RTO for giants is a must because they die without the office. Offices are the last meaningful dense-city economical activity, if you cut them there is no more economical reason for dense cities. With dying dense cities the service industry will collapse because if you live in a single family home it's unlikely you buy from Just Eat or get an Uber car, similarly if you WFH you unlikely buy trendy business dress, shiny mobile bugs/smart-devices and so on, you also do not see physical ads, witch are shop windows, by commuting by feet downtown.
Essentially if we WFH for all eligible jobs we re-create a SMEs economy killing the giants, a thing very positive for the middle class and the society at a whole but certainly not something the big of finance capitalism want.
> Offices are the last meaningful dense-city economical activity
Yup. there's no other money that gets spent by people living in a city. No cafes or stores of any kind or theaters or nightclubs or anything. we should all just pack it up and go off into the wilderness. there's no reason why people want to live conveniently near other people.
some people aren't city people, and some people are. trying to forecast, thinking that everyone's just like you isn't a winning strategy.
Of course there are many ancillary activities that could exists outside dense cities as well, because hey, if you like a restaurant you like it both in a big city, a small village and in isolate countryside. What's change outside the city is that you typically know the restaurants around by name, so you call them directly not ordering food via some apps. Such restaurants tend to be familiar activities not large enterprises owning many identical places in the world. You also need dentists both in the city and outside, the sole difference is that instead of having 100 dentists in a small area you have one per small village (for instance) but the number of people needed them does not change, so their business does not change much. Long story short ALL business existing in a city can exists outside except those of big actors who need the city scale to exists.
> there's no reason why people want to live conveniently near other people.
I've left the big city for the Alps and well... I have MUCH more social life now than in the city, simply because being spread means being much less choosy, so instead of isolated ourselves in a bubble of few friends ignoring the rest of the crowd, we almost all meet almost anyone else. Instead of going together somewhere to consume a service like going to a shopping mall you go together in nature or in some friends home for a home party. A much more social activity alone.
> some people aren't city people, and some people are. trying to forecast, thinking that everyone's just like you isn't a winning strategy.
That's not the point, the point is IF the modern city is sustainable and my answer is no. We can't evolve it, there is no green new deal future for dense cities, while there is a foreseeable future of crescent poverty, issues, unrest and so on. Personally I dream a starship to travel the universe, but it doesn't matter because I can't have it. The point is what we have and what we can or can't have. Giants need the city, but we can't have it in the modern time, so giants will disastrously fall in a decade or so, probably with a world war in the middle, because current economical model can't keep up. Current society can't keep up.
Believe it or not, once you start hanging around in management circles, you'll learn there are modes of communication that despite not involving direct exchanging of words between two individuals, nevertheless, conveys information. In fact, people are selected for the management class many times for their lack of acknowledgement of said mechanisms, as it gives everyone else the cover they need to play ignorant when, having toyed with the levers of power causing something bad to happen, they can play the ignorance card.
So no. They are not asserting that everyone has a secret meeting at midnight. They are pointing out the incentives and dependencies that lead to a pathological state; one that creates a hell of a pot of institutionsl inertia against a WFH paradigm shift.
I think not, there are some official meetings, like those hosted by the WEF, casually renamed https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org to be a bit more modest but there is no special need to meet someone like you to understand your common interests. If you are a blacksmith you know your "cohort" interests without the need to meet some competitor/colleagues. You might occasionally meet them anyway, for lobbying, for a common cause (like the farmers against John Deere for the right to repair their tractors, or to be more precise the tractors they have bought but they do not really own anyway), some meetings might be public, some others behind closed doors, but the common interests of a category are well known by all belonging to that category.
The cohort who seems unable to understand it's own common interests are the 99% of the people who apparently, as usual, fails to see where are their enemy and their potential allies, regularly fighting against their own interests...
I suggest if you have a bit of patience an old book from 1841 by Clinton Roosevelt, The Science Of Government, Founded On Natural Law, it's strange at first bug get clear quickly and it's very fast to read: https://dn790002.ca.archive.org/0/items/sciencegovernme00roo... try and you'll see in a succinct and crystal clear the TODAY world, economy, with anything we have. Another good reading would be Eduard Bernays Propaganda and to complete the game a bit of modern network theory like some Albert-László Barabási.
Sorry, something was probably lost in interpretation. You wrote:
> RTO for giants is a must because they die without the office.
Are you referring to tech giants here? That's what the thread was about I believe (interviewing for tech roles, at least). Just to make sure - you are not including Starbucks here.
> Offices are the last meaningful /.../ [stuff that I probably agree with] /.../
> Essentially if we WFH for all eligible jobs we re-create a SMEs economy killing the giants
This is what sounded like conspiracy to me. Would RTO due to "saving Starbucks" really be an argument line that Apple pursues?
In particular, because they are the most impacted, but it's still valid for all big financial actors starting from real estate.
> This is what sounded like conspiracy to me.
A conspiracy typically is made by some who want to overthrow and substitute a power not by the those who rules against their subjects, that's instead called political agenda. As opposite to a conspiracy it's mostly public, the "sharing economy" is described everywhere, the industrie 4.0 is even a book (more than one), and so on. The agenda can be described simply as "you'll own nothing" where the "you" part means those who pronounce such sentence count to own anything and "rent" anything. In the IT world the cloud+mobile "the sole integrated platform" (actually not at all, but that's what advertised) have already "users" who own essentially nothing and very few giant owners, big enough to steer the IT world simply with their developments, in the physical world it's slowly happen "hey, try our new shiny autonomous taxis", "you do not need a car, just use our app and a car will arrive to bring you whatever you want", obviously the toward-rent trends in cities for both commercial and personal real estate that obviously does not fit much in a spread society, the ready made food downtown for the commuters instead of eating at home what personally prepared, to the point many new city "goshiwon alike" condos have essentially no kitchen but just a small fridge for bottled drinks and something to quickly heat already made food, no dishwasher, common washing machines with some kind of card-based auth to use in the condo basement and so on even "smart locks" for apartments and main entries. It's definitively NOT a conspiracy since it happen under plain Sun light publicly advertised as a good and needed evolution.
But it's not that easy to made people owning nothing, accepting things like abolish the concept of inheritance (a relatively recent PR trend, with some famous testimonials) before, stating that anyone should start with his own arms in an open arena, now stating that successions taxes should exists and be higher and higher, selling "property rights" time limited at 99-years and so on. Remote work is the rock in a running mechanism, because if it spread it obviously push most remote workers outside the expensive, degrading and chaotic city, and actually in the western world potential remote workers are a very BIG slice of the population, also a wealthy and acculturated slice. So the obvious political need is to stop it or the entire big actors common interest informal agenda will derail.
Essentially if we WFH for all eligible jobs we re-create a SMEs economy killing the giants, a thing very positive for the middle class and the society at a whole but certainly not something the big of finance capitalism want.