Work House II: Piping the Dream

It’s 1986, and in a housing estate in Oxfordshire, British Telecom are busy playing their part in delivering the “most important social revolution in three centuries.”

How are they doing it? partnering with builders Alfred McAlpine to pilot an internet-connected home office:

“The first [BT} line would be used for ordinary telephone calls and Prestel, and the other for use with a communicating workstation: a combined computer and telephone with built-in modem. “

The reason for the experiment was to prove that the equipment needed to work effectively from home would fit in your average bedroom:

“Compact units carrying the Merlin Tonto, a printer and the Merlin combined Fax and photocopier could all be easily packed away into a cupboard overnight if required, yet provide the businessman with all his needs.”

The real kicker? The highly affordable cost to get yourself setup for home working, which came in at just under “half the cost of even a modest executive car.”

Reading this excerpt from BT's in-house journal, comically titled 'Piping the Dream,' it’s hard to not imagine how different the world would have been if, in 2020, the cost of setting up a home office had been equivalent to half the price of a BMW 320i.

There’s two ways to think about what the trends discussed in Work House I mean for the homes we live in.

The first possibility is that homes will evolve to better incorporate physical workspaces, thereby more closely resembling homes of the past.

This already happens, particularly when it comes to artists and musicians: take Aaron Dressner’s Long Pond, a private recording studio with bedrooms that sits next to his family home in the Hudson Valley.

It’s now spread further afield: Mark Zuckerberg’s Hawaii ranch has been built to be just as much as a place for bringing Meta’s leadership teams together as it is a place for living from; and and every now and then a gorgeous home office (David Heinemeier Hansson’s is a personal favourite) goes viral.

So we’re heading back towards a world of weirder and more eclectic homes, firmly in line with the high-tech pastoral dreams of Oscar Isaac’s home cum office in Ex Machina.

As someone who thinks bringing beautifully designed things into the world matters, this is a good thing: but for most people these kinds of spaces are simply unattainable.

Which means a second way of thinking about things, and brings us back to our 1986 housing estate in Oxfordshire.

The efforts needed to make a home a productive space back then were nothing short of heroic. And with a cost to match.

Now however, it’s very different.

We simply don’t need grand physical spaces any more, as the physical space, and equipment we need, to do great work, becomes smaller and smaller.

When you read that BT article, and imagine if the pandemic hit in the 1980s, the rush to the office afterwards would have been epic.

Probably even in the early 2010s we wouldn’t have quite managed it (maybe a reason why some of the planning assumptions around lockdown compliance, a lot of which hadn’t been re-evaluated since 2011, were somewhat off the mark).

But when the pandemic happened, we had just about reached the edge technologically where we could go fully remote for months on end.

But, this was kit scavenged together, and taken from our offices. Found objects, as an artist would put it.

Not perfect, but just about good enough.

This, I think, is the best way of thinking about home working technology: it shrinks the physical space needed for us to do great work.

The cost of building a world-class audio/visual studio, in your own home, is now in the hundreds of dollars.

To have a video conferencing setup beyond the wildest dreams of the CEOs of the 00s you need a TV from Amazon, a HDMI cable, and a £100 conferencing camera.

I can buy an actual working teleprompter - that thing that newsreaders and world leaders use - for just under £40, and set it up, in my house.

This is one of the two big reasons Stanford economist Nick Bloom gives for his optimism about the future of home working. As he puts it:

“The rate of technological progress is accelerating thanks to the Schumpeterian economics of “market-size effects”. When markets grow, firms want to innovate to serve the newly enlarged and more profitable market. As wfh has jumped since 2019, the rewards from producing the best video camera, video-conference package or desk-scheduling software have also shot up.

It’s not only a question of a better x, or a better y, but also bringing things that are completely new to the market.

Considering this, it's striking that the case for VR, the major hardware investment of the decade for two of the world's largest companies, Apple and Meta, is built around work.

Here’s Ben Thompson assessing the pitch:

“The point of invoking the changes wrought by COVID, though, was to note that work is a destination, and it's a destination that occupies a huge amount of our time. Of course when I wrote that sceptical article in 2018 a work destination was, for the vast majority of people, a physical space; suddenly, though, for millions of white collar workers in particular, it’s a virtual space. And, if work is already a virtual space, then suddenly virtual reality seems far more compelling.”

Instead of a full bat-cave style rig, in Ben’s world you only need a quiet space, a comfortable sofa, and a great internet connection.

Think Don Draper, in his private office, with a VR headset on.

These developments get us past the great limitation of home working - that (unlike say, homes in Roman society) - the places we live simply aren’t up to the job.

You only need a quiet space, a comfortable sofa, and a great internet connection.

And in doing so, you’re recreating the specialist homes of the past: of the Barings of 6 Mincing Lane, the Roman senators of 75AD, and the artisans of the 18th century.

It’s just, unlike them, you don’t need to make any major physical changes to do so.

In this world any home can very easily become a powerful space to do great work.

A place less about, to borrow from producer Jack Antonoff, stepping outside what you love to do, and more about drilling further into it.

At heart, this was the original dream of Alvin Toffler, the 70s futurist from Work House I:

“as the Third Wave sweeps across society, we find more and more companies that can be described, in the words of one researcher, as nothing but "people huddled around a computer." Put the computer in people's homes, and they no longer need to huddle.

Toffler’s words are a rare example of a correct prediction.

But he missed what mattered most in this equation: the quality, and cost, of the computer.

aled@ashore.io