate him with couriers to pick up his fact-checking materials, lest he be forced to overcome that aversion.”
Similarly, Gladwell declared in 2005, “I hate desks. Desks are now banished.” The Guardian reported that, “He starts the day writing at home, but this is always done from his sofa, using his laptop.”
In 2010, Gladwell described himself as “someone who writes in coffee shops for a living.”
Further thoughts from Colby Cosh:
It seems CEO Gladwell now thinks very poorly of magazine Gladwell. Is this mere hypocrisy? I’m sure the evangelical sense of mission he has as a boss is genuine. He no longer has the problem of finding the most comfortable place to churn out oceans of copy. His problems are those of a CEO, and the podcast he was appearing on is called “The Diary of a CEO.”
Naturally, he thinks the podcasts his company produces represent a solemn and elevated “storytelling” crusade. But if I could have 2006-vintage Gladwell on a “Professional Blowhards Who Make Fishwrap” podcast, I suspect I might find him arguing the other side of the new religious divide with near-equal fervour.
What I’d like best is for people to stop treating the shift to working from home as a moral phenomenon. Folks, you are bitching about the weather — i.e., the labour market. I think COVID revealed something we all know to be true: much office work isn’t especially heavy on the “work” part the way a construction site is, and a lot of it is real-time activity that has you welded to a screen switching between work tasks, Slack windows, instant messages and cat memes.
The productivity surplus from the internet, which economists have been squinting to perceive since the turn of the century, is now materializing in the form of remote work — and, not to wax Marxist, but the workers are in a struggle with the bosses over who shall capture it.
Alvin Toffler was predicting telecommuting in 1980’s The Third Wave, and as far back as 1970’s Future Shock, but it took covid to make it a reality for millions of workers. I can understand Elon Musk’s concerns — unless your Internet handle is Iowahawk, it may be difficult to build cars at home — but for so many 21st century jobs, it doesn’t matter all that much if your monitor, keyboard, and mouse are on a desk in an office tower, or a desk in your home office.
