Clutter is Process
Tokumitsu, Mol | Substack | Nowhere Office | Factoids
Quote of the Moment
The truth is that work, even intellectual work, is typically messy. Clutter is process.
| Miya Tokumitsu, Joeri Mol, Life at the Nowhere Office
Substack
I wrote this note to myself this week:
I am going to move from Substack, if not now then someday and probably soon. I could save a lot with a cheaper solution since they are taking a 10% fee, plus transaction charges. For every $5 sub, I see less than $4.50. When it gets to $10,000, they take a thousand, which feels like a lot, especially if my readers are just reading the newsletter as email.
Also, I'm not sure I want to adopt their platforming of Substack, and the implicit business model. It feels like Medium all over again. Will they shift to pushing their brnad more than ours?
Also, the furor about their sketchy support for right-wing fanatics is starting to feel like Elon Musk (see here, and this interview with Substack CEO Chris Best).
And on a different more mundane and personal level I live and work in Obsidian, and Buttondown -- where I am reviewing as an alternative for Work Futures, has native support for markdown and an integration with Obsidian. I bet that will make the nuts-and-bolts of generating Work Futures posts easier.
At any rate, it should have next to no impact for readers, since both platforms work -- more of less -- in the same fashion, and both rely on Stripe for paid subscription management, so no paid subscribers will have to do anything to be transferred over.
But I will be undertaking this gradually, if I proceed. But I wanted to ask the readership: do you use Substack’s app? Or do you just read the newsletter in your email inbox? Or both?
I looked at Buttondown (markdown support, but minimal website), ConvertKit (wants 0.6% and $79/mo, no markdown), Ghost (too expensive), Patreon (been there), Medium (nope), MailerLite (not sure). Strongly inclined toward Buttondown.
If you have any thoughts, please share in the comments.
Nowhere Office
When viewed from the perspective of productivity, workplace transparency sounds like a no-brainer.
After all, If everyone has access to all the information about work that is potentially relevant -- what the goals are of every project, who is working on what tasks, what decisions have been made by individuals and groups -- then less time would be spent communicating to find and act on that information. In essence, if individuals and groups 'work out loud' -- share information in a timely, low-friction manner about the projects, activities, and tasks they are involved in -- greater efficiency would be gained.
However, in practice, modern work technologies that are employed to 'work out loud' have not, in fact, decreased the degree of communication compared to the norms of the email era. People are drowning in communications, so the ideal of 'working out loud' falls short because, when scaled up -- especially in large organizations -- it's just too 'loud', literally and psychologically.
Consider the stats. Melissa Swift recently reported on how much open communication is happening in the workplace.
The internal messaging app Slack alone boasts 300,000 messages sent per second, and 145 million people log onto Microsoft Teams for similar discussions each day.
This does not include email, comments in Google docs, or the enormous time sink of video meetings. People spend hours of their work day in an endless barrage of communications, mostly open. They are 'on stage' all those hours, as the sociologist Erving Goffman called it, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: being seen and evaluated by one and all.
The rise of trends like 'quiet quitting' -- where employees just do their work, punch the clock, and try to maintain greater anonymity at work -- are likely, at least in part, a reaction to being 'on stage' so much, as well as hinting at the incipient cynicism of early-stage burnout.
On the physically transparent side, consider the open office. Over the past few decades, many companies have adopted the new open office aesthetic for office design. The walled offices and cubicles of the pre-digital era have been reëngineered to engender a certain mindset or philosophy about work and, at the same time, dramatically decrease the square footage allocated to each occupant.
The shrinking personal space is an economic driver that leads to more intrusive noise, so much so that the saying 'headphones are the new wall' has caught on among the open office's detractors. This is another aspect of working out loud in the architectural dimension.
The new office infrastructure -- the glass walls on meeting rooms, long shared desks, no (or few) private offices, open space -- are intended to parallel a contemporary philosophy of work, one that cultural critic Kyle Chayka calls 'Airspace'. As Miya Tokumitsu and Joeri Mol wrote in Life at the Nowhere Office:
The interconnected values of “frictionless” dynamism, notional flattening of managerial hierarchies, and sociability that define contemporary professional work are mirrored in the spaces and gadgets that allow us to function in this rootless, diffuse way.
And of course, there is no place to hide.
The downside of openness is implicit surveillance: the architecture is starkly open, where everyone can be viewed: at their desk, talking with others in the cafeteria, walking across the office to the toilets, or leaving the office for lunch. Nothing is hidden.
One of the most in-demand features for the Airspace office are telephone booths that provide a postage stamp box of privacy. People have also adopted the convention that headphones are the new wall or door: if you are wearing headphones, people shouldn't just come over and start talking.
The negatives of the open office are one of the motivations for working from home for many people, especially the disadvantaged: introverts, women, and POC are all likely to favor working from home.
At any rate, there are other perspectives to consider, not just efficiency and productivity. We live in social systems, not as cogs in a machine, no matter how management may operate, Consider that innovation and resilience are just as critical as productivity, and these major issues may conflict.
And just as important, people work in social systems, not in abstract relations. Consider how group innovation may arise in efficiency-oriented organizations by individuals (or groups) intentionally circumventing processes or rules of production to improve them.
So, how much openness is too much?
Factoids
China produces around 40% of all the intermediate goods in the entire world. | Noah Smith
The US is gearing up for reindustrialization.
…
Big Oil faces a tiny foe on the streets of Asia and Africa. The noisy, noxious vehicles that run on two and three wheels, carrying billions of people daily, are quietly going electric — in turn knocking down oil demand by one million barrels a day this year. Of all the changes the world is making to slow further warming, electric vehicle sales are the only category on track to meet climate goals, according to an exhaustive independent study | Somini Sengupta et al
And I hope they speed that transition.
…
From 2012 to 2022, investment in private U.S. start-ups ballooned eightfold to $344 billion. | Erin Griffith
But hundreds of startups are shutting down or selling for pennies.
…
The shift to working from home cost the borough of Manhattan over $12 billion a year | Bloomberg
And the City/State doesn’t have a real plan.
Office Hours
Sometime in January, I plan to start holding Office Hours, where attendees and I will chat about work-related topics, our own adventures in the workplace, and related matters. I haven’t determined exactly how I will be doing it but some sort of video conferencing.
Office hours will be open to paid subscribers, so it may add a little extra sauce on top and convince people to give it a try. More to follow.
Hi Stowe, personally I enjoy the community here on Substack, but I’m not tied to it and if you move will be very interested to hear more about your experiences