I seem to have a lot of trou­ble with ter­mi­no­log­i­cal shifts.

When I was a young com­plex­ol­o­gist, “chaos the­ory” meant some­thing about deter­min­is­tic dynam­i­cal sys­tems. But grad­u­ally the spe­cific field of math­e­mat­i­cal research got pop­u­lar, and stu­pid man­age­ment con­sul­tants (I say this with love) decided they would use the phrase to mean some­thing about touchy-​​feely intu­itive­ness and dinosaurs and more like what they and the Ancient Greeks assumed it meant all along, about dis­rup­tion and meaninglessness.

When I was a young the­o­ret­i­cal biol­o­gist, “com­pu­ta­tional biol­ogy” meant some­thing about agent-​​based mod­els of evo­lu­tion­ary and mol­e­c­u­lar dynam­ics, and explor­ing emer­gence. But cheap com­put­ing resources became avail­able to every­body and their brother, and sud­denly the Peo­ple With Too Many Base Pairs On Hand (I name them with respect) decided they would use the phrase to mean some­thing more about sequence align­ment, and not mul­ti­scale struc­tural biology.

When I was a slightly older com­plex­ol­o­gist, “com­plex sys­tems” went through the same exact bull­shi­ti­za­tion process as “chaos the­ory” did before it. Now, to be frank, it’s just mostly powerlaw-​​bullshit-​​on-​​networks (I say that with no lit­tle bitterness).

Luck­ily, “astro­bi­ol­ogy” doesn’t really have an easy map­ping to busi­ness con­sult­ing, so that one was kind of safe. But—amusingly enough—I didn’t get to do it for very long before the good old Ivy League Cell & Mol­e­c­u­lar Biol­ogy Depart­ment I was work­ing in decided that astro­bi­ol­ogy itself was bull­shit, or at least not Cell & Mol­e­c­u­lar Biol­ogy the way they did it, and they kicked me out. What the heck; turn­about is fair play.

Then there’s “social net­work”, which used to be a bunch of cir­cles and arrows, not a street term for “pri­vacy inva­sion”. There’s “genetic pro­gram­ming”, which became just-​​plain-​​symbolic-​​regression. And “agile soft­ware devel­op­ment”, which used to be about bring­ing value and reduc­ing the risk to devel­op­ers work­ing on soft­ware projects, not speed­ing up prod­uct deliv­ery for their god­damned (and I say that with no love what­so­ever) cor­po­rate man­agers. And “anar­chism”, which only a few peo­ple in the whole damned world still remem­ber means some­thing about being nice to one another because it’s the right thing to do, not throw­ing rocks at cof­fee shops. And “con­ser­vatism”, which you may be sur­prised to learn used to mean some­thing a lot more like “being rea­son­able and tak­ing into account people’s dif­fer­ences”, not being an ass­hole about rich peo­ple get­ting richer. And “Prag­ma­tism”, which isn’t about com­pro­mis­ing your prin­ci­ples for the sake of The Law.

And so on. I’m used to it; I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch. “Skep­ti­cism” for example.

And maybe now “coworking.”

Today we learnt of another cowork­ing busi­ness clos­ing down. And it looks and feels and sounds like the same old process of ter­mi­no­log­i­cal fail­ure to me.

You may not have noticed that I’ve been deeply involved with Workan­tile Exchange in Ann Arbor since before it began. It hasn’t come up much. Mike Kessler is the founder of that busi­ness, but it was a mat­ter of coin­ci­dence that Bar­bara and Laura Fisher and I ran into him after we’d spent more than six months look­ing for an afford­able space for our com­mu­nity of infor­mal col­leagues, and he had spent months build­ing out a won­der­ful com­mer­cial space in down­town Ann Arbor on spec, hop­ing for a com­mu­nity to crop up.

The detailed story’s for another day, but the short ver­sion is salient: From the get-​​go, we under­stood the con­tin­gent real­i­ties of the cowork­ing business.

