What’s the best way to work? There has been a lot of bluster (and cruelty) by business executives seeking to enforce a rollback on remote working, which in some cases (like mine) was forcibly introduced to novel work contexts. Many of my friends in tech work and thrive in all-remote teams so they are admittedly puzzled by some of the narratives connecting work productivity with a certain kind of presence in a building. Many other friends find it puzzling that anyone might not see the benefit and enlivening in face-to-face embodied interaction with fellow humans. What’s been missed in much of this debate, which has tended to focus on econometric measures of workplace productivity, is the fact that there isn’t a “best” way to work. Working involves a lot of different kinds of people, who will have different ways of thriving and interacting. Some people will struggle with zoom sessions, missing cues, needing embodied intimacy to feel connection. Others will feel overwhelmed, or even repulsed by the insistence on shared space in oversaturated noisy work environments. Which is more productive? Neither. Again, different kinds of people work in different kinds of ways. But it’s not surprising to see a vanguard trying to enforce what is “normal” and “best” for workers.

This preference often follows capital. Teams that are all-remote, can’t fathom how they would cover the additional costs of leasing office space and addiing sufficient infrastructure. Conversely, my own workplace, like many other Universities in the UK has made massive capital investment in running and staffing campus infrastructure, including student housing and food services, and a very paltry one in digital and hybrid environments, most of the latter only when forced to do so under Covid-19 lockdowns. So while tech seems to be, by default, remote friendly, due to underinvestment in infratructure, higher education is the opposite, due to underinvestment in infrastructure. Those who have highlighted the benefits of remote working for wellbeing and improved outcomes for students, especially those with disabilities and neuro-minorities, have been ignored, rebuffed, or even silenced in some cases. It’s a messy situation with many dimensions to it – and I recognise that there won’t be a situation where everyone’s needs are going to be met optimally. So the work here, as I conceive of it, is to find ways to try and find imbalance and work to correct it.

I’ve been observing some symmetrical challenges for young people. On one hand, we see a concerning and large body of evidence showing the negative mental health impacts, exploitation and danger that meet children through their use of digital social environments on social media. This has led to a burgeoning movement among many educators and parents to ban phones (by young people) in schools. There’s a similar, but more intense subculture of which we’re often a part, where parents seek to protect their children by minimising their use of digital devices altogether. As home educators focussed on learning in nature, my partner and I are often part of these conversations. And I often agree, our young people are systematically denied access to nature, social spaces which aren’t saturated by media, or even the basic conditions for a quieter or contemplative experience. But I have also noticed narratives that increasingly concern me here too. Sometimes parents and public figures speak of screens use as a form of “addiction”- this was certainly the case in my own childhood where we were strictly rationed only 30 minutes of computer game playing during weekdays, and weren’t permitted to have video game consoles for much of our early years. I’ve also seen people promulgate  the research regarding negative mental health impacts on young people of playing computer games. As a scholar it’s my job to test assumptions, and as I’ve brought that conviction to this area of concern, I’ve found that children’s engagement with digital devices does not meet the basic thresholds for addictive behaviour. And all of that researching showing the negative effects of video games on children (or before that television)? Mostly just journalists citing pseudo-studies, which source checking reveals are thin and inconclusive. Another way of reading that distress of young people when parents enforce harsh and restrictive rules regarding digital devices is that they’ve found a mode of comfort or accommodation that eases some area of cognitive or emotional difficulty in their lives (which may have even been imperceptible to parents), so their distress is indeed intense, but not because it is rooted in a harmful addition, but because they are being separated from something soothing and helpful in a very overwhelming world.

I’ve been working in campus environments for my whole life – first working in a school district office, then a large telecommunications company and then a series of Universities. In this time of bitterly depressing suburban and urban landscapes, I love the ways that campus working can revive a sense of being in a small town community – waving to people you know on your way to a meeting, popping into the campus cafe for a break, bumping into friends in the hallway and having spontaneous conversations. So it’s probably not surprising that I didn’t realise the significant negative impact this kind of environment was having on my mental and physical health until I was forced into a new work atmosphere under lockdown. The impacts of lockdown didn’t affect us all equally. Some people lived their best lives during lockdown, continuing in already all-digital jobs in comfortable homes benefitting from less logistical distractions and improved delivery services. Others struggled. Many died or experienced significant bereavement. University teaching shifted all online for many Universities for an extended duration – mine was one that re-opened as quickly as possible – but we did have a time during mandatory campus closures. This was incredibly stressful as I needed to rewrite all my teaching, ex nihilo, for a new format, and also found myself teaching on completely new courses given University mandates to take up co-teaching on all modules for “resilience”. As I’ve spoken with a number of staff since then, however, this experience also opened the door of experience to remote working for many of us who had never expereinced or considered it before. For those of us in neuro-minorities, this was a particularly striking enlightenment. We suddenly felt forms of relief we’d never experienced at work before and baselines suddenly shifted.

