The Death of the Office

By Roqayah Chamseddine | September 15, 2025 | 9:31am

Screenshot via MovieClips on YouTube

Economy The Office

For decades, the office has stood as a physical monument of alienation, hierarchy, and an all-around bad time. 1999’s cult classic Office Space perfectly captures this exact hierarchy and the absurdity that defines the modern office; the bureaucratic rituals, stifling managerial oversight, and the obsession with enforcing corporate compliance. Through characters like Peter Gibbons, played by Ron Livingston, the film’s comedic tenor emphasizes the soul-crushing routines and the mindless, performative structures that define office life, underscoring the inherent tension between the working people’s arguably innate desire for autonomy and capitalism’s need to extract as much value out of them as possible.

Peter Gibbons makes a similar, bitter observation when saying that “[h]uman beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.” In the real world, much like in Mike Judge’s Office Space, the decline and slow death of the office isn’t because workers have outgrown their cubicles and have been liberated through remote work from the boundaries of their corporate high rises, but because the fragility of capitalist organization and profit imperatives has exposed the persistent struggle between labor and exploitation.

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The pandemic helped accelerate the ongoing reconfiguration of the traditional office, leading to more remote work. At the beginning, this was seen as a more liberating way forward: no more long commutes, no more overbearing managerial staff breathing down your neck, the end of forced office chitchat and so-called “office culture,” and the kind of independence someone might experience when they’re only a few short feet away from their beds. But one should note that the corporate abandonment of the office space didn’t come out of generosity, but because it allowed them to transfer infrastructure burdens onto workers’ homes, cut costs, and even unleash new surveillance technologies.

Surveillance software, also known as “Bossware”, can monitor your GPS, take screenshots of a worker’s desktop, and even evaluate their emotion, thereby reproducing in-office control by way of modernised “scientific management.” The demands of the office didn’t vanish with the pandemic; instead, they were amplified, and began reaching into every corner of a worker’s day, intensifying alienation and making labor inseparable from managerial surveillance. Despite this, most workers do not want to return to in-office work, come hell or high water.

A recent Gallup poll reveals that among U.S. workers whose jobs can be done remotely, 51 percent are splitting their time between in-office work and working from home; 28 percent are fully remote workers; and 21 percent are strictly working in the office. To no one’s surprise, only 10 percent would choose to return to exclusively on-site work, and employees are demanding more flexibility in terms of their work location.

Still, corporations are insisting their employees make their way back to the office, realizing that they can’t physically corral their workers the same when they’re working from home. In the meantime, employers have transformed Zoom attendance, Teams statuses, and screen monitoring tools into instruments of bureaucracy; workers are reporting that their bosses are overseeing their keystrokes and even active mouse movements as proxies for discipline in much the same way infamous “TPS reports” did for the characters in Office Space. In the decades that have gone by, the only thing that’s changed is that managerial control doesn’t rely entirely on physical memos anymore but comes by way of push notifications and digital oversight.

The slow death of the physical office exposes the way that capital still attempts to enforce compliance and extract value, but on the other side, workers have shown that corporate control is not commutable. The demand for remote or hybrid work reveals the working-class impulse to reclaim any kind of autonomy and control over their labor. There’s no denying that alienation still continues, drastically reshaped by things like AI and digital surveillance, emphasizing the importance of the struggle between labor and authority. Workers who insist on remote work arrangements are often accused of shirking their responsibilities or being lazy, but studies show they often work longer hours on average. The traditional cubicles may be gone, but as Peter Gibbons reminds us, the refusal to indulge in meaningless office rituals may very well be the first step in reclaiming not only our labor but our time.