Ed Zitron

It's been funny seeing the anti-WFH sentiment especially in light of Ed Zitron's (https://ez.substack.com/) counter-arguments. At this point, I'm somewhat convinced that anyone in business railing against WFH either misses crushing worker ants under their thumbs or has a huge investment in commercial REITs.

There is a disinformation campaign against remote work. The likely culprit behind it are commercial real estate interests and good old fashioned corporate leaders with their head buried in the sand. Ed Zitron’s Substack has been following and reporting on the remote work propaganda machine for over a year. https://ez.substack.com/archive?sort=top

his substack articles. he’s been writing a lot about remote and managers pushing return to office lately. https://ez.substack.com/

Isn't joking about firing people (not to mention actually firing people) one of the most common ways that managers assert and reinforce their dominance in the social status hierarchy? In most companies, managers' greatest power (besides controlling subordinates' movement, actions, privacy, and access to amenities such as light, heating/cooling, quiet environments, restrooms, etc.) is their largely unlimited power to simultaneously deprive subordinates of their livelihood, health insurance, social relationships, and social status. Ed Zitron suggests that maintaining this social dominance and control over subordinates is typically the underlying (and primary) reason why managers want employees "back in the office": https://ez.substack.com/p/the-work-from-home-future-is-destroying

The author does think a lot of middle management are in fact useless, though - he's written at length on why return-to-office culture is wrong, and who's pushing it (useless middle managers) on his substack: https://ez.substack.com

I'm with you on this. I had the temerity to suggest there are benefits to face-to-face collaboration, and that meeting with colleagues was a valid reason for asking them to be on site in the office -- and I got raked over the coals as a butts-in-seats management lackey. https://ez.substack.com/p/the-work-from-home-future-is-destroying/comm…

This was an odd read after this Ed Zitron piece[1] which included a tweet[2] mentioning how truckers aren’t paid when waiting in line to load up only when they are actually moving something are they paid. I’m going to hypothesize that there’s an enormous and possibly unfair labor requirement for moving these containers so the ships can be unloaded. As long as companies involved with these logistics are optimizing for profit bottleneck improvements won’t significantly change. [1] https://ez.substack.com/p/there-isnt-a-labor-shortage-theres [2] https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1451163926780076032

Ed Zitron just wrote about this, and I agree with him: The whole conversation around “revenge bedtime procrastination” is a frustrating example - it is the idea that we are staying up late doing things we want to do instead of going to bed, which is otherwise known as “being a person.” I’ve seen several different articles about it, going into depths about “the why” of people staying awake doing stuff before bed. The answer is probably that they’re intellectually stimulated by the thing they’re doing and like doing it and are more interested in the thing than going to sleep. Big deal! But it’s now yet another codified entity for people to chew over and ask themselves about - am I “revenge bedtime procrastinating?” A take that seems profound and thoughtful, but is laser-focused on being shared by people saying “hey, I also do stuff instead of going to bed!” Entire articles now exist of people talking about why they stay awake instead of sleeping, as if that’s new, or thoughtful. And now people have a new term for something that didn’t need a term, and can bring intellectualism to “I stayed up until 1am playing Slay The Spire.” https://ez.substack.com/p/hot-takes-and-the-new-portable-intellectuali…