In the nineteen-sixties, Jack Nilles, a physicist turned engineer, built long-range communications systems at the U.S. Air Force’s Aerial Reconnaissance Laboratory, near Dayton, Ohio. Later, at NASA, in Houston, he helped design space probes that could send messages back to Earth. In the early nineteen-seventies, as the director for interdisciplinary research at the University of Southern California, he became fascinated by a more terrestrial problem: traffic congestion. Suburban sprawl and cheap gas were combining to create traffic jams; more and more people were commuting into the same city centers. In October, 1973, the OPEC oil embargo began, and gas prices quadrupled. America’s car-based work culture seemed suddenly unsustainable.
That year, Nilles published a book, “The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff,” in which he and his co-authors argued that the congestion problem was actually a communications problem. The personal computer hadn’t yet been invented, and there was no easy way to relocate work into the home. But Nilles imagined a system that could ease the traffic crisis: if companies built small satellite offices in city outskirts, then employees could commute to many different, closer locations, perhaps on foot or by bicycle. A system of human messengers and mainframe computers could keep these distributed operations synchronized, replicating the communication that goes on within a single, shared office building. Nilles coined the terms “tele-commuting” and “telework” to describe this hypothetical arrangement.
The satellite-office idea didn’t catch on, but it didn’t matter: over the next decade, advances in computer and network technology leapfrogged it. In 1986, my mother, a COBOL programmer for the Houston Chronicle, became one of the first true remote workers: in a bid to keep her from leaving—she was very good, and had a long commute—the paper set her up with an early-model, monochrome-screen PC, from which she “dialled in” to the paper’s I.B.M. mainframe using a primitive modem, sending screens of code back and forth. “It was very slow,” she told me recently. “You would watch the lines load on the screen, one by one.” The technology wasn’t fast enough for widespread use—hours could pass while the computers synchronized—but the basic template for remote work had been set.
In the following decades, technical advances arrived with increasing frequency. In the nineteen-nineties, during the so-called I.T. revolution, office workers started using networked PCs and teams embraced e-mail and file-sharing. People began spending less time in meetings and on the phone and more time interacting with their computers. As computer prices dropped, many bought comparable machines for their homes, using modems to access the same tools they used at work. In 1994, A.T. & T. held its first “Employee Telecommuting Day”; in 1996, the federal government launched a program to increase remote-work options for its employees. In the early two-thousands, broadband Internet made home connections substantially faster, and, in 2003, a pair of European programmers released Skype, which took advantage of this broadband explosion to enable cheap audio communication. In 2004, they added conference-call capabilities, and, in 2006, video conferencing. By the next year, their program had been downloaded half a billion times.
Office work seemed on the brink of a profound shift. Instead of commuting into crowded cities, white-collar workers would soon relocate to more affordable, bucolic areas; they’d enjoy flexible schedules, picking up their kids from school and sitting down for family dinners after productive days at home. Some people envisioned more radical departures. In his book “The 4-Hour Workweek,” from 2007, Timothy Ferriss, a twenty-nine-year-old entrepreneur, suggested that readers aggressively negotiate remote-work agreements with their employers and then move to parts of the world where the cost of living was low. (Argentina was experiencing a currency crisis, and so could be a good spot for such “geo-arbitrage,” Ferris wrote.) Unsupervised by bosses, these ultra-remote workers could do their jobs in highly efficient bursts, enjoying lavish lives of leisure the rest of the time.
“The 4-Hour Workweek” became a huge best-seller. But just when the remote-work revolution looked inevitable, it lost momentum. In February, 2013, the recently-appointed C.E.O. of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, put a stop to all remote work at the company by means of an all-hands memo from H.R. “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” the memo read. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.” I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Best Buy, and other companies curtailed their telework programs; Silicon Valley companies became known for the ludic enticements—free meals, coffee bars, climbing gyms—that they used to keep workers at the office. A month after the Yahoo memo landed, an article in Business Insider lauded Google’s Corporate Concierge team, which helped its engineers accomplish mundane personal tasks, such as planning dinner parties or finding Halloween costumes. “Employees who work for the search giant don’t have to worry about much besides their work,” it concluded.
Today, remote work is the exception rather than the norm. “Flexible work” arrangements tend to be seen as a perk; a 2018 survey found that only around three per cent of American employees worked from home more than half of the time. And yet the technological infrastructure designed for telecommuting hasn’t gone away. It’s what enables employees to answer e-mails on the subway or draft pre-dawn memos in their kitchens. Jack Nilles dreamed of remote work replacing office work, but the plan backfired: using advanced telecommunications technologies, we now work from home while also commuting. We work everywhere.
As spring gives way to summer, and we enter the uncertain second phase of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s unclear when, or whether, knowledge workers will return to their offices. Citigroup recently told its employees to expect a slow transition out of lockdown, with many employees staying out of the office until next year. Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twitter, went even further, announcing in an e-mail that those whose jobs didn’t require a physical presence would be allowed to work from home indefinitely. In a press statement, Twitter’s head of H.R. said that the company would “never probably be the same,” adding, “I do think we won’t go back.”
Not every company will want to embrace remote work so fully, but, to protect worker health and reduce corporate liability, many will have no choice but to allow significantly more telework for months or perhaps years to come. Offices in Asia may provide us with a glimpse of the American future: restrictions have eased in a number of Asian cities, but at Microsoft Asia’s offices, in China, only around half of the company’s six thousand employees have returned to in-person work. At Nanjing University, many administrative staff members have adopted interlocking schedules in which they work only a few in-person days each week, minimizing the number of people on campus at any given time; coffee shops in Hong Kong, which have recently reopened, are reportedly filled with remote workers looking to get out of the house. It’s possible, as the pandemic unfolds, that offices which have returned will have to go remote again. It’s plausible to expect an extended period during which even reopened offices will remain only partially occupied, with most meetings including at least a few participants joining from home.
