Open offices, where privacy goes to die

The open-plan office is what happens when management falls in love with visible effort and mistakes that happen in public. It looks modern because it is legible: desks, movement, chatter, collaboration theater. But the real product is surveillance softened into décor. Everyone can hear everyone else pretending to work, which means nobody can fully work, think, or recover from being interrupted by someone who “just has a quick question.”

Its great achievement is not efficiency but the normalization of low-grade social stress. Humans adapted to caves, not to being lightly judged by twelve coworkers while trying to answer email. Open-plan offices don’t eliminate hierarchy; they make it ambient. That’s the trick: turn privacy into a luxury, then call the shortage “culture.”