WeWork: Or the Mak­ing and Break­ing of a $47 Bil­lion Unicorn

In my final week of a temp job a few sum­mers back, the com­pa­ny I was work­ing for moved into a WeWork. There were DJs, a free dance mat in the lob­by, beer on tap, and talk of work­out stu­dios being built on the top floor.

I was so bam­boo­zled by the array of ameni­ties that I seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered apply­ing for a per­ma­nent role, even though the job wasn’t what I want­ed to be doing. I imag­ined a new, glossier life, filled with over­ly-com­pli­cat­ed cof­fee orders and pre-work yoga ses­sions; nev­er mind the fact that caf­feine makes me anx­ious and I strug­gle to exer­cise with­out the moti­va­tion of loud music.

Here­in lies the allure of WeWork. Their slick­ly-out­fit­ted offices seem to have the pow­er to change how we relate to work. They are not just a place to labour, they are also there for social­is­ing, exer­cis­ing and relaxing.

Accord­ing to co-founder Adam Neu­mann this is part of a world-chang­ing rev­o­lu­tion, cen­tring the needs of the work­er and fos­ter­ing a vibrant com­mu­ni­ty. But this blur­ring of the bound­aries between busi­ness and leisure ulti­mate­ly ben­e­fits the employ­ers more than the employed, who end up spend­ing even more time at the office.

While Neu­mann chose not to par­tic­i­pate in WeWork: Or the Mak­ing and Break­ing of a $47 Bil­lion Uni­corn, the use of archive footage allows his voice to be heard. In an ear­ly sequence we see a mon­tage of vague­ly cultish images – a crowd of peo­ple sit­ting on the ground, eyes closed, clasp­ing each oth­ers’ hands – as he tells us of the fail­ures of tech­nol­o­gy in con­nect­ing peo­ple. He’s prone to speak­ing in plat­i­tudes, remark­ing often on the strength of com­mu­ni­ty over indi­vid­u­al­ism (“Take the ​‘me’ and you flip it, you get the ​‘we’…”).

Though the film estab­lish­es Neu­mann as an unre­li­able nar­ra­tor, with a range of for­mer employ­ees and finan­cial experts dis­put­ing his ver­sion of events, his ide­al­is­tic pack­ag­ing of the com­pa­ny as an anti-estab­lish­ment utopia is essen­tial­ly unchal­lenged. No links are made between WeWork’s qua­si-reli­gious fol­low­ing and the prob­lems of a broad­er cul­ture of work­ism, which places career at the cen­tre of people’s lives as not only a means of sur­vival but also a call­ing by which your worth is defined.

Cap­i­tal­ism is at odds with Neumann’s sup­posed human­i­tar­i­an aims, but this con­tra­dic­tion remains large­ly unex­plored. The few astute points ques­tion­ing the finan­cial indus­try as a whole aren’t giv­en the space they deserve. Less than a minute is spent scru­ti­n­is­ing the fact that for CEOs, the thin line between being seen as an errat­ic lia­bil­i­ty and an eccen­tric genius is sim­ply profitability.

The gen­er­al lack of anti-cap­i­tal­ist cri­tique is per­haps unsur­pris­ing giv­en that the film was pro­duced by Forbes Enter­tain­ment, the same com­pa­ny that pub­lish­es Forbes Mag­a­zine who fea­tured Neu­mann on the cov­er in 2017.

The film ulti­mate­ly buys into the dream of WeWork. It accepts the notion that although it became cor­rupt­ed, at its core the com­pa­ny was about human con­nec­tion and cre­at­ing a bet­ter world, rather than just mak­ing mon­ey pro­vid­ing aspi­ra­tional office space.