Workism Lesson #5: Rise and Fall of WeWork
1C Essay #2 Due October 22
Workism and Groupthink Compromise Critical Thinking and Exploits Employees
The Assignment
Read Derek Thompson's essay "The Religion of Workism Is Making Americans Miserable."
Then compare the idea of Workism, especially how employers rely on manipulation and Groupthink to exploit their employees, in relation to one or more of the following documentaries and TV shows: WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, and Severance. For your comparison of Thompson’s essay and the documentaries or TV shows, develop a thesis that addresses the claim that fraudsters rely on Workism and Groupthink to create a colossal breakdown of critical thinking that causes employees, investors, and customers to become dangerously gullible to the false promises of these mad grifters. As a result, the employees are exploited. Is the following claim legitimate? Why or why not? Explain. Be sure to have a counterargument-rebuttal section in your essay before you reach your conclusion.
Suggested Essay Outline
Paragraph 1: Summarize Derek Thompson’s essay about Workism.
Paragraph 2: Your thesis: Develop a claim that the causes of Workism are the following:
- The rise of the fraudster who relies on a mythical origin story about creating disruptive change that makes for a better world.
- The prevalence of Groupthink in the workplace makes workers malleable.
- The prevalence of toxic positivity in the workplace is used to manipulate workers.
- The prevalence of pseudo-spirituality in the workplace tethers employees to work while they disconnect from family and community and this creates a vicious cycle.
- The prevalence of the Ubermensch ethic as described by Anne Helen Petersen chains employees to a burnout work cycle.
Paragraphs 3-7 address the above bullet points.
Paragraphs 8 and 9: Counterargument and Rebuttal
Some will argue that economic necessity in a hyper-competitive field that makes success a zero-sum game to be the real reason of Workism, not the above. Do you concede that point? Do you reject it? Why? Why not?
Paragraph 10: Conclusion, a reiteration of your thesis.
Works Cited with 4 sources in MLA format.
Smoke and mirrors created this powerful drug-like aura around WeWork, and the company curated a beautiful environment that looked like a luxurious womb. As we read in “The Rise and Fall of WeWork” by Lizzie Widdicombe:
All of the employees I spoke to described a similar emotional trajectory. The first stage was romance. “Forget forty-seven billion dollars. I don’t know of a single architecture office worth one billion dollars,” another worker at the wine bar, a designer, said. “That was promising.” The company’s proposition was as intoxicating as it was vague. “I bought into it. I’ll admit it,” he said. The idea was “this new ‘office of the future.’ That, if you make work an enjoyable place to come to, you can probably improve productivity.” An architect said that she’d initially been skeptical of the company but was won over during her job interview, when she visited WeWork’s Chelsea location, its showpiece. “I have to say, the vibe there is magnetic,” she said. There were endless seating options: booths, extra-large couches, café-style tables. A barista whipped up lattes with vegan milk, and the central pantry offered wine, beer, and kombucha on tap. “It’s bright and bustling,” she went on. “People are chatting in small groups, or having coffee and working on a laptop. You’re convinced that they are busy and doing things well. It’s interesting, because that’s what they were selling: this energy, this magnetic, productive buzz.” The WeWorkers themselves had a specific look, which spoke of the excellent paychecks. The women favored tight jeans and motorcycle jackets. The men tended to be “sales bros,” the architect said. “The kind of guy who walks around with an Apple EarPod in his ear, talking to someone.”
***
If you’re not lured and seduced by the opulent trappings, then your mind will be manipulated at a pseudo-religious retreat complete with New Age speakers. As we read:
Then came a literal honeymoon: a festival known as Summer Camp, which was mandatory for new employees. At the wine bar, my two drinking companions thought back to the summer of 2018, shortly after they’d been hired. SoftBank had just provided the company with a billion-dollar cash infusion. Eight thousand WeWorkers were whisked to a field outside of London, where they camped in tents for three days. Lorde performed, and the New Age guru Deepak Chopra led a meditation. The two employees had been tent buddies, and they’d experienced moments of what they called “foreshadowing.” “I think we crunched the numbers on the plane and were, like, ‘O.K., this is twenty-five hundred dollars a head just for the flights,’ ” the designer said. “On one hand, I was, like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’ Most companies I’ve worked at, I’ve been lucky if they’d buy me dinner. On the other hand, from a business perspective, there were some red flags there.”
