[On Hulu’s new documentary and why we keep falling for guys like
Adam Neumann.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

AMERICANS BELIEVE IN WORK. WEWORK PREYED ON THAT INSTINCT.  
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Alissa Wilkinson
March 31, 2021
Vox [[link removed]]

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_ On Hulu’s new documentary and why we keep falling for guys like
Adam Neumann. _

WeWork founder Adam Neumann is the focus of a new documentary about
his company’s rise and fall. , JB Lacroix/Getty Images

 

Watch the new Hulu documentary _WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of
a $47 Billion Unicorn_, and if you can keep your eyebrows from
crawling off your face entirely in the first 20 minutes, my hat’s
off to you.

WeWork — the now-troubled company
[[link removed]] that
took out long-term leases on New York City real estate and built fun
co-working office spaces for millennials — is described throughout
the film in terms that border on the religious. It began as a
“transparent and accountable” community, focused on
“connection” and “changing the world.” Spending your days at a
WeWork site was “somehow like being a member of a club, beyond just
where your office building is.” Where recent college grads could go
to find “purpose” and a “dream.” It was “legitimately the
craziest work experience.” WeWork, and other related brands —
WeLive, WeGrow — was all about “bringing people together” in the
“spirit of We.”

All that language is creepy and also queasily familiar to so many
millennials, brought up to believe outlandish ideals about work. I am
what is often called an “elder millennial,” born in 1983, and my
age cohort and I are accustomed to recitations of the myth that
actually, the company that pays us money in exchange for our labor —
if we’re lucky enough to evade the gig economy’s clutches — is
“more like a family” than a business. (It never is.) And we were
raised in a cultural landscape, as the Atlantic writer Derek Thompson
says in the documentary, of “techno-optimism,” a world in which
“you were rewarded if you could articulate a vision of your company
that wasn’t just going to make money, it was going to _change the
world_.”

Work is our purpose, our guiding light, where we find our meaning,
where we have fun — or at least, that’s what we were supposed to
believe. It’s not about work-life balance; it’s about melding your
life with work. We hear Dolly Parton sing “9 to 5” and sigh
wistfully. (In a dystopian twist, Dolly recorded a version of the
song called “5 to 9,”
[[link removed]] an
ode to the “side hustle,” for a Squarespace ad during the 2021
Super Bowl.)

And of course, work is where we make money. Gobs of it, if only we
work hard enough. In the words of WeWork founder Adam Neumann: “We
want to do something that actually makes the world a better place, and
we want to make money doing it!” In the words of the WeWork
tagline: _Do What You Love_. The familiar rejoinder to that phrase is
implied: _And love what you do._

[A photo of the exterior of an office space with a bike in front.]

A WeWork space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, bearing the WeWork mantra:
“Do What You Love.”

 Spencer Platt/Getty Images

It’s just a 21st-century utopian mantra, and for WeWork and Neumann,
it worked for a while. Small wonder. Dreams of utopianism are an
American tradition — maybe _the_ American tradition, if we extend
the label to those who immigrated to this continent in search of a
better and more harmonious life, far away from wherever life was
worse. In the 19th century, hundreds of utopian communities were
founded in the US [[link removed]],
both religious (the Shakers) and secular (the transcendentalist Brook
Farm). The 20th century carried on the tradition (think of the hippies
in Haight-Ashbury).

Over time, the shape has morphed but the basic principles remain the
same. Groups form, often around a charismatic and idealistic leader.
To some degree, they isolate themselves from the outside. They adopt
ideals that run against the grain of mainstream society and try to
live in harmony with one another, modeling a new way of living.
Sometimes they succeed and thrive; more often, they fold or implode,
scattering spectacular fireworks. More than a few times, they devolve
into abusive cults (hello, _Wild Wild Country_
[[link removed]]).

It is fitting that some infamous 21st-century utopian communities have
organized themselves around secular ideas of self-betterment and
success, especially in this “techno-optimistic” world. Streaming
services have made a modest cottage industry of documenting the latest
developments. One recent example is Keith Raniere and NXIVM in
HBO’s _The Vow_
[[link removed]],
about an organization (read: a cult) devoted to projecting prosperity
and accomplishment. Or there’s the double whammy of the Netflix and
Hulu docs centering on Billy McFarland and the Fyre Festival
catastrophe
[[link removed]].
That infamously botched event grew out of McFarland’s keen sense
that young, aspiring professionals in New York would latch onto a
vision of success that started with cocktail parties in fancy
brownstones and ended with a lavish party on a Caribbean island.
(Or cheese sandwiches in styrofoam takeout containers
[[link removed]],
I guess.)

