My last entry was ripping on the WeWork experience, I wasn’t expecting their business to be extinct a few months later. They can put up shower curtains between the coffee stations, its still not a place I ever want to find myself.

Washington, DC is a weird place of late. The morning commute rush is gone, the trains I once fought for space on a rainy Thursday afternoon are virtually empty. The Capitol is under armed military occupation and razor wire. Busking has ceased entirely. Today you might walk past a row of people living in tents to have a romantic dinner inside a different tent on the same sidewalk.

What’s left is the feeling of living within a husk of your former life. The untouched rack of business casual clothing, way too much plaid. I found a movie ticket in my coat pocket. Theaters apparently were showing movies last year, though I can’t meaningfully construct any timeline of 2020. Last year never ended and we’ll be stuck with the same 9/11 safety themed theatrics for the foreseeable future, which basically means f o r e v e r. We’ve found the atomic button for enacting nonsensical public policy and it will be smashed into oblivion.

This experience has just made me yearn to live a more remote existence. City life is dead, I just want to be among trees and the terrifying indifference of nature.

First, they lure you in with free coffee and bottomless wifi.

Working in a Wework is a lot like officing out of a Starbucks. In fact, there is no discernible difference that I can think of. There’s a large population of temporary inhabitants, a few funkily decorated yet disgusting bathrooms, and a massively unacknowledged security problem. In the case of Starbucks, the security problem is your laptop being absconded while using the bathroom. At Wework, the wifi password is literally password, there is NO security. Most “technology” companies would be deeply ashamed and instantly discredited by such an oversight, but Wework is NOT a tech company. Wework is a coffee shop with a subscription model.

It’s not surprising to see Wework’s valuation tank before its IPO. Look at any other commercial real estate company, there are dozens with more physical assets than Wework, and virtually none with a $50b valuation. I know, “Wework is a technology company”, and I can tell you first hand that their “technology” is a keycard. This card enables you to enter the building, and a sister application helps book meeting rooms. So they have the same groundbreaking technology as a community yoga studio. Thrilling!

Wework puts up signs all over the building to remind you that Wework is “a platform for creators”. Just as they loosely defined themselves as a tech company, Wework is equally stretching with the word “platform”. Looking to create something inside Wework? You might as well do it outside on the street. There is not a shred of privacy to be had. The meeting room walls are paper thin, and any weirdo can see into your meeting and your ideas all over the whiteboard. Creating anything other than a spreadsheet? You are out of luck! There isn’t a room in the building suitable for filming or recording audio.

Wework’s cleaning staff is given a key to your space, and while it is nice to come in every morning to clean windows, it is less nice to show up on Monday to find your suite completely unlocked with tens of thousands of dollars of equipment left for anyone to walk in and take. I don’t actually want to disparage the cleaning staff though, they are honestly the hardest working people in the entire building.

So if you are in the market for a noisy office with no privacy or space to make anything that you could not just as easily make on your couch at home, boy I have got just the place for you.

UPDATE: Here’s a real email they sent about how WeWork furniture is literally toxic:

Hi Brian,

We have an important update to share regarding phone booths at your WeWork location:

We are taking a number of phone booths at your location out of service due to potentially elevated levels of formaldehyde caused by the manufacturer.

After a member informed us of odor and eye irritation, WeWork performed an analysis, including having an outside consultant conduct a series of tests on a sampling of phone booths. Upon receiving results late last week, we began to take all potentially impacted phone booths out of service.

Part of the magic of Siskel and Ebert, was that Ebert judged movies for their intended audience. Siskel would quip “Parents will be bored to death by this movie” before Ebert would point out that the movie is made to entertain toddlers. Thus Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is held to a different standard than The King’s Speech, despite employing the same thumbs up / thumbs down rating system. There are plenty of movies that are admittedly not made for me. The Fast and The Furious? No thanks. Brooklyn? Turned it off after fifteen minutes. I don’t bother critiquing them beyond admitting I didn’t watch. I generally try to keep my expectations for movies non-existent, so I’m either pleasantly surprised or totally apathetic.

My main gripe about movies in their current form, beyond the fact that most of them are unwatchable marketing vehicles, is that they aren’t about story at all, and are entirely judged on messaging and virtue signaling. I don’t care what John McClane’s character represents about masculinity in an intersectionalist context. It only matters to me that his actions serve the plot and his character develops somewhat over 100 minutes. There is a legitimate argument about representation to be made, but it is a larger symptom of casting and the financial risk of sinking millions of dollars behind a name no one recognizes. The worst way to combat this problem in my opinion, is to double down on the franchise model and make racial or gender specific versions of movies that already exist. Do we need an all women version of Ocean’s 11? Why does it need to exist in the same universe, no one doubts that women can be sophisticated criminals. If one changed three names in Ocean’s 8 it could exist instead on its own merit. Ghostbusters might be a little tougher, but it could still be it’s own movie if it wanted to be.

