Writing About Work
I recently posted a link to Alain de Botton article that lamented the absence of the information economy’s workplace from modern literature. In the article and his recent book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
However, as Kelefa Sanneh pointed out in a recent New Yorker article, not everyone is excited about the office of tomorrow. In reviewing Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work Sanneh finds a good amount of malcontent with the modern world in Mathew Crawford’s polemic on craftsmanship, pointing out that, “the call to craft is in some ways a conservative call: it asks workers to seek fulfillment through personal diligence, not politics.”
Despite the discontent that Crawford taps into, de Botton may get his literature of the office. As Sanneh rightfully recognizes, “hard jobs get much easier to love as soon as they start to disappear.” If the financial industry and all of its legal, technical, and clerical support don’t reappear there maybe a new literature coming out of New York and other white collar strongholds — a literature that captures the “highly networked semi-autonomous refuge, where turn-of-the-century workers spent their pleasant days solving problems, exploring the limits of cooperation, and wasting valuable company time on the Internet.”