• You can’t sell jack shit to unem­ployed peo­ple, so don’t expect to make money by “sup­port­ing those tran­si­tion­ing to an inde­pen­dent lifestyle” (aka, “lay­off vic­tims”). Leave that to the gov­ern­ment, and pure non­profit people.
• Peo­ple who think they want a desk and a phone and a mail­box really just want to project an illu­sion of corporate-​​style suc­cess, and thus they don’t want to cowork, they want a bargain-​​basement price on an office lease, and a fuck­ing but­ler (I say this with a whole heap of wry bon­homie). So send those peo­ple to a land­lord so they can learn the prices and hid­den costs of actual real estate, and not merely leech off your cowork­ing space’s lease and lim­ited staff and ser­vice budget.
• Diver­sity of mem­ber­ship reduces the risk to every mem­ber, so don’t try to spe­cial­ize in “mak­ers” or “cre­atives” or “star­tups” and fer­chris­sakes not Realtors.
• 30% of the work­force is an inde­pen­dent. That com­pares to some­thing like 10% that’s a dopey seat-​​of-​​the-​​pants looking-​​for-​​venture-​​capital startup-​​style big-​​E Entre­pre­neur (I say this with love, and the knowl­edge that “entre­pre­neur­ship” is a cog­ni­tive dis­or­der; I myself am a high-​​functioning entre­pre­neur), and besides they don’t want to spend one thin dime, so don’t even bother deal­ing with col­lege kids or the local incubator’s castoffs.
• Most land­lords (but appar­ently not ours, thank good­ness), the Use­less Cham­ber of Com­merce, the local Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment grant-​​givers, the State Gov­ern­ment, the can­di­dates who want to demon­strate their “effec­tive­ness”, the News­pa­per Busi­ness Colum­nist, any­body who thinks of them­selves as an “angel investor”, and for that mat­ter any per­son who has ever watched an unironic hour of Bloomberg Tele­vi­sion? Those peo­ple do not get it. In their world, the only way to make money is to raise prices and offer improved ser­vices until demand tapers off. Cowork­ing is not about quid pro quo, it’s not a zero-​​sum game, it’s not about being a land­lord or find­ing arbi­trary ten­ants or even—this is impor­tant—mak­ing money. You can­not make a profit by run­ning a cowork­ing space.

That last one’s impor­tant. We’re not com­mu­nists, we’re not anti-​​capitalists and we’re not run­ning some kind of pep club. It’s just that we’ve thought about it. You can­not make a profit sell­ing community.

So the ques­tion is: what the hell is “cowork­ing” then? I mean, I’ve dis­qual­i­fied rent­ing desks to peo­ple, and set­ting up offices for inde­pen­dents, and all that other nor­mal stuff. What is it?

It’s com­mu­nity. Not the kind you join because it “offers good oppor­tu­ni­ties for net­work­ing and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment”, but the kind you join because it would be neat.

It’s church. Not the kind where you wor­ship, but the kind you go to for fel­low­ship with peo­ple from diverse back­grounds, but who are in the same essen­tial and exis­ten­tial posi­tion you are: Inde­pen­dent in a world that assumes you have a “job title” and a “boss” and “employer health­care” or you can “send a pur­chase order”.

It’s a club. Not the kind you go for help, but—and I’m sorry if this makes me sound like a super­cil­ious ass­hole—the kind of club you join in order to build a strong bar­rier between you and the Pinks, the Nor­mals, the hoi pol­loi. Though in our case, those hoi pol­loi are often the bosses, the politi­cos, the nom­i­nal movers and shak­ers of the “work­ing world”.

We’re not them. We’re the 30% of the peo­ple who are inde­pen­dent of all that.

That 30% is all over the place. But who­ever it is we actu­ally are, we’re also proud. Of who we are, and of what we’re help­ing to create.

I’m not as full of hot air as nor­mal, here. Dur­ing the first two years of Workan­tile Exchange’s exis­tence, Mike Kessler tried sell­ing desks, and sell­ing mail­boxes, and sub­leases, and startup incu­ba­tion, and non­profit meet­ings, and maker spaces, and all the rest of that stuff. You know what broke every one of those busi­ness mod­els? Those peo­ple don’t want to belong to a com­mu­nity. They want ser­vices, and they want dis­counts.

