A quiet revolution in disguise

If this doesn't get me unfollowed as "too political," I didn't go far enough. I didn't write this to stay invited. I wrote it because silence is complicity — and I'm not here to make anyone comfortable while we sell out the values that built this movement.

We keep calling this "apolitical." That's bullshit. It's convenient ignorance dressed up as neutrality.

Because here's what I've learned: there is no such thing as ‘apolitical’ business.

There are only two types of businesses: those that examine their supply chains and those that don't.

Coworking was never supposed to be a product. It began as a set of values. Community over contracts. Trust over transactions. Shared tables, shared purpose.

But walk into many "coworking" spaces today and you'll find high-spec real estate and hotel-level hospitality. No connection. Not civic participation. Not the messy, magnificent work of people building something together.

The fundamental shift is more profound — and more dangerous than we want to admit.

Three stories, one choice

In Citizens, Jon Alexander reveals that every society operates from one of three fundamental stories about human nature:

The Subject Story: We are passive recipients who need strong leaders to protect and direct us. Think authoritarian regimes, but also paternalistic corporations that "know what's best" for their customers.

The Consumer Story: We are individual choice-makers whose power lies in selecting from options others provide. This became dominant after World War II and shapes everything from politics (candidates competing for our votes) to dating apps (swiping through potential partners).

The Citizen Story: We are active creators who shape the world around us, working together to build the future we want to live in.

Most coworking spaces today operate firmly within the Consumer Story. They compete to offer us better amenities, more convenient locations, slicker apps. We're customers choosing between options, not citizens building something together.

But here's what Alexander shows us: the Consumer Story is collapsing. And when it does, we either retreat into the Subject Story (authoritarianism) or step forward into the Citizen Story (active participation).

There's no middle ground.

The truth about consumer comfort

Here's the savage truth: Spotify is to artists what WeWork is to community — a glossy front-end and a broken back-end. Consumers get frictionless. Creators get squeezed. The real money is in surveillance and scale, not care and craft — unless we own the infrastructure we depend on.

Daniel Ek, the man who built his fortune selling music as a monthly all-you-can-eat buffet, has invested €700 million in Helsing, an AI defence company developing battlefield technology. His investment firm Prima Materia led the funding round, and Ek serves as chairman.

You won't hear that in your Spotify Wrapped update.

During university, I accidentally worked at the London Arms Fair at EXCEL — the event company I worked for managed the British Aerospace VIP room.

Interestingly, the show shares a similar conference atmosphere to Inbound by HubSpot or the Workspace Design Show London, but with the addition of attack helicopters, missiles, and grenades, rather than newsletter apps and biophilic design.

😳 Same lanyards, same coffee breaks, same PowerPoints. Different body count.

I remember the moment I hit "cancel" on my Spotify subscription in 2019. I'd been a loyal user since 2008 — with hours of specialist house music playlists, Bowie playlists, year-by-year compilations, even running tracks for different moods and distances. I had plane playlists and train playlists.

The more I heard from musician friends about how badly Spotify treated artists — and the fact that De La Soul wasn't even on Spotify — the less I could stomach it. But I stayed. For years, I stayed. Because of the playlists. It's nuts how convenience can make you complicit.

YouTube Premium gave me access to music I couldn't get on Spotify. And then, finally, in 2019, I found an app that could import all my playlists to YouTube Music.

That was it. No more excuses. I jumped ship.

When Daniel Ek's investment firm Prima Materia led a €600–700m round in Helsing this year — with Ek as chairman of an AI defence company developing battlefield technology — I wasn't surprised.

The pattern was already clear. The man who built his fortune selling music as a monthly all-you-can-eat buffet now invests in war tech.

It's the perfect example of what Jon Alexander calls the central falsehood of the Consumer Story: "that choice from a menu of options constitutes power." We feel empowered by our playlists while the platform owner shapes the battlefield.

The same pattern repeats everywhere. The front-end experience is flawless. But behind the curtain? Artists squeezed. Drivers exploited. AI tools built for war.

And we don't see it. We're not supposed to.

The brands we trust are funding what we oppose

In her June 2025 report to the UN Human Rights Council, "From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide," Francesca Albanese lays this bare with documentation that should stop us all in our tracks.

The war in Gaza isn't just being fuelled by weapons — it's being profited from by companies we interact with daily. Google. Microsoft. Hyundai. Allianz. AXA.

From Albanese's report: brands most of us rely on are named in the machine — Google and Microsoft among them.

The point isn't to pick sides; it's to follow the money. If our industry keeps saying it's "apolitical," while our software stack and investors are entangled with an economy of genocide, then what story are we really telling?

