Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  Copyright © 2014 by Nikil Saval

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Portions of this book appeared in different form as “Birth of the Office” in n +1, issue 6 (Winter 2008).

  Jacket design by Oliver Munday

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Saval, Nikil.

  Cubed : a secret history of the workplace / Nikil Saval.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Offices—History. 2. Clerks—History. 3. Office management—History. 4. Office layout—History. 5. Office buildings—History. I. Title.

  HF5547.S336 2014

  651.09—dc23 2013037635

  ISBN 978-0-385-53657-8 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-385-53658-5 (eBook)

  v3.1_r1

  | For Shannon |

  I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils …

  —Theodore Roethke, “Dolor”

  ESTEEMED GENTLEMEN,

  I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip …

  —Robert Walser, “The Job Application”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1

  The Clerking Class

  2

  The Birth of the Office

  3

  The White-Blouse Revolution

  4

  Up the Skyscraper

  5

  Organization Men and Women

  6

  Open Plans

  7

  Space Invaders

  8

  The Office of the Future

  9

  The Office and Its Ends

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  Because the footage comes from a security cam, the images are grainy and silent, the perspective fixed. We are in a recognizable scene: a cubicle farm, with workers crammed next to each other, all staring at their computers, in a tiny, fluorescent-lit space. A man in a shirt and tie sits at his desk while a co-worker crouching next to him collects papers from a file cabinet. Time passes with little else happening until the crouching man suddenly grabs the sheaf of papers and hurls it at his colleague. The colleague backs away as the man lifts up his hulking computer monitor—a cathode ray behemoth from another time—to send it careening to the next cubicle over, where it crashes into the corner of a desk before tumbling to the floor, exhaling smoke. With self-possession and eerie calm, the man collects more papers from the floor before aiming and snapping his arm as he slingshots them at transfixed colleagues farther away, the pile fluttering into the air like oversized confetti. He gets up on a desk and begins kicking at the thin partitions that grid the room, bending them out of shape. Two co-workers hiding behind a corner record the scene with cell phone cameras as the man, prowling the room, lithe and balletic in his rage, secures a large stick from behind a desk and quickly lights into the copy machine. At last one of the other employees works up the temerity to grab the stick from him and wrestle him down to the ground. Disarmed, pinned to the carpet, he is incapacitated by a Taser. In the last images, we see him fetal, writhing, clawing at his stomach, his collar, his tie.

  “Security Cam Footage of Cubicle Rage to the Extreme Is Every Cube Dweller’s Fantasy,” read the Gizmodo post from June 2008 linking to the video. Over time, as the original footage went viral, one of the cell phone cameramen would post his video too: with sound and color, it better conveyed the sickly, toothpaste green of the walls, the shrieks of the onlookers amid the flurry of white papers, and the pain and exhilaration of the man in the last minutes of his revolt. Yet nothing could top the original security-cam video for its panoptic view of the office from above: how recognizably cramped it looked; how obvious were the conditions and potential for this rage. “This dude rocks,” ran the first comment. “He really knows how to live. His cellmates should’ve joined in the rebellion.” Inevitably, after it had been viewed millions of times, some would charge that the video was fake (who doesn’t have a flat-screen LCD monitor these days?), but, authentic or not, the video struck a nerve. Common among the sentiments, whether pro or con, was this, from a blogger: “Deep down every employee wants it to be real.”

  In 1997 Steelcase surveyed cube dwellers and found that 93 percent of them would prefer a different workspace. A 2013 study from two University of Sydney researchers indicates that little has changed: the cube-ists (about 60 percent of office workers) expressed the highest rates of unhappiness with their work setup. (People with closed doors were unsurprisingly the most satisfied of the bunch.) This dissatisfaction with office spaces and office life more generally—the myriad aggravations, small ironies, larger defeats, and modest victories—has been seeping into the broader culture for years. In the film Office Space, a trio of disgruntled tech employees take out their frustration at their company’s downsizing by annihilating the office printer with baseball bats and dropkicks. (You can find dozens of amateur remakes on YouTube.) In the novels Personal Days by Ed Park and Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, proper e-mail etiquette becomes the subject of quasi-academic debate, and the highlight of a typical day is discovering that free bagels have been left over from a breakfast meeting. Both novels are narrated by an impersonal “we,” the better to capture the passive conformism and bland anonymity of the contemporary white-collar landscape. The original British version of The Office (now remade in the United States, France, Germany, Quebec, Israel, and Chile, with Swedish and Chinese versions in the works) had one character torment the other by encasing his stapler in a Jell-O mold. Meanwhile, the Danish author Christian Jungersen’s worldwide best seller The Exception took the concept of “office politics” to the extreme by having office workers seem to plot against and murder each other.