All this boils down to: sus­tain­able cowork­ing isn’t any­thing to do with office space at all. Any moron can buy a cubi­cle and set it up in her garage or her spare bed­room, and sit there and play My Spe­cial Office when­ever she wants.

It’s not about “work” at all. Real cowork­ing is about the “co-​​” part, about being together. Pride. Like-​​mindedness. About avoid­ing the risks and vicis­si­tudes of sit­ting at work by your­self, not being exposed to the exter­nal­i­ties of real life by your­self, about not rein­vent­ing the wheel by your­self every time a com­puter acts weird or a con­tract gets con­fus­ing or a law­suit pops up or your dog needs a play date or you have too much work.

And (because this comes up) it’s not about being some kind of consensus-​​driven co-​​op, either. We remain inde­pen­dent, or we lose our self-​​definition com­pletely and fall back to being mere ama­teurs with “lifestyle businesses”.

Nope. Cowork­ing is a way of eat­ing entropy. Redi­rect­ing risk using com­mu­nity dynam­ics. If you want to think about it in a con­fronta­tional way, it’s about co-​​opting the same social design patterns—colocation, team for­ma­tion, com­ple­men­tary skillsets, tacit knowl­edge bank­ing, and col­lab­o­ra­tive risk balancing—that cor­po­ra­tions bring to bear against us.

It sad­dens me that I never got a chance to visit Car­rboro Cre­ative Cowork­ing, and it sad­dens me more to see them join the ranks of those who have fallen. But it doesn’t sur­prise me.

We’re weird. We’re prob­a­bly weird enough that we’re wrong in a lot of ways. It’s deathly tir­ing to con­stantly have to explain all this to guests and vis­i­tors and peo­ple look­ing for things we’ve decided not to offer, and just have it bounce off their fore­heads’ Cog­ni­tive Dis­so­nance fields. And as Workan­tile Exchange tran­si­tions from a fail­ing for-​​profit to a sta­ble what-​​the-​​hell-​​who-​​cares-​​about-​​money low-​​profit, maybe we’ll fall by the way­side ourselves.

I don’t think so, though.

We have more than 60 mem­bers right now who are diverse, pow­er­ful, enthu­si­as­tic experts in their fields. We have archi­tects, film­mak­ers, authors, edi­tors, busi­ness devel­op­ment peo­ple, lawyers, activists, traders, pro­gram­mers, graphic design­ers, stu­dents, con­sul­tants, remote employ­ees, mar­keters, and even a dilet­tante or two (like me). We have tequila tast­ings and book fairs, art gallery open­ings and Word­Press Users meet­ings. We have the amaz­ing vol­un­teer con­tri­bu­tions of Trek Glowacki, the hon­ored and respected Mem­ber who’s been work­ing for more than two years as our de facto “com­mu­nity man­ager”, and of Tom Brandt and David Erik Nel­son who (with me) are try­ing to “man­age” us into a new, more rea­son­able busi­ness model. And all the many vol­un­teers among the Con­tribut­ing mem­ber­ship, who have given time to mop and tidy and run events and intro­duce peo­ple to one another, share lunch and talk and offer advice, fill the air with music and chatter.

And tol­er­ate one another. And see value in one another.

Any­body can be wrong. But see: the more dif­fer­ent you all are from one another, the less likely that becomes.

Maybe to suc­ceed in the long term we really do need to spe­cial­ize, and exclu­sively rent desks to dudes who wear iden­ti­cal khakis as they work on the Next Google, or mar­ket more to women entre­pre­neurs whose busi­nesses have been sin­gled out by local eco­nomic devel­op­ment experts as lead­ing the way into the 20^th Cen­tury, or give dis­counts to poor out-​​of-​​work cor­po­rate lay­off vic­tims who need a hand dur­ing their tran­si­tion to this unfa­mil­iar world that has no “work life bal­ance”, which only includes life, with work as a part of that.

Maybe we’re wrong.

Who cares? If this is wrong, it’ll do for now.

Every day it lasts is wonderful.