One percent useful. Today, with the state of California’s final, reluctant acquiescence to The Science, U.S. cities from coast to coast are largely open for business. The sun is shining, the masks are off, and for America at least the pandemic is effectively over. On one hand, this is an obvious, unmitigated good. On the other, let’s complain about it.

Week before last, Apple’s One Percent — the team of in-house activists improbably allowed to spend their time crafting petitions that have nothing to do with their stated jobs and leaking them to the Verge’s anti-tech team — was back in the news with their third in a series of ridiculous grievances. From outrage concerning the hiring of newly-minted Bad Tech Man Antonio García Martinez to the utterly bizarre insistence Tim Cook take an opinion on Israel and Palestine, the ire of Apple’s activist class finally settled on something close to actual work, or at least… close to their place of work. Long story short, they don’t want to go back. With offices set to partially open by fall, Apple’s brief, deeply-uncharacteristic stint with work-from-home culture was placed on the endangered species list, and for Tim Cook’s hipster militants, obsessively posting in their “screw this workplace” workplace Slack channels between sips of nine-dollar pour-over coffee, this could not be tolerated.

Working from home is not a new concept in the technology industry, but the pandemic shuffled the deck, and over the last year the practice came to be seen not as a perk, but as a fundamentally new kind of corporate organization — at least, potentially. Is a team’s physical proximity critical to a team’s success, or can we decentralize our companies? Then, if we can decentralize our companies, can we decentralize our industry? Is Corporate America destined for the Cloud? Are we leaving San Francisco?! These are interesting questions, and I’m of two minds on the topic. For startups, a culture of working remote strikes me as probably a path to failure. For a mature company like Google, where many employees don’t really do very much, a culture of working remote seems probably fine. We’ll know a lot more in two or three years, when the pandemic’s class of new startups have a little more fully matured. But when exactly did forever work-from-home become an employee’s right? At Apple specifically, an outlier in tech, working from home was never a perk. Famously, Apple doesn’t even offer free workplace lunches. This means the hipster militants now running to the press over Tim Cook’s beyond-the-pale three-day work week signed up for, actually, a much more committed workplace culture. Nonetheless, the horror: