Ddubz

People at the doctor's office that get too shit of a mobile signal on their phone in the waiting room to look at anything else.

That and Gen X, boomer democrats that don't think Bush Jr. is that bad of a guy.

In my observation it has been industry and sector dependent.

Corporate tech and finance are calling for remote work to end. Most of the articles I see where going back to the office is touted are all "silicon valley" type companies and finance/investment firms writing opinion peices.

PR, marketing, and news media, comms fields - which I am in - are doing the opposite. I work in digital media with government clients and my office just had a building contractor come in and walled off 2/3 of our empty cube space that was full pre-pandemic but is now vacant because all those employees remained remote. The positions in that area of the office were mostly copy editors, graphic design, and technical writers. The building owner turned that area into a new office but hasn't rented it to anyone new yet.

Many of my colleagues are active duty military and government civilians. They all telework as much as 3-4 days a week currently. All of their jobs are administrative in nature and almost all of the military people are officers.

It is important to note that the military has loosely instructed liberal telework at unit level discretion because of record low retention rates. I've been working in/for government for a long time and even before 2020, federal contractors and DoD civilians have usually had telework of some kind provided what they did was something that could be taken home.

When I worked in DC in the mid-00s it was common to see offices engage rotating flex schedules because of the insane traffic and hours long commutes in the DMV corridor.

But, I suppose it's all anecdotal. Where you live and what you do for work are going to impact reality more than anything. Watching the MSM speculate and reading nonsense opinion articles in the Atlantic or Times aren't going to give you any real information.

All I can say for sure is my office has fully remote and hybrid only. We are guaranteed two days WFH a week but all salaried employees have optional flex schedules and can work non-concurrent hours as long as deadlines are being met. But again, I work for a massive international fed contractor that does largely administrative and PR consulting. So all things that have a history of WFH schedules already.

The one person I know that still watches Bill Maher is a guy that says he's a libertarian. But he's a libertarian in the way that a college freshman in 2005 was a libertarian.

Dumping Twitter, to start. We've been able to finally get our client to try some new things using IG reels and YT shorts. We've also been able to grab their ear about Reddit, Lemmy, and Mastodon. While they're not fully onboard yet with federated platforms, they're interested, which is a huge step. We've also been pitching more proactive content and getting more support on strategy shifts to have a more conversational back-and-forth with the client's audience. They used to prefer to get people off open comments and into private DMs. We have been pushing them to be more transparent and human with their direct engagement.

I'd argue the opposite. People have been fed up with the mainstream platforms for a long time now. Now that we know how social media grew grassroots terrorism and that the platforms allowed it for ad clicks, I'd say it's a good time to pivot away from the traditional models of the last 15-20 years, move away from the Facebooks and Twitters, and try something new.

Professionally, I lead a team of digital artists and oversee digital marketing efforts for a government client. The chaos and burning out of Twitter and Reddit has been a great time for my team as we've finally been given the latitude to do new work and build new strategies instead of just doing the same bullshit over and over. I've started enjoying work again and my team has been energized because everyday there's something new to overcome. And because the social media ecosystem is so turbulent, it's actually removing the pressure from us because our client understands that we are operating in new territory. Essentially, we are being allowed to fail in the pursuit of innovation.

I'm pumped to be a part of this evolving shift. There's so much potential. Also, I'm selfishly enjoying watching these fucking assholes like Musk flail and burn through billions of dollars as a result of their hubris.