  Destroying the printer of oppression in Office Space (1999). Photofest

  Above all, of course, we’ve had Dilbert, a comic strip that converted fungible dullness into concise, portable office satire. Appropriately enough, the original Dilbert comic grew into a small franchise, which soon became a cliché fixture of the very office environment that it satirized so well, with ubiquitous desk calendars, coffee mugs, mouse pads, and plush toys (all available in the online store’s “Cubeware” section). As bleak as Dilbert sometimes was, running through all of it was a simple, even humanist sentiment, most succinctly expressed by one of the characters in Office Space: “Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day.”

  Or you might take a cue from Rousseau: Man is born free, but he is everywhere in cubicles.

  Happiness has no history, says Balzac; neither does the office. “The white-collar people slipped quietly into modern society,” wrote the sociologist C. Wright Mills, and the office that housed them appeared with reticence as well. Other workplaces, like the factory, entered clanging and whistling; the office was typically demure. By the middle of the twentieth century, when Mills was writing his b
ook White Collar—to this day, the only comprehensive treatment of the subject—men and women who worked in offices were on the verge of constituting a majority of the American population. But where the office came from has remained a mystery—too banal, perhaps, to be felt worthy of serious inquiry.

  People first began to notice offices in the middle of the nineteenth century, when such spaces were first called countinghouses—virtually indistinguishable from the Italian merchants’ offices of centuries ago. These were small, cozy—or certainly small. “The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters.” A sort of tank, where men entered in the prime of health and exited shrunken and phthisic; where so much activity took place, but only paper seemed to be produced. From the outset, the office was considered unworthy of its own appointed tasks. Business was noble, exciting even: one could risk, venture, thrive, and grow prosperous.

  The office, meanwhile, was weak, empty, and above all boring. If business took place in the office, it was a dry, husky business. And yet it was this boredom, this tedious respectability, that made the office the forging ground for a twentieth-century discourse that has proved indispensable: the rhetoric of the middle class, and the promise of upward mobility. The clerk in his dismal cell might one day rise up to the top; the accountant marooned out in the snake pit of the data-processing pool could, with pluck, become the president of his company; the drone in the cubicle could code his way into the boardroom. No other workplace, no matter how degraded, has been such a constant source of hope about the future of work and the guarantee of a stable, respectable life.

  In other words, offices were never meant to be icons of tedium. In fact, since the early twentieth century, the office has been the source of some of the most utopian ideas and sentiments about American working life. From their very origins at the beginning of the twentieth century, when they began to expand as administrative centers to ever larger Gilded Age businesses, offices offered a potential refuge from that other icon of tedium, the factory. Visionary architects like Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright designed offices that hummed with the efficiency and regularity of an assembly line but with less physical danger and manual hardship and, therefore, more social prestige. By the 1950s, it was possible for an entry-level employee to imagine himself (and, considerably less often, herself) rising through the ranks, taking on more tasks and counting beneath him ever more subordinates.

  Few jobs rivaled in prestige and symbolic power that of white-collar workers in mid-twentieth-century America. The structures that housed them—like the Lever House and the Seagram Building—would be among the most iconic buildings of the century. In the 1960s, management theorists began to imagine new kinds of office workers who, aided by technological advances in computing, would become “knowledge workers”—highly educated, creative white-collar professionals who would be paid to think. Office design theorists tried to house this new kind of worker with a bewildering number of designs, from the German Bürolandschaft (“office landscape”), which tried to make indoor offices cohere with the ebb and flow of paperwork, to Robert Propst’s Action Office, which consisted of shiftable, modular walls for the active, hard-thinking office worker of the future. The 1990s witnessed yet more office utopianism, fueled by the perfervid fantasies of the dot-com bubble: offices that were miniature cities, offices equipped with bowling alleys, offices as big as college campuses, offices as small and as comfortable as your tricked-up garage or rec room. With better telecommuting technologies in the first decade of the twenty-first century and beyond, designers and theorists began to glimpse the end of the physical office itself, to be replaced by an invisible and ubiquitous office of networkers in cafés and living rooms who attend the virtual meetings of a company nominally based in Bombay while they lounge in New Canaan in their pajamas.

