The modern coworking space is a marvel of category confusion: it charges the price of an office while delivering the ambiance of an airport lounge. It wraps commercial real estate arbitrage in the language of community, innovation, and — that most debased of words — synergy.
Let us be clear about what a coworking space actually is. A landlord leases a floor of a building at a long-term rate. A coworking operator subleases desks on that floor at a short-term rate, pocketing the spread. The desks come with a coffee machine, a few meeting rooms bookable via app, and a Slack channel where strangers post about their startups. This is presented as a revolution in how we work.
The economics are, to borrow a term from structural engineering, load-bearing nonsense. The operator’s margins depend on keeping occupancy above 85 percent in a product category where tenants can leave on thirty days’ notice. When the cycle turns — and it always turns — the operator is left holding long leases against evaporating demand. We have seen this film. It was called WeWork, and the ending was not ambiguous.
But the deeper objection is not financial. It is aesthetic.
Serious work requires either solitude or the company of people who share your specific problem. A patent attorney drafting claims does not benefit from proximity to someone building a meditation app. A novelist does not write better because a growth hacker is doing a standup meeting at the next table. The collision theory of innovation — the idea that breakthroughs happen when diverse minds bump into each other at the kombucha tap — is a fantasy promoted by people who sell desk space.
The café was the original coworking space, and it was superior in every respect: cheaper, better coffee, natural turnover that prevented anyone from monopolising the electrical outlets, and a complete absence of ping-pong tables. Balzac wrote the Comédie humaine in cafés. Sartre held court at Les Deux Magots. No one needed an app to book a meeting room because the meeting was the café.
What we have lost is not space but judgment — the capacity to distinguish between environments that foster work and environments that merely look like work is happening.