WeWork Captured Millennial Id Study Guide
Study Guide for “How WeWork Has Perfectly Captured the Millennial Id” by Laura Bliss and “WeWork’s Adam Neumann Is the Most Talented Grifter of Our Time” by Derek Thompson
Facade of Hipster Lifestyle and Meaningful Connections
New generations of workers are “meaning junkies,” they want to have meaningful office connections, and they love all the hipster trappings in an office.
Laura Bliss, a writer for The Atlantic whose staff moved to a WeWork office space, found these hipster virtue signals to be in great abundance. As she writes:
I remember our first morning vividly: It was like entering the Millennial id. Craft beer and cucumber water poured from kitchen taps. Laptoppers in jeans and toques clacked along to MGMT in the wood-paneled common area. A WeWork “community manager” showed us to a glass-walled office so small that my colleagues and I could clasp hands while seated. We sat. Had we arrived in the future of work?
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Notice the above description is all about the workplace image; it speaks nothing to the real well-being of the employees.
Moreover, WeWork was run by a fraud CEO Adam Neumann who lied about the company’s valuation and was kicked out of the company but not before taking over a billion dollars with them. By all accounts, he worked his employees to death, enjoyed all the profits, and larded them with BS about “doing what you love.”
Another salient fact about the former CEO taking over a billion. There was no severance for the workers who lost their jobs. Adam Neumann hogged it all.
Wine and Craft Beer Bars Vs. Legal
With all these different companies mingling in a shared office space with alcohol flowing, there is a lot of legal exposure: What if employees behave inappropriately in these alcohol-soaked environments?
“WeWork’s Adam Neumann Is the Most Talented Grifter of Our Time” by Derek Thompson
Adam Neumann sold meaning and transcendence but use the company as a personal ATM. As Thompson writes:
Neumann proposed that office space could play the kibbutz’s role of fostering community, empathy, and serendipitous creation. “If you understand that being part of something greater than yourself is meaningful,” he said, “and if you’re not driven just by material goods, then you’re part of the We Generation.”
Rather than treat WeWork like a community farm, however, Neumann used the company like a personal ATM.
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Thompson observes that Neumann is both a hustler who lines his own pockets and a fraudster who sells a phony religion of self-actualization. As Thompson writes:
WeWork’s answer to the work-life-capitalism conundrum is a breezy: Why not all of it? Live through work, work through life, we're all in this together, but first get filthy rich yourself. Neumann secured billions of dollars from Softbank with a plan for global domination. But he burnished his company’s reputation by telling employees and members that, by doing normal jobs in a place that set its ambitions at the level of human consciousness, they could be participants in a grand fusion of profit and purpose. A capitalist kibbutz.
Half a century, ago, Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard—grappling with the failure of his self-help system Dianetics—told his wife that the best way to make real money in America wasn’t to start to start a business but rather “to have a religion.” That is not only a lesson of Adam Neumann’s ludicrously profitable shtick; it is equally the moral of this strange moment where so many U.S. businesses are looking for a New Age facelift to hide the old bones of their traditional commercial interests. By harnessing the language of uplift and spirituality, American capitalism isn’t reforming itself. It’s just claimed another commodity to be possessed, marketed, and sold.
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