Forty years prior to COVID-19, Alvin Toffler saw the future of working from home, and it looked very good. In his 1980 best seller, The Third Wave, the futurist author declared that modern economies would soon shift away from the office and toward “the electronic cottage”—a retro-utopian update of the preindustrial days of home work and piece work, now wired to the modern world via desktop computers, faxes, and dial-up modems. “The electronic cottage raises once more on a mass scale the possibility of husbands and wives, and perhaps even children, working together as a unit,” he explained. This arrangement would propel “greater community stability” and “a renaissance among voluntary organizations.”
Fast-forward to the great pandemic and shutdown of 2020, an extraordinary social experiment unfurling at global scale and astounding speed. By June, 42 percent of the American workforce was working from home. The benefits of the new normal became readily apparent—no commutes! comfy sweatpants!—and many relished the slowdown in the relentless pace of 21st-century life. As Toffler predicted, America’s remote-working classes became simultaneously placeless and newly rooted in place, their mental maps shrinking to a few neighborhood blocks, the local grocery, the nearby park.
Yet Toffler’s optimistic, communitarian forecast failed to perceive how this new electronic reality would exact a toll on mental and financial health; split open new fault lines of class, gender, and race; and accelerate a long-brewing social reckoning. Schools and child-care facilities shuttered, leaving working parents, especially mothers, struggling to balance professional and domestic duties. Some had to cut back work hours; others quit their jobs altogether.
Seven months into the pandemic, the US employment statistics reflected the sharp inequalities of COVID’s economic toll, with job losses falling disproportionately on women and people of color.
Many such losses were among those who could not stay home in the first place, on whose labor in grocery stores and Amazon warehouses and meatpacking plants all the comforts of the electronic cottage were dependent.
There already has been a great deal of speculation about the lasting effects of this information-overloaded digital year on work, schooling, and the public realm. As retailers shutter and major corporations announce they will keep workers home for good, it is clear the pandemic has already changed some things permanently. But looking backward to the roots of remote work is equally important. It turns out that these systems were never really designed to benefit the groups that could gain the most from them: working mothers, caretakers, and their children, especially those without easy access to new technology.