The Post-Work City

Cities feel like theme parks and so does the internet

Airbnb relaunched itself as an “everything app” this week, announcing an expanded array of Services and Experiences in a move that Steven Levy describes as a midlife crisis for the company. “I’ve never had a dream with a device in it,” CEO Brian Chesky tells Levy, emphasizing Airbnb’s ability to get us off of our phones and out into the Real World of our dreams, where Experiences await. This is what we aspire to, right? You don’t see phones on Instagram either. The reason they don’t appear in our dreams because they’re the frame. A more realistic view of our aspirations, perhaps, is this article about how students are cheating their way through college using ChatGPT—one of the reasons being that they’re too busy to do the work as content consumption demands more and more of their time. “What students have replaced the reading and writing and seminars with is the tell,” Sean Monahan observes: “Screens. TikTok. Instagram. Netflix. Xbox.” In other words, reducing the hours you spend on Bad Screen simply frees up more time for Good Screen, to invoke a pandemic meme about remote work. A darker version of the same idea is this tweet from a couple months ago, positing that every corporate or government layoff “creates incremental screen time for the consumption of conspiracy theories among people who feel bitter or desperate.” Each observation makes the same point: When everything happens on your phone, time saved in one category of screen activity (work, school) is simply reinvested in another. When you don’t see the computer it means you’re inside the computer.

That we are addicted to our phones is nothing new, but as screen time approaches the limit of our available waking hours, it becomes possible to view the foundational activities of life, such as work and education, as the few remaining obstacles to unfettered content consumption (along with sleep, which Netflix once declared its biggest competitor). It’s ironic, then, that the same technology that demands so much of our attention is also the mechanism that whittles those obstacles down, making even more attention available. And the convergence of so many different activities in one medium has further confounded the already blurry distinctions between work and leisure, which both often amount to different kinds of information processing, generating economic value in different ways. Shopping is work. Partying is work. Taste is work. One cynical interpretation of the above tweet about layoffs (a half-joke) is that we’re at our most valuable when looking at screens—as consumers rather than producers. The more we have to spend, the more likely this is to be true. Reallocating our collective eyeballs from Bad Screen to Good Screen could be an irrelevant distinction, but it’s also possible that Good Screen is where we do our most important work.

The physical footprint of this change is visible in the post-industrial city, where consumption has gradually supplanted production since the latter 20th century. That transformation reached its final phase with the pandemic, of course, which decoupled white collar work from the physical office. If manufacturing and other tangible forms of production had long since left the urban core, now the knowledge work could follow. But unlike industry, the office didn’t end up in a different place—it moved into the digital ether, allowing cities to more fully embrace their role as consumption hubs. For permanently remote workers with no commute, remaining in a city is a lifestyle choice. Thus, many urban neighborhoods feel like WeWorks turned inside out, their laptop-filled coffee shops and wellness infrastructure reflecting the same integration of work and play that we find on the internet. Last week’s viral Brock Colyar piece about the West Village being a yuppie theme park obviously upset people; on one hand, it describes an old phenomenon dressed up differently, but it also points to a final stage of gentrification (or post-gentrification) where consumption is the only goal and, unlike prior waves, no one pretends to make art or even DJs. But look closer—everyone is creating constantly (posting), doing micro-labor that is so embedded in everything else that it becomes invisible, with the output mostly ending up on the internet rather than the streets. Real work is happening somewhere, but not here. As consumption and remote work converge and fake email jobs dissolve into the rest of the internet, everything will look more like this. Just because you’re three Aperol spritzes deep doesn’t mean you’re not adding value. The West Village girls are emissaries from the future. If you don’t see the phone it’s because you’re inside it.

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Reads:

• Ben Thompson on the disconnect between what Airbnb thinks it is and what it actually is. “The route to connecting real people with real assets necessarily first entails atomizing both sides of the market such that only Airbnb can bring them together.”

• Why robots will need to dress well.

• Catherine Liu on Irvine, California as an accelerationist utopia. “Its houses are not well built or well designed, but they are so utterly comfortable. Irvine is completely and utterly anonymous, prosperous, rich, decentered. It is the inhuman future of a frictionless Internet made flesh.”

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