I created a Gmail account in 2005 and moved my business to Google Apps (now Google Workspace) in 2008. I'm a YouTuber and I use YouTube Music.

My entire operational life revolves around Google. That's the tension: the tools that help us build community are named in systems that erode it.

We can't pretend that it isn't true.

Whether you're pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, it should stop you in your tracks that the brands shaping our coworking software and venture-backed ecosystems are named as participants in what Albanese documents as an "economy of genocide."

The truth is that wars are no longer fought for flags.

They're fought to protect profits. Coworking is funded by the same capital that funds displacement, surveillance, and extraction. If we don't ask where the money comes from — we're just laundering the story.

The same venture capital that shapes our industry shapes these systems.

We can't build community on the foundations of complicity.

When speaking up costs you clients (and why silence costs more)

Someone told me, "This isn't the place for politics." If a coworking industry built on community isn't the place to talk about how our supply chains intersect with war and surveillance, then where is?

I recall my first post about Palestine on LinkedIn, and thank you, , for leading the way on how and why to do this.

I sat at my laptop, draft rewritten three times, finger hovering over "publish." A friend messaged: "Are you sure? You've seen what happens to people who speak up." I knew I'd lose subscribers. I knew a client might quietly disappear. I posted anyway.

I’d already lost a client because I’d posted about Palestine on my private Instgram profile.

I understood why they did not want to work with me, and at least they had the fucking spine to take a position and say something constructive.

But I’d also heard from proud Jewish friends — many of whom march and campaign for Palestine — thanking me for saying what they felt. The silence helps no one.

Organisations like Jewish Voice for Peace and Na'amod UK demonstrate daily that opposing genocide isn't antisemitic — it's deeply human. Standing with Palestine means standing with all people against systems of oppression.

Yesterday, 10 August 2025, 474 people were arrested in London during the Support for Palestine marches — the highest single-day arrest total in the capital's history, surpassing even the peaks of the 2011 riots.

The only larger mass arrest in mainland UK came in July 1990, when police detained 836 people at the Love Decade rave in Leeds under Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government — a political climate defined by hard-line law-and-order policies that treated raves, protests, and public gatherings as threats to be crushed.

Yesterday in Parliament Square, Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack spoke about how this is one of the most shameful moments in legal history.

The entire electronic music ecosystem — encompassing recorded music, publishing, festivals, concerts, and nightclubs — generated approximately £2.4 billion for the UK economy in 2024 (source: NME).

The same culture Thatcher tried to criminalise now props up the economy. But when citizens gather for justice rather than consumption, the Subject Story still shows its teeth.

This is what the Subject Story looks like in practice. When citizens try to speak, they're treated as subjects to be controlled.

The Consumer Story tells us to express ourselves through our purchasing choices. The Subject Story arrests us when we express ourselves through our bodies and voices.

The middle class squeeze

Gary Stevenson has been shouting this for years: the middle class is being hollowed out faster than most people realise — and that is the primary market for coworking.

If we don't join the fight against wealth inequality, we're not just failing society; we're sawing off the branch our industry sits on.

Here's what this means for coworking: your members aren't just choosing between workspace options. They're being systematically pushed out of traditional employment into precarious entrepreneurship. Not by choice, but by economic necessity.

As Kofi Oppong put it on our Coworking Values Podcast, "The system isn't working when you look at it that way because it's always top-heavy." With tech-driven job churn accelerating, "it's really important that everybody has a side hustle."

That isn't the shiny "future of work" narrative we've been sold; it's economic displacement dressed as opportunity.

Kofi understands this from lived experience. Kicked out of his family home at 17, he learned early that "the system does not allow you to get through unless you have unique stories."

Now, through Urban MBA, he's preparing marginalised communities for a harsh reality.

"Unless we recognise that if we don't create services for ourselves," Kofi warns, "it will never, ever, ever happen in terms of parity."

The same logic applies to coworking. Unless we create citizen-owned, community-controlled spaces, we'll be left with whatever venture capital decides to give us.

And that venture capital?

The big money shaping this moment isn't shy. BlackRock and Vanguard show up as major investors across defence and tech; indexes rise even as lives are shattered.

Since 12 October 2023, companies on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange have posted substantial gains. Even Norway's "ethical" pension fund reports vast holdings in companies named by Albanese.

I've always preferred bootstrapped companies to VC-backed ones. In coworking, that's why I rate platforms like Nexudus, PONT, and Cobot | Coworking Software — they are self-funded, accountable to their customers instead of shareholders, and free to make product decisions without chasing growth at all costs.

