In the Year of Our Lord Twenty-Sixteen, I worked for a publication called The Wrap for six weeks. It was an absolute horrorshow of a working experience that gives me anxiety nightmares to this day, but also they did not have a New York office and I was living in a studio apartment and so I decided to shell out an astonishing $300 a month* for a “hot desk” membership at a WeWork in Brooklyn Heights—just far enough away from where I was living to get me out of the apartment and feel like a commute, but also a walkable distance.
Yes, there was “free” coffee and beer. There were “networking” events I mostly tried to avoid because I had to actually work. One Friday, shortly after quitting my job, I decided I’d see who I’d been sharing a space with.
I fell into conversation with a guy somewhere in his 20s. He was paying for a private office—then running upwards of $500 a month, I believe. He was working on an app. What was the app?
Well. You know how it’s hard to make friends and meet new people? And remember to do stuff like laundry and grocery shopping?
I… not really, no, but proceed.
It’s like a life coach and social coach, it finds events in your area and signs you up for them and reminds you about daily life stuff and orders groceries for you.
The app was not called “Mothr,” but in my head, that’s its name. An app that does the things this young man was apparently never taught to do, and, if he were not single, would probably rely on a romantic partner to do for him.
“We believe our company has the power to elevate how people work, live and grow,” WeWork says in its prospectus. It does not seem to want to admit that it serves the same kind of people that make up its board, that it is exclusively the domain of well-to-do workers of likely meaningless jobs.
Or that it’s another way for its founders to enrich themselves via self-dealing.
The more I look at this prospectus, the more WeWork seems like the perfect synthesis of two things I’ve already written about: corporate totalitarianism, and semantic drain.
Look at this chart from the WeWork S-1 and see if you can spot the problem:
Do you see it?
“WeWork aggregates demand.” They want to replace all the intermediaries and landlords. Aggregating demand sure looks an awful lot like… a monopoly. Right?
WeWork—sorry, The We Company—wants to become a monopoly, but it can’t say the word “monopoly,” because that word does still carry just the faintest whiff of negative public sentiment. So instead, they “aggregate demand.”
To further distract from their clear efforts to swallow the global real estate industry,** The We Company uses yet more meaningless phrases like “elevate the world’s consciousness” and “We envision a future in which our global platform is a one-stop shop where members have access to all of the products and services they need to enable them to work, live and grow.”
Their mission is not to elevate the world’s consciousness. They don’t actually give a shit about making work an enjoyable experience, or they’d be buying up chicken processing plants and shutting them down.
Their mission is to make money. As much money as possible, for as long as possible, and by any means possible. By providing people with a space to create an app to paper over their own personal failings, and, now, a space in which to live that algorithm-directed life. By suing other businesses that use the word “We” in their names. By indoctrinating 5-year-olds.
An entire company devoted to seeking rent from literally every aspect of human life… and still somehow losing nearly $2 billion in a single year.
*The Wrap did not pay for this office, or reimburse me for any expenses like internet or cell phone bills. However, I was being paid a salary of $65,000 per year—which felt like an enormous sum to me but ultimately was not enough to endure the horrorshow for longer than six weeks.
**Real estate itself is just a rat king of scam, of course.