I had no desire to see Booksmart. The previews boasted a half-assed Apatow modern comedy, with lots of gratuitous, slow-motion party shots. When I read a glowing review, four stars on Ebert’s own website, I thought maybe it would be worth checking out. I could barely find a seat in DC, every theater was almost completely sold out this weekend. It felt like a sign. As it turns out the movie is Superbad!, recast with female characters, but instead of aspiring towards modern classic, it hits somewhere near Neighbors 2: Sorority Uprising. Another unnecessary, female-skewed remake.

Booksmart has no heart. It’s two Gilmore Girls spin off characters spitting witty dialogue at lightning speed trying to get to a party. I hesitate to call them characters, because all we really know about them is that they are nerds. They have no redeeming qualities beyond their grades. The other kids at school are mean to them because they don’t party. One of them is a lesbian, though its the sidekick because making the main character gay would be perhaps too intersectional? Her strict, religious parents are totally cool with it for some reason, leading to no conflict whatsoever. The other kids at the school don’t seem to give her any trouble either, so it has no real impact on the story other than being a mundane detail. The main character is overweight and conventionally unattractive, though no one in the movie criticizes her appearance in the slightest. Despite these traits which could lead to some interesting character development, it is not mentioned to signal that people should more accepting of others. What a wonderful lesson.

The characters are let off easy. This has the effect of making them less likable because we don’t see them overcome their situation and be real people. Instead we are supposed to like these girls because the sidekick is spending her gap year before college “making tampons in Botswana”. While that’s a funny scenario in premise, it doesn’t serve the story other than to completely rehash the conflict from Superbad! where Seth finds out Evan will not be rooming with him next year. At one point, the girls are dosed with “Asian iowaska” (whatever that is) and the trip lasts about 40 seconds. God forbid something actually happen to these two precious angels.

It’s really impossible to not compare this movie to Superbad! But where Superbad! is a spiral notebook overflowing with imaginative, phallic art, Booksmart is but a crude, stickman’s dick. It doesn’t share the heart of Lady Bird, and it offers the audience nothing new.

I got off Facebook about 8 years ago. I’d hoped it would be completely irrelevant by now, and market forces would simply MySpace it to death. The only conscionable reason to be on Facebook is to maintain sexual activity in college. College students aren’t even on Facebook anymore. Demographics aside, the UX is a nightmare. A sea of whitespace and blue text, but without the purposeful Craigslist-esque minimalism. Now the government wants to break it up because it is a “monopoly”. Great idea! We know our government has performed miracles in regulating telecoms, which has allowed us to sail past our competitors in the telecom space all the way to #1(0)!!!!

There are countless non-arguments to be made against Facebook. “They take our data!” would be good, except that you give it to them carte-blanche. “Fake news!!!” would be another, except that you readily spread that news without taking a second to fact check. “Terrorism!!!” wow, what are you doing on Facebook? The reason Facebook still exists, is because you want it to. You want someone to digest all the news in the world and feed it to you while you sit on the toilet every morning. Except that, it’s not news, and the algorithms feeding your insatiable appetite know how to keep you mindlessly scrolling and arguing with strangers. The cybernetic, tiny-handed mannequin controlling the whole thing really wants you to believe they are trying.

People are still on Facebook because it has replaced the AOL welcome screen. We don’t need old-school ISP’s to aggregate news and chat and email for us, but it turns out some people really want a stupid dashboard to guide them through the internet, even if it guides them directly into hell. It’s just an easy place to share baby pictures. Have you tried sending them to your family directly? MMS is practically free.

A large facet of Instagram’s early success (before being Zucked up), was that it was a way to keep tabs on your friends without having to ingest their terrible, idealistic, internet politics. The gram since has morphed into the dystopian future of consumer product marketing. This is still better than what Facebook itself has become, though admittedly it makes users miserable. It’s not a new problem, as it is the same complaint people have made previously against using unattainably beautiful models in ad campaigns.

Instead of breaking up Zuckerberg’s personal pages for college nerds, and giving the federal government even more control over our lives, just quit. The massive user base is the only thing that makes this chili-bowl-haircut of a business profitable. If the users leave, Facebook will be done and we can all go back to the satisfying bliss of ignoring one another online. At least on AOL we had enough sense to go by an alias. The worst thing we ever did as a species was be ourselves online.