Elon Musk is just saying what everyone in tech always thought

Last week the world’s richest man, once again, let his Id do the talking. And as so often happens, he was simply saying what his peers feel but are constrained from saying openly by ‘political correctness’. It should be a wake-up call for everyone who thinks that there is a ‘new normal’ of Remote Work that will continue to help reduce pollution and slow climate change. Every forward progress is always accompanied by pushback.

The soft factory

As I’ve written many times, remote access software has been available for two decades. The key innovation of Zoom was that it made the technology easy to deploy. Previously, remote work required exactly the kind of IT pro that only a Tesla or Apple could provide. The irony was that those companies were the last places one would find remote workers because it was a maxim in software engineering that you wanted to keep workers in the office for as many hours of the day as possible. Despite all the stereotypes about ‘knowledge workers’, the ethos was exactly the same as any factory. More hours; more widgets. Hence all the free food, game tables and open office plans.

And in fact, the tech companies have been a real estate developer’s dream come true because that ethos created expensive custom designed floor plans and a whole lot of guaranteed occupancy.

I would explain this to people not in that world and it was so unbelievable to them that an industry that was *tailor-made for remote work would not do so. Most people I would talk to simply would not accept it. So it’s nice to get some validation from the world’s most techy kinda guy.

Those were the days…

But another thing I’m now having trouble selling is how much effort the world would put into getting all those butts back in all those seats the moment COVID seemed to be waning. The fact is, Remote Work works. People were very productive during the pandemic and now that they’ve figured that out, many are loath to return to the office–at least, not five days a week.

And that’s frightening as hell for a whole lot of people, including corporate managers, real estate investors and anything transportation-related.

But the workers of ‘the new normal’ are not lazy, or stupid. Far from it. In fact, they’ve figured out that they can hit all their targets, save hundreds a month on transportation and get the kids’ to their doctor’s appointments. So why on earth should they go back? They have found freedom.

There is and will continue to be tremendous pressure, both from old-school executives like Mr. Musk and all the people who benefit from people wasting their lives in traffic or on needless flights. After all, if people continue to work from home, they don’t buy gas. So no road taxes. And no Light Rail fares. And no business class flights (which are the only profitable seats left on a typical commercial jet.)

But not all the pressure will be hard. Books will be written about the good ol’ days. The ‘synergies’ and joys of the water cooler and the 10AM meetings in the conference room.  And the authors will surely be people who manage office buildings.

We cannot go back…

We must move forward with Remote Work. It is the least costly, most impactful and quickest way to reduce our carbon footprint. And since we’ve already started down this road, we’ve already done the hardest part. If we back off now, go back to the office, making similar reductions in C02 will not be nearly so easy.

Beyond the practical and personal benefits, this is a moral imperative. COVID gave our society the push it simply did not have the will to do on its own. We cut emissions so much that the skies over Puget Sound were noticeably clearer than they have been in decades. And still the stock market went up and  unemployment went down. The only thing we have to do now is to not give back the immense silver lining that came at the cost of millions of lives.

To paraphrase the politician: it would be a crime against humanity to let such a good crisis go to waste.

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*A couple of examples. After fifteen years, many of the core builders of WordPress have still never met in real life. Same with the Linux operating system, which powers the vast majority of Internet servers.