Given I work in the IT industry it’s been possible for me to work from home since the late 1990’s and it has gotten easier as Internet speed and capacities have increased, as well as the increased automation of many company systems.

But even as my kids grew up I found that it wasn’t as great as it sounded. There were simply too many distractions, even with my own office, and in any case, I enjoyed seeing people and working in the place that I was trying to improve.

Now if your job consists of only shuffling paper and this all moves online then in theory you could be just as productive from home. I (and many others in IT) speculated from early in the Internet Age as to what the tipping point might be to trigger a whole-scale shift. I figured it would be something like a war, such as when WWII massively accelerated technologies that had been cooking along in the 1930’s, like rocketry, radar and nuclear power.

That’s basically what happened with the C-19 pandemic. For the first time in human history we could send people home from their workplaces and still get much the same work done. Not all of it of course, the physical jobs of production and service, the trades and such, are simply not online work and are essential to making our civilisation run – and it was that type of work that got crushed by the paper shufflers because they set the rules and could live by them.

However, there have been growing concerns in both the private and public sectors that work-from-home hasn’t been as productive as it was thought to be, likely for a variety of reasons to so with distractions, the productivity of physically seeing and interacting with others, and in some cases outright laziness.

Hence the increasing calls from CEOs for employees to get back into the office, those calls growing more demanding the further we move away from the Great Chinese Lung Rot Scare.

There has been resistance and thus people being fired. Naturally it’s the government that has lagged the most, but it has never been as vividly portrayed as in the following piece of video from the new head of the US Small Business Administration (SBA), Kelly Loeffler, as she walked through their Washington D.C. headquarters on the Friday afternoon after being confirmed by the Senate.

I wonder what we’d see if a similar video tour was conducted in Wellington?

What we won’t see is a message like this….

And the result!

But at least one sensible response from a government employee has been spotted: I can only assume he’s new to that world.

Ultimately a lot of these departments should be shut down but since Congress set them up it’s their responsibility; Trump and Musk can’t do it – although firing a lot of their “workers” and stopping them spending the money Congress has handed to them (a fight soon coming over that via the 1974 Impoundment Act) might have the same effect. If any of these workers wants to know what’s coming they need only watch the following and note that Musk fully supports these proposals from Milton Friedman.