Picture Leonardo DiCaprio heading stolidly to work at the start of two of his most alliterative movies. In Revolutionary Road, set in 1955, he’s Frank Wheeler, a fedora’d nobody who takes a train into Manhattan and the elevator to a high floor in an International-style skyscraper. He smokes at his desk, slips out for a two-martini lunch, and gets periodically summoned to the executive den where important company decisions are made. Wheeler is a cog, but he is an enviable cog—by appearances, he has achieved everything a man is supposed to want in postwar America.
In The Wolf of Wall Street, set in the late 1980s, DiCaprio is a failed broker named Jordan Belfort who follows a classified ad to a Long Island strip mall, where a group of scrappy penny-stock traders cold-call their marks and drive home in sedans. His office need not be a status symbol, since prestige for stock traders is about domination, not conformity; if you become a millionaire, who cares if you did it in the Chrysler Building or your garage?
Watch these films back-to-back, and you’ll see DiCaprio traverse the recent history of the American workplace. A white-collar job used to be a signal of ambition and stability far beyond that offered by farm, factory, or retail work. But what was once a reward has become a nonnecessity—a mere company mailing address. Highways are now stuffed with sand-colored, dark-windowed cubicle barns arranged in groups like unopened moving boxes. Barely anyone who works in this kind of place expects to spend a career in that building, but no matter where you go, you can expect variations on the same fluorescent lighting, corporate wall art, and water coolers.
In his new book, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, Nikil Saval claims that 60 percent of Americans still make their money in cubicles, and 93 percent of those are unhappy to do so. But rather than indict these artless workspaces, Saval traces the intellectual history of our customizable pens to find that they’re the twisted end result of utopian thinking. “The story of white-collar work hinges on promises of freedom and uplift that have routinely been betrayed,” he writes. Above all, Cubed is a graveyard of social-engineering campaigns.
Saval, an editor at n+1, traces the modern office’s roots back to the bookkeeping operations of the early industrial revolution, where clerks in starched collars itemized stuff produced by their blue-collar counterparts. Saval describes these cramped spaces as the birthplace of a new ethic of “self-improvement.” A clerkship was a step up from manual labor, and the men lucky enough to pursue it often found themselves detached—from the close-knit worlds of farming or factory work and even from their fellow clerks, who were now just competition. In Saval’s telling, this is where middle-class anxiety began. (...)
My first office job started in the summer of 2007. I’d just graduated from college, and I took the light rail to the outer suburbs of Baltimore and walked half a mile to my desk. The McCormick & Company factory was nearby, so each day smelled like a different spice. In that half-mile (sidewalk-free, of course), I passed three other corporate campuses and rarely saw anyone coming or going. I worked in a cubicle of blue fabric and glass partitions and reported to the manager with the nearest window. For team meetings, we’d head into a room with a laminate-oak table and a whiteboard. If it was warm, I’d take lunch at a wooden picnic table in the parking lot, the only object for miles that looked like weather could affect it. In my sensible shoes and flat-front khakis, I’d listen to the murmur of Interstate 83 from just over a tree-lined highway barrier, the air smelling faintly of cumin or allspice. This was not a sad scene, but it was an empty one, and I was jolted back to it when I read Saval’s assertion that post-skyscraper office design “had to be eminently rentable. … The winners in this new American model weren’t office workers or architects, not even executives or captains of industry, but real estate speculators.”
Freelancers are expected to account for 40 percent to 50 percent of the American workforce by 2020. Saval notes a few responses to this sea change, such as “co-working” offices for multiple small companies or self-employed people to share. But he never asks why the shift is under way or why nearly a quarter of young people in America now expect to work for six or more companies. These are symptoms of the recession, and the result of baby boomers delaying retirement to make up for lost savings. But they’re also responses to businesses’ apparent feelings toward their employees. It’s not so much the blandness of corporate architecture, which can have a kind of antiseptic beauty; it’s the transience of everything in sight, from the computer-bound work to the floor plans designed so that any company can move right in when another ends its lease or bellies up.When everything is so disposable, why would anyone expect or want to stay?
In The Wolf of Wall Street, set in the late 1980s, DiCaprio is a failed broker named Jordan Belfort who follows a classified ad to a Long Island strip mall, where a group of scrappy penny-stock traders cold-call their marks and drive home in sedans. His office need not be a status symbol, since prestige for stock traders is about domination, not conformity; if you become a millionaire, who cares if you did it in the Chrysler Building or your garage?
Watch these films back-to-back, and you’ll see DiCaprio traverse the recent history of the American workplace. A white-collar job used to be a signal of ambition and stability far beyond that offered by farm, factory, or retail work. But what was once a reward has become a nonnecessity—a mere company mailing address. Highways are now stuffed with sand-colored, dark-windowed cubicle barns arranged in groups like unopened moving boxes. Barely anyone who works in this kind of place expects to spend a career in that building, but no matter where you go, you can expect variations on the same fluorescent lighting, corporate wall art, and water coolers.In his new book, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, Nikil Saval claims that 60 percent of Americans still make their money in cubicles, and 93 percent of those are unhappy to do so. But rather than indict these artless workspaces, Saval traces the intellectual history of our customizable pens to find that they’re the twisted end result of utopian thinking. “The story of white-collar work hinges on promises of freedom and uplift that have routinely been betrayed,” he writes. Above all, Cubed is a graveyard of social-engineering campaigns.
Saval, an editor at n+1, traces the modern office’s roots back to the bookkeeping operations of the early industrial revolution, where clerks in starched collars itemized stuff produced by their blue-collar counterparts. Saval describes these cramped spaces as the birthplace of a new ethic of “self-improvement.” A clerkship was a step up from manual labor, and the men lucky enough to pursue it often found themselves detached—from the close-knit worlds of farming or factory work and even from their fellow clerks, who were now just competition. In Saval’s telling, this is where middle-class anxiety began. (...)
My first office job started in the summer of 2007. I’d just graduated from college, and I took the light rail to the outer suburbs of Baltimore and walked half a mile to my desk. The McCormick & Company factory was nearby, so each day smelled like a different spice. In that half-mile (sidewalk-free, of course), I passed three other corporate campuses and rarely saw anyone coming or going. I worked in a cubicle of blue fabric and glass partitions and reported to the manager with the nearest window. For team meetings, we’d head into a room with a laminate-oak table and a whiteboard. If it was warm, I’d take lunch at a wooden picnic table in the parking lot, the only object for miles that looked like weather could affect it. In my sensible shoes and flat-front khakis, I’d listen to the murmur of Interstate 83 from just over a tree-lined highway barrier, the air smelling faintly of cumin or allspice. This was not a sad scene, but it was an empty one, and I was jolted back to it when I read Saval’s assertion that post-skyscraper office design “had to be eminently rentable. … The winners in this new American model weren’t office workers or architects, not even executives or captains of industry, but real estate speculators.”
Freelancers are expected to account for 40 percent to 50 percent of the American workforce by 2020. Saval notes a few responses to this sea change, such as “co-working” offices for multiple small companies or self-employed people to share. But he never asks why the shift is under way or why nearly a quarter of young people in America now expect to work for six or more companies. These are symptoms of the recession, and the result of baby boomers delaying retirement to make up for lost savings. But they’re also responses to businesses’ apparent feelings toward their employees. It’s not so much the blandness of corporate architecture, which can have a kind of antiseptic beauty; it’s the transience of everything in sight, from the computer-bound work to the floor plans designed so that any company can move right in when another ends its lease or bellies up.When everything is so disposable, why would anyone expect or want to stay?
by John Lingan, American Prospect | Read more:
Image: CubeSpace/Asa Wilson
