Across the world, so long all roads lead to downtowns, forcing over billion cars to go spinning in and out daily causing climate change as office workers are struggling daily in a two-way-entry and exit via traffic jams in perpetuity, these century old models no longer sustainable.
As an inhumane model of cubicle slavery this billion-car-rat-race of gas-guzzling frenzy, now an alarm bell to the Human Resource Management across 10,000 cites to eliminate corner offices and issue hammocks. Time to revisit, office-less productivity, no matter how remote, how virtually accessible, so long superior value delivered via rested minds and not by the already exhausted water-cooler-huggers or mad-max-survivors.
Flat dwellings at centers of the city earned their image supremacy over centuries to become sizzling downtowns, elevators added floors, high speed created skyscrapers. Nevertheless, tall concrete jungles, plotted on ancient jigsaw puzzles of narrow streets, mostly build way before modern technologies. In other words, there would be no downtowns today, if our modern technologies ever existed centuries ago. Let us go downtown…
The Scaling of Skyscrapers by Corporate King Kongs
“Ever since business barons created empires in need of distinct name identities, a new corporate nomenclature emerged, the power of image supremacy of iconic status prioritized as top of the boardroom agenda, altering city landscapes every other decade during the last century. Back in the 1900, during Print Society, when printed word was power, literacy required, when all corporations were all huge industrial complexes, period. Small business undefined. Simple long names were required, as ‘National Pipeline Manufacturing & Petroleum Refinery Distribution’; stringing long names and mile long factories was power.
Corporate Names of businesses were excessively long designed to fit the very long walls; a call of the time, like, Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing, Radio Corporation of America or International Business Machines as they looked powerful, when each single gigantic letter on the entire side of the wall of the plant displayed in perspective. This is when VIP customers entered such factories in their prestigious chauffeured driven sedan cars, slowly advanced passing huge letters painted over many thousand feet long walls, impressed by the full-length power of the corporate name. This was a power play of the period. There was neither Radio nor TCV, so no Radio ads, no TV ads; just mile long factories and mile long corporate names.
Suddenly, the elevators arrived, the craze of Telescoping of corporate names started, mighty names shrank to 3M, RCA, IBM, now they wanted 20-40 feet high neon signs lit on the rooftop floors. The CEOs wanted the cinematic on-again and off-again color reflections bouncing back inside the boardrooms on the top floor as a super impressive gesture and often met VIPs at the top floor of the building with gigantic letters as backdrop for photo-ops.
The adrenaline shots of the period during corporate power play were flying experiences in a twin-propeller-engine Airline of the period came when circling downtown at evening dusk when cities as if shiny jewels highlighted the skyscrapers with few brightly lit gigantic signage on the top floors the pulsating heart rate of CEOs approved bonuses.
This was the age when people counting floors marched downtown. Later the towers became far too high to read the icons, too many business names and too many towers exploded. The new CEO stock options changed the mood for important backroom dramas. Windows permanently shuttered to avoid personal emotional exuberance displayed as somersault exits from the windows after goofy corporate maneuvers.
Later on the trend of buying rights to naming Sports Stadium started. Only less than 1% of corporations were able to acquire such iconic status. The public looked up in shock and awe.” Excerpted from Naming for Power, Naseem Javed, 1993, ‘Linkbridge Publishing’, and ‘Global Lecture Series on Corporate Nomenclature”
Suddenly came the buzz of Silicon Valley, miniaturization and replication exploded and removed single hierarchical skyscrapers and spread them across the nation or world. This is when debt burdened citizens learned to walk with heads down, now further fortified as the new posture of the cyber age, and glued to mobile devices.
Suddenly, new millennia arrived, and today, kicking the door behind shut; now enter Covid-19 with a smirk. Elimination of billions workers forced to climb the termite hills every day while global leadership still singing hymns to the combustion engine of car as a celestial monolith from outer space, so long the downtown remains main magnets of office work for the city the Godzilla footprint of carbon will do rest of the damage. Climate change demands new thinking and while scaling of the corporate King Kong is already a dead idea; the cemented needles need a new role in the economic mix.
Suddenly, futurism is workless; mind is the new measurement of national productivity, mobilization of national entrepreneurial-mind-set is the national wealth although recognized neither at the accountancy-mindset nor at bureaucratic-mindset. With knowledge available like free ocean to jump in, who will need business education and economic development like growing gardens of grassroots prosperity, which will need undecipherable algorithms to create illusionary fake success as crypto-tyrannies hiding in downtowns? Time to end the divide and conquer socio-economic played like open hunting season video games.
Conclusion: Future of work is crawling towards sunlight. Elimination of daily doses of inhaling diesel flavored combustion, listening to many hours of Hate-Radio the billions of workers in their gas-guzzling automobiles stuck in traffic jams will eventually stop this and save the climate.
Find your own suburbia; grow your own gardens of prosperity. Live in harmony, tolerance and diversity
The rest is easy
