Money is a construct.
The Hulu documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn is not good or great or even bad: it exists. Like most documentaries today, it does little more than place people in rooms, turn the cameras on, and make us watch them speak. The story that unravels is by now a common one: man walks into a room, cons several people into giving him money for the best, most profitable business ever, man turns out to be a crook and disappears with all the money. Directed by Jed Rothstein, the film focuses on Adam Neumann, who is both a revolting and disgusting human being and a man of our times, someone who promised to transform office life forever. WeWork offered flexible and rather glamorous workspaces for freelancers and people who were starting their businesses but didn’t have the funds to rent conventional office space. On the face of it, it seemed like a genius idea. The reality is that WeWork was a mythical creature that only existed to draw gullible and greedy people to it, people who told themselves that they too could gain the kind of wealth and success Neumann seemed to possess.
Whether the office space as we know it will ever return remains unresolved. The pandemic has made “going to the office” an ordeal for most and even with vaccinations made accessible to more people (in the United States, while the rest of the world suffers from a lack), offices aren’t what they were: the water cooler as a social institution is probably dead at least for the foreseeable future. Only the worst and most evil employers force their employees to come to the office. One of them, it turns out, is John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s who donates more than $4 million a year to keep it going but somehow can’t find the money to pay its interns (the last fact caused my eyebrows to knit together in deep annoyance, especially since I just renewed a subscription). He also makes all his 17 staffers come into the office every day in what the New York Times refers to as “a kind of hostage situation” (it actually just is a hostage situation). In other offices, protocols (about which Mr. MacArthur cares not a bit, as he also walks in maskless on his employees) are in place, windows are opened, and employees are assured that ventilation systems have been upgraded (often a blatant lie). The everyday office, once a prime source of often excellent sitcom humour (several once existed), is now a deathtrap.
But if you were around in The Time Before The Pandemic, you remember this thing called WeWork, and a few of its imitators. The idea seemed genius in its simplicity: given that so many people are freelancers or were starting up companies without the funds for expensive office spaces, why not offer them well-designed pods inside a building fitted with everything they needed, at varying rates? Neumann, a lanky long-haired man who walks around barefoot, is married to Rebekah Neumann, who is a cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow: that fact alone, sadly unexplored in the documentary, tells you everything you need to know. In one brief scene from an interview between the two women, we see them gazing into each other’s eyes, knees almost touching. Paltrow has just asked Neumann about a new education venture the couple have created and the latter says, “When my eldest daughter was in kindergarten, as we started to look around for schools in both New York and the West Coast, I wasn’t finding a space that was going to nurture her spirit and her soul as much as her mind.” (You can watch a slightly longer version here.) Most people worry about finding the right neighbourhood for decent schools for our children (today, they also worry that their kids will die) so that they might at least learn the basics of math in cities and towns with underfunded public schools. The Neumanns casually contemplate which coast to send their kids to but, thankfully, are still concerned about their spirits and their souls which apparently cannot be nurtured by their parents at home.
It turns out that this gibberish (no, I don’t know what the hell she meant, either) was part of the WeWork corporate ethos and typical of capitalism’s contemporary bait and switch: we will work you to death but in the process convince you that all of this is good for your spirit and soul. And you will die in the process, reaping profits for the few but you will feel good about having worked yourself to death. In Olden Times of Yore, people got gold watches after fifty years of service, along with decent or even excellent pensions. Today, everyone is expected to celebrate the fact that they will work till the exact minute of their death but they will have nurtured their spirits and their souls all the while.
In a Thrillist review, Dan Jackson points out that the documentary never really convinces that Neumann was as charismatic as everyone claims: “What type of financial system rewards a person like Neumann? Why were so many eager to prop WeWork up? How does this keep happening? Instead of digging deeper, Rothstein falls back on many of the clichés about community that Neumann himself was so skilled at rolling out.” WeWork was a venture built on a steamy, sliding, stinking pile of bullshit, but few were willing to call it out at the time, seduced by the promise of massive profits. It glorified the worst of neoliberal work conditions, and its gorgeous interiors and communal style workspaces helped mask the fact that nearly everyone in those airy, pretty spaces was chasing dreams bound to extinction before they started. Do you need a calm, nurturing environment in which to craft a hundred pitches to people who will never respond because those jobs have already gone to their cousins and classmates? Here you go, desks and free micro-roasted coffee, tea, and fruit water! Phone booths! Wi-Fi! Did we mention fruit water?
Eventually, as these things must, WeWork melted into a puddle of financial incoherence and disaster but, of course, Neumann walked off with more than enough: $1.7 billion. He and his wife currently live in two houses in New York (at least two houses, we assume, because surely a billion buys you more) and are still interested in starting up that educational venture for children. WeWork the documentary tries to lock in a social-justice-y perspective on all of this, with ex-workers speaking about a sense of betrayal (the company insisted it couldn’t afford to pay for severances). But it’s hard to believe that a group of highly educated people couldn’t figure out that the dude blabbering on about how a place that, as NYU professor Scott Galloway puts it, was “renting fucking desks” could transform the world. It’s hard not to believe that they bought into his “vision” because they were convinced that they would all get very, very rich and that they knew that nobody gets that rich without a lot of people being screwed over in one way or another.
While the focus of WeWork is Adam Neumann, he’s not really at the centre of it. Ultimately, the documentary is about money. WeWork the corporation, or whatever we call it, was and is a benighted entity whose only purpose was and is to exist as an entity that attracts funds from entities which in turn create funds out of thin air to create other entities that then fund other entities that actually only exist as long some other entities testify that they can make this thing called money. The amounts thrown around in the documentary are massive: tens of billions here, a hundred billion there, and so on. I read and read the wiki entries on Softbank, the holding fund that funded WeWork and others, trying to get a grasp on how all this money moved back and forth and the only fact that emerges is that an entire financial system, if we can even call it that, only exists to make it seem like money exists. This is not to say that there isn’t very real money sitting in some bank accounts: the billion plus dollars in Neumann’s bank account is very real, the money Gwyneth Paltrow has made from toxic-shock-inducing jade eggs is very real, the money that buys the private planes that successful venture capitalists fly around in is very real. But money becomes immaterial at a certain point: it’s nothing, and it can’t be made to exist when it’s most needed. It doesn’t exist to pay interns anything at all at Harper’s even though its publisher could clearly make that money materialise (unpaid internships mean that only a certain class of people can even afford to get into publishing, and that sustains the class structure that keeps Harper’s going).
In 2019, a group of ex-WeWork employees tried to generate sympathy by tying their lot with the cleaning staff who, it turned out, had only been paid minimum wage. But the cleaners had clearly been paid shoddily from the start and the ex-employees hadn’t given a damn about them then: somehow the absence of money wasn’t a problem until, in the more labour-conscious age of 2019 and amidst public discussions about inequality, it became something with which to leverage money for themselves. These employees had dreamt of becoming multi-millionaires while working for someone who was clearly a conman: the money was non-existent except in their heads and it now became something material as their rents became due.
All of this is to say: Money is a construct. It can be made to disappear into the pockets of a few but it can also be made to appear for those who need it. The world’s richest country has the highest death count and the largest rates of infections. Instead of giving businesses and people money to use to pay themselves to just sit back for a while until we have a real handle on all this, we are forcing teachers and others back to work for the sake of a “normalcy” we may not return to for at least another year or more. People died because the richest country in the world didn’t want to just give masks and PPE to everyone who needed them. And so on.
Money is a construct. We need to untether it from the idea that only those who “work hard” or show “inspiration” and “vision” (all the buzzwords used by venture capitalists) deserve it. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t exist. In this world, where most of us need to pay rent and buy food and survive by using it? Just give people money.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: United States Bullion Depository