It’s the Fyre Festival audience that WeWork founder Neumann targeted
most aggressively. (I’d love to see the Venn diagram overlap between
McFarland’s and Neumann’s acolytes.) And it’s Neumann who is the
main draw of _WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion
Unicorn_.

[WeWork CEO Adam Neumann points while onstage during WeWork Presents
Second Annual Creator Global Finals. ]

WeWork founder Adam Neumann speaking in January 2019.

 Michael Kovac/Getty Images for WeWork

The film, written and directed by Jed Rothstein, relies on familiar
visual language — slow-motion shots of empty rooms, archival
footage, brightly lit interviews — as it tries, a tad clumsily, to
document both Neumann’s rise and fall and the company’s while
exploring the kinds of people who were drawn to his vision. They are
all earnest, beautiful, and around “elder millennial” in age —
the kind of people who are ready to get their hands dirty and really
make something of the world. They signed up to work for, or at,
WeWork. They wanted to build companies while in the presence of other
ambitious young people with the hope of making the world a better
place. (There’s a great supercut of young founders reciting the
portmanteau names of their companies in quick succession — monikers
like Yoink, BrunchCritic.com, SmileBack, ScrollKit, Handshake, Scruff,
and what sounded like Beer2Buzz.)

They also wanted to drink, a lot. The documentary makes a big point of
this. Former WeWork lawyer Don Lewis, who a bit older than most of the
interviewees, talks of kegs of beer, unlimited alcohol, appearing at 4
pm and continuing to flow until there was no one left to drink it. The
annual WeWork “summer camp” for adults (yes, you read that
correctly) is described mostly as a place where the booze flowed
freely and founder Adam Neumann gave motivational speeches. Someone
calls it “Fyre Festival gone right.”

(It’s frankly shocking, given the amount of drinking it documents,
that the film contains not a single whisper of sexual assault
allegations. Especially since harrowing and troubling allegations
have most certainly been raised in court
[[link removed]];
allegedly one co-worker told another that it was “only a matter of
time until someone gets raped” at a WeWork event.)

RELATED

WeWork is being sued for allegedly enabling sexual harassment
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Some of WeWork’s clients — er, community members — took their
devotion a step further, signing up to live in a “WeLive”
neo-commune. Individual residents (pretty much all of whom, according
to the film, were single) lived in 200-square-foot hotel-style rooms
and shared kitchens, laundry, and common areas. This setup itself is
not unusual in New York City, where the rent is high and friends can
be hard to find if you’re new in town. But WeLive, as former
resident August Urbish explains, became more like a walled-off utopian
community than just a place to live. “It was weird if someone left
the building,” he says.

Later, Urbish notes that after he moved into the space while also
working out of a WeWork office, his “entire life was propped up by
the We Community.” Friends from “the outside” would come to
visit him and wouldn’t return. “Pretty quickly,” he says, “I
had alienated most of my friends outside the building.”
(Incidentally, or maybe not, being encouraged to isolate yourself from
your friends and family is a well-established warning sign
[[link removed]] that
you’ve joined a cult.)

On the one hand, this sounds a lot like college, when you’re swept
up into campus life and might start to lose touch with the friends
back home. On the other hand, these were adults, professionals, in
their 20s and 30s. And as more time went by, the more it started to
seem that Neumann and his vision were not entirely on the up-and-up,
especially when his wife Rebekah (a cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow and
seemingly cut from the GOOP cloth) took a more active role in the
company.

In the film, former WeWork staffers talk about the “propaganda”
that was fed to members while everything was chaos behind the scenes.
On Monday mornings, when new members were being “onboarded,”
current workers occupying WeWork spaces would hear deafening chants
and whoops and hollers, all about the awesomeness of WeWork. “They
were ready to spend any amount of money to make themselves feel good
and look good to their employees,” says Joanna Strange, who was once
a product manager for the company.

[Neumann stands with forms and spreadsheets around him.]

Neumann was seen as a vaguely messianic figure, but once the truth
about the company was known, investors started fleeing.