It rained on the first night, and the WeWorkers huddled under a tent, listening to Neumann speak from the stage. He broke into a televangelist bit, walking out into the crowd and pointing to random people, asking them to describe their “superpower.” The designer recalled, “People were raising their hands, like, ‘Pick me! Pick me!’ ” Some WeWorkers shared personal stories, and got emotional. “I’m like sitting there, like, Oh, my God. I don’t know how to feel about this.” The development worker, who is gay, said that he’d felt a twinge of discomfort when Rebekah Neumann, Adam’s wife, delivered a tearful speech, in which she declared, “A big part of being a woman is to help men [like Adam] manifest their calling in life.” (The festival also included a panel event in which the Neumanns talked about the success of their relationship.) “I was kind of grossed out by this whole religious, heteronormative undertone to everything,” he said. But he was having too much fun to worry about it. And he figured that there was more to the company’s leadership than the Neumanns’ theatrics might suggest. “There was always this assumption that, behind Adam, there was someone intelligent—a group of people—who were watching and making the practical, financial decisions,” he said. “That someone was taking care of it.”
***
Neumann and his cadre are whipping up intense emotion, a hunger for belonging, a sense of FOMO (don’t miss out on this “manifest”); everything is “manifesting,” and Neumann uses billions of dollars from intoxicated investors who are blind to the dumpster fire to create a seductive world that shines with tinsel and baubles.
But if we look closely, getting a jog at WeWork is like getting in a relationship with a drug dealer, precisely what Adam Neumann is. You’re taking Adam Neumann to your house to have dinner with your parents and the slick-tongued snake rolls out his load of crap about manifesting and dreaming and in reality, he is a drug dealer and he is going to crash. You need adults in the room to see this, but there were no adults, and even if there were, those adults were drugged by the promise of billions and feared missing out, FOMO.
***
“The WeWork Documentary Explores a Decade of Delusion” by Lizzie Widdicombe.
We read that Adam Neumann is either a religious prophet selling unicorns or a drug dealer selling psychedelic unicorns:
The story of WeWork’s rise and fall is the story of the past decade: a strange time when greed, technology worship, and low interest rates combined to produce throngs of supposedly billion-dollar startups, known as “unicorns.” But it is also the story of one man, Adam Neumann, an Israeli immigrant with flowing, dark hair and a habit of walking around barefoot in public. It’s clear that, had Neumann been born a few centuries earlier, he would have made an amazing prophet. But, in 2010, in New York City, he became the next best thing: a founder. The documentary suggests that the two aren’t so different: footage of old-timey faith healers is juxtaposed with scenes of Neumann preaching to starry-eyed millennials. He anoints them, “You’re a creator! And you’re a creator! And I know you’re a creator!”
***
What was the secret formula to Neumann’s drug dealing?
- He needed greed to stimulate investors. Check.
- He needed lonely people searching for meaning and belonging. Check.
- He needed a new work aesthetic that would make the job site look like Pinocchio’s Fantasy Island. Check.
- He needed camps and retreats to brainwash people into believing they were joining a pseudo-religious movement. Check.
- He needed employees who wanted to work themselves to the bone for the chance of becoming part of something larger than them. Check.
As we read:
Other companies have offered flexible office space, most notably Regus, which has been in the business for decades, without anyone getting overly excited about it. (To explain the lack of buzz, we see a snippet from a Regus ad, in which a cheerful businesswoman provides a tour of beige, corporate meeting rooms.) One could argue that WeWork’s biggest innovation was in creating a new workplace aesthetic: casual enough to lure freelancers from coffee shops but more sophisticated than the nerdy playpens of Palo Alto, with their indoor slides and ball pits. A WeWork space resembled a cool person’s living room. Glass walls, exposed brick and concrete, oversized couches, and beer on tap. In the documentary, there’s an amusing roll call of WeWork’s early customers, announcing the names of the companies they were attempting to start there: Yoink. BrunchCritic.com. Spindows. Scruff. Roomhints. These founders—mostly white men and women—wanted a place to work, but they also wanted membership in a club. Or was it a fraternity? One of WeWork’s earliest rituals was an event called Summer Camp, a multiday bacchanal where members indulged in water sports, ropes courses, and semi-clothed games of beer pong. Neumann is the ringmaster of this circus. The endless footage of him partying—crowd-surfing, exchanging chest bumps—becomes a metaphor for his ineffable mojo.
***
Neumann is part of a larger trend in society toward grift and fraud. As we read:
How does this happen? Rothstein doesn’t land any interviews with the big-name investors themselves. And he offers a fairly cursory explanation for Neumann’s ability to seduce them, suggesting that they were motivated by fomo, the fear of missing out on the next Airbnb or Uber. But I found myself craving a deeper understanding—especially because the story doesn’t stop with WeWork or Neumann. It’s part of a rash of tales about grifts and cons that have proliferated and then ended up onscreen over the past few years, from “The Vow,” about the NXIVM cult, which ensnared many wealthy and successful people, to “Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal” and multiple documentaries about the Fyre Festival.