This dovetailed for me with a process of unmasking and diagnosing being autistic. That sudden gestalt shift, left me seeing things in a new light. I reflected on my past (if tacit) enjoyment of long written exchanges over email, as they offered an opportunity to get my thoughts out clearly in a format that left the other person with time to process what I’d said and react asking for clarification – a rare opportunity in real time meetings, especially those in large groups. I thought back even further to my experiences as a young person in the early days of the internet – I had access to email as a teen, and was administrating the servers that provided email hosting for our entire school district. I enjoyed late exchanges texting messages over IRC and other text-based chats. There was something pure and accessible about being able to sit in a room with no sensory stimuli, read people’s words without being constantly inundated and distracted by a room full of body language, microexpressions, smells, background noise, scraping chair legs, fans running, perfume, body odour, laundry detergent, garlic from that lunch sandwich, etc etc etc. I could focus on the person, and had a level of emotional availability and energy to read and return communication with a clear mind. I relish the ability to think slowly about a tricky policy or scholarly challenge with a colleague over the course of weeks, months or even years without pressure to foreclose and decide. Sometimes my thinking takes unusually long times, because I’m considering a much wider range of angles than other people do and also because I tend to need to synthesise and make a coherent model or plan for moving forward before I can feel comfortable pushing on with action.

After a year under lockdown, returning to campus was excruciating. That’s not because I’d been converted to new forms of leisure that had been formerly unavailable, but because I had become attuned to matters of personal discomfort and stress that had always been present, but which I’d learned and conditioned to mask and conceal. This is corroborated by a long history of personal physical impacts from sustained workplace environmental stress long before 2020. The return was also a departure from a temporarily opened portal on creative thinking about hybrid work environments. All of a sudden, people who had been struggling before under the previous regime with certain defaults, had their chance. Some of my students thrived and developed new levels of entitlement to demand more flexible teaching. Some staff too, had seen the fruits of this, though we were all also admittedly tired and broken down from the trauma and chronic sickness so many of us experienced during the pandemic. So we returned with new forms of ambition and entitlement. I know of many people who have experienced this in many workplaces – this opening of hope, which was quickly dashed when it became clear that executive authority meant to enforce a return to the previous default, and had narratives in hand to defend their choices. The creativity and consultation was over.

The opening of the millennium was full of hope for new creative formats and fora. So much of that has faded, and several years out now, I’m left wondering how we can revive the energy we need to improve the ways we work and live together. I remain steadfast in my conviction that digital spaces are a crucial tool for making our communities more open and available to people who have a personality or bodily experience that deviates from the default – I think this population extends far beyond those who comfortably acknowledge a personal expereince of disability, or would claim to be highly sensitive, to a significant minority of the population, that is, some people in every team in every business, charity, school: customers, stakeholders, and members.

The trouble is, our options for digital exchange have been captured by hostile forces. I was an early adopter in every case, but no longer make use of those platforms which have been infected by algorithms, surveillance, and advertising, e.g. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. This problems is also much deeper – we’ve become committed to values which establish an unbreakable tether between ourselves and those services. We avoid small platforms with niche audiences and communities. We don’t avoid and even refuse to participate in the work of moderation and community maintenance online. It’s easier to complain about facebook’s moderation policy whilst grudgingly continuing to use the platform than it is to shift to an alternative where you need to build up a new, potentially smaller audience, especially if that new platform will also require new forms of work. We require convenient apps with smooth UX and seamless user experinces. And we avoid applications that make demands on us to customise or install tools, engage in learning offline before they are possible. We gravitate towards algorithmic feeds, because it feels easier than having to confront content coming up in our reading that doesn’t match the current vibe – which as a general rule undermines the very idea of moderation and discovery of new and challenging ideas. Convenience and populism meet in the current social media landscape, and regardless of whatever less-unvalorous-option arises (non-federating bluesky anyone?) it will simply continue this lock-in to toxic media engagements which erode our personal values, relationships and citizenship.

My one hope for a future resurgence is in a desire to create spaces for our young people. I’m anxious that many of my peers with the privilege and skill to build these spaces, but who lack the disabilities to grant that work urgency, have opted-out. But maybe there is some opportunity here to create new communities to connect young people, given them agency, community, and safety not through demands that some oligarch-led platform reform its bad behaviours, but by creating new spaces in small communities tied to or seeded from our geographical, familial and relational ones. This would open those communities up to those of us who are hyper-sensory, experience social anxiety, or just don’t work at the pace of the crowd. It would help those people who are able to get along just fine with the norm, by granting exposure to other ways of life that can be spicy and exciting. I think I’m going to put some energy into making this case, and building these environments in the years to come. I hope you’ll join me!