 Hulu

Neumann cultivated an air of vaguely Muppety charisma that charmed not
just people his own age, but the fabulously wealthy investors who kept
the money, and alcohol, flowing freely. In normal people’s terms,
Neumann fleeced them, largely by using a kooky metric called
“community adjusted Ebitda” to measure WeWork’s success. (Ebitda
stands for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and
amortization,” and is widely used in the world of finance; Neumann
and his colleagues “adjusted” the definition to include various
building- and community-level operating expenses, thereby tweaking the
numbers to hide WeWork’s vast unprofitability.) He wasn’t running
a real estate company, he insisted; it was much bigger than that. The
company became a Silicon Valley “unicorn” — a private company
valued at $1 billion — and then a unicorn many times over,
eventually reaching a value of $47 billion. Investors, drawn in by
other investors, just kept investing. Even the Saudi Arabian
government
[[link removed]] got
in on it.

Neumann was flying high on his own supply, seemingly just assuming
that if he talked enough and convinced people he knew what he was
doing, everything would work out. He thought he could bend reality to
his will. And why shouldn’t he? Thanks to one anecdote an
interviewee relates in the film, we discover that the WeWork baristas
had started serving lattes when people ordered cappuccinos, and vice
versa, because Neumann would order a latte but expect a cappuccino and
nobody wanted to correct him. “If you tell a 30something male that
he’s Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you,” NYU business
professor Scott Galloway says.

Meanwhile, people in the WeWork community were discovering the perils
of questioning the “spirit of We.” Justin Zhen, the founder of a
startup called Thinknum Alternative Data that was housed in a WeWork
space, talks about the day his company discovered, via public data,
that the WeWork “churn rate” — that is, the number of members
leaving WeWork — had increased and was accelerating. Furthermore, an
internal social network, developed for use among WeWork community
members and used by Neumann as a lure for investors, was barely being
used. Zhen’s company posted something about it on their blog, and
within hours a WeWork community manager appeared. According to Zhen,
they told him he’d “violated our membership happiness clause”
and had 30 minutes to pack up his company and leave the premises.

And then, just days before it planned to go public, the jig was up
[[link removed]].
As the unprofitable foundation and Neumann’s sleight of hand became
clear to investors, his financial backers began to head for the hills,
and he was eventually sent packing altogether. Among other
developments, the S-1 form that WeWork filed with the SEC
[[link removed]] (which kicks
off the IPO process) included this little ditty on the first page;
someone in the documentary describes it as the writing of someone who
was high:

We dedicate this
to the energy of we —
greater than any one of us
but inside each of us.

_WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion
Unicorn _chronicles the company’s many financial problems,
investment kerfuffles, the figures lurking behind the scenes, the
parties, the spiritual advisers Rebekah Neumann brought in, the
oddities, and the long-reaching business consequences of Neumann’s
grift. Then there’s the manipulation Neumann used to convince his
employees that they were lucky to work for him, that he didn’t need
them, that they had to fight to stay employed, and that they should be
grateful for it.

But it’s oddly incurious about the larger cultural implications of
WeWork’s downfall, or what the whole catastrophe actually means. It
shares this disinterest with the recent HBO series on QAnon, _The
Storm_, which fails to really explore
[[link removed]] why
otherwise smart and curious people are drawn into what seem like
obviously preposterous schemes. The only answer given is that Neumann
presented a vision of coolness that resonated with millennials’
desire to find both purpose and profit in their work. (And also
booze.) But it doesn’t get at why so many people find that vision
attractive and credible in the first place.

I’m curious about this. I think, sometimes, that given how often
we’ve heard this kind of — well, let’s be frank, bullshit —
from charismatic and young (and usually male) dreamers, we’d be
inoculated by now. It’s a sales pitch. They want something from you.
Neumann was seeking young, ambitious, good-looking millennial startup
founders to pay his company to rent space ... er, excuse me, join the
community. (By renting space.) As the Atlantic’s Thompson explains,
“the original members weren’t ‘members’ so much as a
‘resource’ from which WeWork could extract a reputation.”

[A window printed with cursive lettering reading “Hustle.”]

Mantras, everywhere.

 Hulu

A former assistant to Neumann reflects that “I was in my mid-20s
looking for purpose, and here’s this person selling this dream, and
I was an easy target for that.” By the end of the film, she’s in
tears, remembering what she lost when WeWork went down: “It could
have come together into something beautiful.”

But could it have? Could an “authentic” community centered on a
guy like Neumann, who wanted a flock who would worship him, be any
good at all? Why do we keep falling for this?

If I sound annoyed, it’s because I am. I don’t fault anyone for
desperately seeking purpose in life or trying to find community;
that’s the most sympathetic trait imaginable, a tale as old as
humanity itself. What frustrates me is that it keeps working, and
taking the seekers down with it.

