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The point of WeWork is to facilitate access to reasonably priced, convivial office space. It has sought to apply the logic of a tech startup to the hard-to-scale dynamics of in-person communities. Its problems were exacerbated by the pandemic, but they started long before that.

This is so fundamentally a category error. Probably nobody familiar with my work will be surprised to hear me say: WeWork would have worked much better as a co-op. It is a shame that we live in an economy that lacks the capacity for co-ops to access capital to do this right.

If WeWork were a co-op, the point wouldn't be to deliver outsized returns to investors, it would be to meet member needs. The greatest benefits of the company would go outward to the world through its members rather than being organized for investor capture.

@funkaspuck which one?

@funkaspuck Certainly a co-op structure does not guarantee human-centered outcomes, it just enables the possibility of them.

@funkaspuck ah yeah, we really need to democratize that beast big time.