***
Derek Thompson: “WeWork’s Adam Neumann Is the Most Talented Grifter of Our Time”
Thompson describes WeWork’s fall and Adam Neumann’s as the dramatic shake down of a great grifter and “Houdini”:
This is how the WeWork story ends—for now. The high-flying office-sharing startup, which introduced itself to the world as “a community company” with a mission to “to elevate the world’s consciousness,” is paying its founder, Adam Neumann, more than $1 billion to go away. Meanwhile, the company is so cash-poor that it cannot afford to pay the severances of the 4,000 workers it intends to cut.
WeWork’s free fall from a projected valuation of nearly $50 billion to just $5 billion will likely be taught in business school, immortalized in best-selling books, and debated among analysts for years. But one thing’s for sure: It has established Adam Neumann, who escaped from the wreckage a billionaire, as a figure of almost mythical monstrousness—like some capitalist chimera of Midas and Houdini.
***
The most spectacular fraud from this grifter Neumann is that he larded the world with saccharine cliches about bringing peace, togetherness, and love to spread throughout Planet Earth as he siphoned everyone’s money, including his own workers’, like a blood-sucking vampire. He preached generosity and community, but he was overcome by greed and ego. As we read:
It is not unusual for founders of billion-dollar enterprises to get rich. What’s deeply unusual, however, is the way Neumann wrapped himself around WeWork’s business to squeeze profit from its every pore, even as he proclaimed his firm’s spirit of generosity.
***
Within the company, there were other signs that Neumann’s “spirit of we” rhetoric was a cover for “lucre for me” behavior. In 2015, Neumann made tens of millions of dollars selling shares during an investment round. Soon after, the company offered to buy back ordinary employees’ shares, but it offered a much lower “payout per share” than what Neumann had received. Many of Neumann’s kibbutzniks didn’t even know they had been shafted. “Neumann’s sale wasn’t publicized within the company,” according to Wall Street Journal reports.
As Neumann was becoming fantastically rich—by running WeWork, by buying stakes in buildings that he could urge WeWork to lease, and by selling WeWork stock for hundreds of millions of dollars—his tastes grew dear. He developed a thirst for private air travel, which he slaked with the acquisition of a $60 million private jet. He and his wife reportedly spent more than $80 million on “at least five” homes, including a 60-acre estate north of New York City and a 13,000-square-foot house in the Bay Area. Net worth and self-admiration increased in lockstep. By 2016, Neumann was telling friends that he was intent on becoming the first trillionaire. Perhaps, he said, somewhere along the way to eternity, he might become the “president of the world.”
***
“The Shocking True Story of WeCrashed”
Sample Thesis Statements That Focus on Adam Neumann As Grifter and Fraudster
Sample #1
Fallen WeWork CEO Adam Neumann embodies the most virulent traits of Workism.
Sample #2
Snake-tongued Adam Neumann is the quintessential fraudster of the modern era who exploits Workism, toxic positivity, pseudo-religion, and Groupthink so that he can promise his employees, investors, and customers a better, more enlightened world on one hand while exploiting and destroying the lives of others like the blood-sucking vampire he is on the other.
Sample #3
While many are tempted to demonize Adam Neumann, we should look at those that he duped who are responsible for their own demise: their greed, their unchecked FOMO, their self-induced loneliness that made them desperate for belonging, and their willed ignorance that made them embrace a bunch of unverified BS. In other words, let’s not point the finger at Neumann when his victims have no one to blame but themselves.
Sample #4
Adam Neumann of WeWork and Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos are both fallen angels who now reside in hell because they utilized the most heinous methods of Workism: micromanaging employees to run a tightly-run image campaign that bore no resemblance to reality; relying on the greed of investors; pushing a mythical narrative about “changing the world,” and sacrificing the wellbeing of others for their own vaunting ambition and egotistical grandeur.
Sample #5
I will concede that grifters like Adam Neumann and his ilk should be held accountable for their fraud and graft, but we do a great disservice to ourselves if we don’t place the blame on the real culprits: the alleged victims who have compromised their own responsibility, self-agency, and critical thinking in favor of greed and childish fantasies so that they can believe in false notions of belonging, security, and a utopia fabricated by the techno-devils who will always be with us.
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