In a world that re-evaluates coal, buys up gas, starts looking for oil again, thinks back to nuclear power, there is the most acclaimed innovator of our time, Elon Musk, ban smart working. It has its own coherence.
We entered the pandemic by telling us that nothing would be the same “because the world before was the problem”(Quote from a wall in Madrid); and we’re dating a dangerous war on the doorstepskyrocketing inflation, a widespread sense of insecurity and an irresistible nostalgia.
It was better before. Best when we didn’t know, or didn’t want to know that climate change was a threat to humanity. Before when the digital had not yet shown us its potential and the work was only in the office, stamping a ticket, drowned in paperwork, within reach of the scream of the boss; because, to ban trust, merit, talent: I bought your time. You are mine.
It’s not a isolated thinking that of Elon Musk, in Italy for example the email to Tesla employees was preceded several months by the exits of the Minister of Public Administration Renato Brunetta for whom the end of smart working was equivalent to the end of the period in which we pretended to work. An injustice as well as a claim not supported by any scientific evidence. Una fake newsto put it in a common term.
But in Musk’s case it can’t be said that he doesn’t know what we’re talking about. That he does not know the technology, that he has not seen and appreciated the advantages for all of one different conception of work. The first: an increase in productivity.
So? How to explain such a primitive exit? In one way only: we have emerged from the tunnel of the pandemic to enter the black hole of the economic crisis. We are afraid of the future. It was better before.