To me, Neumann’s language sounds most of all like a very specific
variety of cool young “church planters” — mostly male pastors of
mostly white and mostly conservative evangelical churches — who
popped up in the late ’90s and early aughts, right when I was coming
of age, and lured young people into their congregations with the
promise that this wasn’t your parents’ church, that we’re not
like those others. (Neumann is Israeli and grew up on a kibbutz, but
his rhetoric is dead on.)

You knew it when you saw it. They had strobe lights and a coffee bar
in the back, or maybe they lounged on couches or met in a bar — so
countercultural! The aspiring-influencer pastor wore expensive jeans
and a hipster haircut, and at Wednesday-night Bible study you might
indulge in some artisanal beer (a daring move in a teetotaling church
culture). When one interviewee in the documentary says that at WeWork
there was excitement about “rebelling against the office culture set
by the ’80s and ’90s,” the hair stood up on my neck.

Everything was about transparency and accountability, about
“authentic community” and “being real,” not like those
fuddy-duddy churches back home. Your friends were from church; your
life revolved around it. And they were all young, good-looking,
well-dressed, and smart, like you. To borrow the words of Don Lewis,
the former WeWork lawyer: “People really liked the coolness of it,
and that was kind of what was being sold.”

Don’t get me wrong: Some of the church leaders I remember were
sincere, and some of the churches helped people and matured just fine
into close-knit but welcoming groups that actually invested in serving
the community around them. And the ’90s weren’t the first time a
younger generation of clergy tried to reinvent their parents’ Sunday
meetings — not by a long shot.

But more than a few of my acquaintances and friends got burned by
those places, realizing too late that the pastor was more interested
in amassing adoring followers than in leading. Sometimes that
motivation “only” manifested in narcissistic behavior; sometimes
it played out in far worse ways. And their followers might have been
rebelling against the culture of their parents, but their rebellion
was surface-level; if they dared to be “authentic” and “real”
enough to question the leader, they’d find themselves on the
outside.

What some experience in religious communities, others experience in
secular ones. WeWork and the full “We community,” led to its
demise by Neumann, is only one such case. But there are big reasons
why millennials flock to these new leaders and “authentic”
communities, and scholars
[[link removed]] study
[[link removed]] those
[[link removed]] reasons
[[link removed]].
Until its final five-minute stretch, the documentary doesn’t try to
address them in any meaningful way. I suspect that’s because the
filmmakers don’t know the reason themselves.

At the end, they give their best shot. Many of the interviews were
seemingly conducted during the pandemic, and in the film’s final
moments, it turns its attention to why “community” exists and how
we’ve lost it during this time. But it lacks true insight. There are
lots of slow-motion images of empty New York streets and interviewees
donning face masks. People talk about how much we miss “community”
during such an extended period of isolation, saying things like,
“What are we if we don’t have each other?”

RELATED

The pandemic could have crushed WeWork. It may have saved it instead.
[[link removed]]

But maybe a better tack would have been to lightly interrogate the
word “community,” which is so present in the film it’s
practically a watermark, yet is also so overused as to be meaningless.
After all, “community” is a big buzzword at Facebook, too, and on
pretty much every social networking platform. And in all of Silicon
Valley, and in cults like NXIVM, and in pop-up churches that meet in
bars. Adam Neumann didn’t invent it. Does it mean friends? Family?
People you kind of know? Drinking buddies? People you see every day?
Could it be that guys like Neumann are latching onto the word because
of its vagueness? Because of the malleability that allows anyone to
make it mean whatever they want? And if there’s no space for arguing
or questioning one supreme leader in your community, is it a community
at all?

_WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn_ is
certainly worth watching, a cautionary tale for our time. I wish it
had been more curious about the roots of the rage-inducing tale it
tells. As it stands, it’s just another brick in a growing pile of
examples of 21st-century techno-utopianism and the ruses we fall for
over and over again.

By the way: Adam Neumann is doing fine, though he and Rebekah declined
to be interviewed for the documentary. In January 2020, WeWork was
still growing
[[link removed]].
In fact, the pandemic might have saved the company
[[link removed]].
As of a few days ago, it was still valued at $9 billion and going
public
[[link removed]].
The Neumanns live, as the film tells us at the end, in one of the
several houses they own in the New York area; Adam got a golden
parachute on his way out of WeWork. In the grand American utopian
tradition, it’s everyone else who got screwed.

WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
[[link removed]]_ premiered
at the virtual SXSW Film Festival in March and begins streaming on
Hulu on April 2._

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