Over the last year, many companies have ended their liberal work-from-home policies. Firms like IBM, Honeywell, and Aetna joined a long list of others that have deemed it more profitable to force employees to commute to the city and work in a central office than give them the flexibility to work where they want. It wasn't supposed to be this way—at least according to Norman Macrae.
In 1975, when personal computers were little more than glorified calculators for geeks and the Internet was an obscure project being developed by the United States government, Macrae, an influential journalist for The Economist who earned a reputation for clairvoyant prophesies—including the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Japan—made a radical prediction about how information technology would soon transform our lives.
Macrae foretold the exact path and timeline that computers would take over the business world and then become a fixture of every American home. But he didn't stop there. The spread of this machine, he argued, would fundamentally change the economics of how most of us work. Once workers could communicate with their colleagues through instant messages and video chat, he reasoned, there would be little coherent purpose to trudge long distances to work side by side in centrally located office spaces. As companies recognized how much cheaper remote employees would be, the computer would, in effect, kill the office—and with that our whole way of living would change.
"Telecommunications," Macrae wrote, "will alter society's patterns more profoundly than the previous and smaller transport revolutions of the railway and automobile have done." A digital America, he declared, would soon "lead the world toward the end of the urban age."
Fast forward 40 years and suburban breadwinners still clog motorways in a daily trek to cities to make money. Young professionals flock to live in them for the perks of urban life. Far from the "re-ruralization" that Macrae predicted, the metropolis of the computer age has become an even stronger magnet for the physical bodies of human beings.