On the strange institution that turned the workplace into a club you pay to belong to
There is an institution that has come to define the working life of Shoreditch, and it is the coworking space, the reinvented office that is not quite an office, the workplace that has been rebranded as a lifestyle, a community, a club one pays to belong to. I am Cyndi Himmelstiere, I have worked in several of these spaces, and I remain genuinely uncertain whether they represent the liberation of work or its colonization of every remaining corner of life, or, as I increasingly suspect, both at once.
The Office That Is Not an Office
The coworking space presents itself as the opposite of the traditional office, and in many ways it is. There are no cubicles, no fluorescent lights, no soul-deadening corporate uniformity. Instead there is exposed brick and reclaimed wood, plants and natural light, coffee on tap and beer on Fridays, a carefully curated aesthetic of relaxed creativity that signals, insistently, that this is not your parents’ workplace. The coworking space has taken everything depressing about the traditional office and replaced it with everything appealing about a nice cafe, and then charged a membership fee for the privilege.
And it works, in the sense that the spaces are pleasant, the aesthetic genuinely appealing, the experience of working in them far preferable to the experience of the traditional office. The freelancers and the startups and the remote workers who populate the coworking spaces of Shoreditch have, in a real sense, gained something, a pleasant place to work, a community of fellow workers, an environment that supports rather than crushes the spirit. The rise of these spaces reflects genuine changes in how people work, changes tracked by analysts of the modern economy and the future of work.
But there is something worth examining in the coworking space, in its transformation of the office from a place one is required to be into a place one pays to belong to, in its rebranding of work as lifestyle, in its blurring of the line between working and belonging. The coworking space is not just a nice office; it is an office that has learned to feel like a community, a club, a way of life, and this learning has consequences worth thinking about.
Work as Belonging
The genius of the coworking space, and its subtle danger, is that it makes work feel like belonging, transforms the workplace into a community to which one is glad to belong, blurs the line between professional necessity and social life. The coworking space offers not just a desk but a community, events and networking and a sense of being part of something, and this offering is genuinely appealing to the freelancers and remote workers who might otherwise work alone and isolated. The space provides the community that solitary work lacks.
But in providing this community, the coworking space also extends work into territory it did not previously occupy, making the workplace a source of belonging and identity and social life, drawing the worker ever more fully into a world organized around work. The freelancer who joins a coworking space for the desk finds themselves part of a work-community, attending work-events, building a work-social-life, until work has expanded to fill not just their professional hours but their need for community and belonging as well. The space gives, and in giving, it also colonizes.
This is the ambiguity at the heart of the coworking space, that it genuinely improves the experience of work while also extending work’s reach into life, that it provides real community while also organizing that community around work, that it liberates the worker from the traditional office while binding them more fully to a world defined by work. The space is a benefit and a trap at once, and which it is depends, perhaps, on whether one can accept the desk and the coffee without being wholly absorbed into the work-life it offers.
The Club You Pay to Join
There is, finally, something telling in the fact that the coworking space is a club one pays to belong to, that the community it offers is a purchased community, that belonging here is a transaction. The traditional office, for all its faults, did not charge you to belong; the coworking space does, monetizing not just the desk but the community, the belonging, the sense of being part of something. The space has discovered that people will pay for community, for belonging, for the feeling of being part of a creative tribe, and it sells these things alongside the desk and the coffee.
This monetization of belonging is, when you think about it, a remarkable development, a sign of how thoroughly the logic of the market has penetrated even our need for community, our desire to belong. The coworking space sells what people once found for free, in workplaces and neighborhoods and social institutions, and the fact that people pay for it suggests how scarce genuine community has become, how willing people are to purchase the belonging they can no longer easily find. The space fills a real need, and charges for it, and the charging is itself a sign of the need.
I continue to work in these spaces, to enjoy the coffee and the community and the pleasant aesthetic, while remaining alert to the ambiguity, the way the space liberates and colonizes at once, and I write about these contradictions over at my home on The London Prat, because the coworking space is a perfect emblem of the modern relationship between work and life.
The coworking space is the office reinvented as a lifestyle, a club you pay to belong to, a benefit and a trap at once. More observations on the strange institutions of modern work appear at The London Prat, and the broader story of how London works is covered by the London press.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