  Look closer, though, and the picture gets grimmer. Transposing the factory model to the office turned white-collar work into numbing, repetitive labor. The mid-century middle manager began to feel himself as spiritually trapped—an “organization man,” his soul made captive to his company. Soon after joining the workforce, women were often assigned to administrative or secretarial roles from which it was impossible to rise, and they faced a double subordination in sexual harassment. The offices themselves began to be reproduced endlessly: for every elegant Seagram Building, there were ten more soulless modular knockoffs, their interiors lacking in human warmth. Honest attempts to fix these problems produced more problems: the German “office landscape” was chaotic and inhospitable to concentration. Robert Propst’s Action Office would be perverted over the years into the most notorious symbol of the American office world: the cubicle. Even the crazy dot-com offices would be remembered not for their architectural utopianism but for the crazy hours their denizens worked: “white-collar sweatshops,” many began to call them. Meanwhile, the burgeoning café life of the freelancer is a reality for many, but it comes with persistent financial insecurity, no benefits, and a relatively asocial work environment. In short, the story of white-collar work hinges on promises of freedom and uplift that have routinely been betrayed.

  Why have the best intentions of planners and architects, designers and executives, fallen short of producing a happy environment for the American worker? And among the rare instances of successful offices, what about them works so well? Why has the allure of office life (so prestigious on the face of it) consistently proved to be so elusive or disappointing, from the earliest days of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” to the baseball-bat-wielding dudes from Office Space? How have the compromises and changes made inside the office come to affect the world outside it?

  Cubed talks about design and history, and it speaks through faceless, unnamed workers, and sometimes the typewriters and file cabinets they used and the chairs they sat in. But it also chronicles the history of individuals who sought to shape the office, whether physically or socially—often with the aim of bettering the lives of individuals within it and usually achieving something far from what they intended. It is a history from the perspective of the people who felt these changes from their desks.

  This book is inspired by and is an homage to C. Wright Mills’s White Collar, a dyspeptic and classic work about the nonmanual worker at mid-century. Though I don’t discuss this book in detail, its influence and ideas are everywhere. There are differences, of course, in the method: Mills’s work was sociology, or at least his own, highly subjective brand of it. This book is a social history, mixed with some journalism and, toward the end, some stabs at futurology. Moreover, Mills’s term “white collar” is at once more expansive and more vague than “the office,” referring, as he does, to professors and salesmen, doctors and military generals, alongside clerks and stenographers. By restricting my view to the office, I omit many of the larger questions about professionals and politics that he describes; or those questions come up more indirectly. Here history is glimpsed through the office—through the feelings and attitudes of those who worked in offices over the decades, as well as those who tried to impose a vision on what office workers could do, and what their work should be like.1

  White Collar came out in 1951, when white-collar workers constituted just under half of the workforce. They were an emerging group whom most observers saw as replacing the old middle class of artisans and small shopkeepers—their salient characteristics had to be defined, and their politics and outlook on life remained amorphous. Mills’s portrait was scathing: he saw white-collar people as “little men,” or autonomous followers, people who felt themselves to be independent, entrepreneurial, even when they were enslaved to large companies. Though their work was becoming just as routinized as factory labor, the intangible aspects of their job—prestige, high status—rendered them immune to the idea that they belonged to a particular class with particular interests. Their politics were up for grabs. “Of what bloc or movement will they be most likely to stay a
t the tail?” he wrote. “And the answer is, The bloc or movement that most obviously seems to be winning.”2 He was right to see the self-understanding of white-collar workers as highly subject to vague categories like prestige. And the social features of the workplace he described have remained: the office as a place of glad-handing and vacuous sociability, alongside tedious, numbing work and individual isolation.

  Mills argued his case as if the entire white-collar workforce could be seen as a new middle class, and therefore could be viewed as constituting a single bloc. But the history of office work betrays less solidity than that. Few things ever remained fixed about the office, or outside the realm of contestation, least of all the understanding that office workers had of themselves, and what their life chances were. Subjecting Mills’s synoptic portrait of the office to the claims of history reveals ideologies and classes being made and unmade, along with fundamental notions of how and why we work.

  Nor could Mills have quite realized what the world would look like when the office was not just another workplace, alongside the store and the factory, but the signature of an advanced industrial society. When the German journalist Siegfried Kracauer visited Berlin in the 1920s, he was astonished by how much the city seemed to be characterized by an “employee culture,” how overrun it was by salaried office workers. In what American city now—or indeed any European city—would this be a startling observation? The culture of the office has become the dominant workplace culture of the country; the United States is a nation of clerks. Cubed is the history of how this came to be, and an analysis of what it has meant and might mean in the future.

  1

  THE CLERKING CLASS

  The torn coat sleeve to the table. The steel pen to the ink. Write! Write! Be it truth or fable. Words! Words! Clerks never think.