What hospitality really means

Will Guidara, who transformed Eleven Madison Park into the world's #1 restaurant, understood something crucial: "Service is black and white; hospitality is colour."

→ He writes about this in Unreasonable Hospitality.

Getting the right plate to the right person at the right table is service. But genuinely engaging with the person you're serving, so you can make an authentic connection—that's hospitality.

Most coworking spaces today offer excellent service.

Clean desks, fast wifi, good coffee. But true hospitality? The kind that makes people feel they belong, that they matter, that they're part of something bigger than themselves?

That requires consciousness. It requires choice. It requires the courage to ask: who are we serving, and what systems are we reinforcing?

When did building community become building an audience? I've walked into too many immaculate spaces — perfect lighting, artisanal coffee, every surface Instagram-ready — where no one looks up.

It's a coworking museum. You don't belong there; you pose as if you do.

When Guidara decided to be "unreasonable" about hospitality, he wasn't just improving customer experience. He was choosing to see people as whole humans, not just revenue streams.

"No one who ever changed the game did so by being reasonable," he writes. What would it look like to be unreasonable about justice in coworking? About transparency? About who gets to participate and who gets left out?

The citizen alternative

Coworking is not just "a nicer office."

At its best, it's a local, human-scale alternative to the extractive logic of big tech, big property, and big lies.

At its best, it's the public square disguised as a subscription.

At its best, it's not passive space — it's active infrastructure for the citizen economy.

Ask anyone who's built real community — not the LinkedIn version, the actual messy human kind — and they'll tell you the same thing.

Which is exactly what Dan Sofer told me when on our recent Coworking Values Podcast.

Dan didn't have a press team. He had a purpose. That's what coworking looks like when it's working.

I first met Dan at a Space4 community lunch in London — one of those deceptively simple, ridiculously effective weekly rituals that keep a neighbourhood's lifeblood moving.

Quiet tables (ish), loud purpose. What started as low-key meetups became Gaza Sky Geeks and Yalla Cooperative — people in Camden and Finsbury Park training people in Gaza and the West Bank. Then, their building was destroyed.

The most important coworking spaces aren't sexy. They're saving lives.

Own your infrastructure or it owns you

Side note on platforms vs people: I've got friends whose entire audience sits on Spotify.

When the platform moves, they move — or they disappear. This is why owning your audience matters.

If you run a coworking space or community, your email list isn't a marketing extra — it's your community's backbone.

Don't rent your relationships from an algorithm.

But to protect that future, we have to be willing to ask hard questions:

• Which software companies are we paying, and who owns them?
• Where does our investment capital come from?
• Are our facial recognition systems connected to surveillance networks?
• Do our insurance providers also insure weapons manufacturers?
• Are we part of the pattern — or part of the shift?

Brian Eno, in his foreword to Citizens, writes: "There is a coalescence. A different story is rising and ripening... The people are organising, not only in grassroots movements but also, crucially, inside the very institutions and organisations that are currently failing us."

Watch Brian Eno interview Jon Alexander for the Citizens book launch to hear them discuss this shift.

He's also helping organise the Together for Palestine Concert in London on 17 September 2025 — another sign this isn't a fringe conversation but a cultural mainstream one.

Citizens came out in 2022. We're already living it. The Citizen Story isn't theoretical — it's here now and spreading: in distributed resistance, digital democracy, cities that facilitate instead of command, and businesses that involve rather than sell.

And yes, in coworking spaces where people gather not just to work, but to build the world they want to live in.

Your move

We don't need to be perfect. We just need to be awake.

• Start with an audit. Trace your supply chains.
• Ask your software providers to disclose their parent companies.
• Check your investors' other portfolio companies. Look at your insurance provider's client list.
• Start with your CRM, your booking software, and your landlord. Who owns them? Who backs them?

You might not like what you find. I didn't.

When I audited my own stack, I found connections I wish weren't there. I'm still using some of these tools — for now — but at least I'm awake to what I'm funding.

But consciousness is the first step toward choice. And choice is the first step toward citizenship.

Get involved - take a little action

If you're looking for others who are thinking this way, join us:

• Actionism Summer Connect – August Online Meetup
• Unreasonable Connection – Online: a monthly, informal-with-intention meetup for coworking community builders. No panels, no pitches — just operators talking to operators.
• Read Ashley Proctor's Reflecting on 20 Years of the Coworking Movement here on Linkedin.
• My photo choice today? Read: The Most Famous Coworking Photo On The Web by Pauline Roussel

One concrete action: host a screening of ACTionism: The Art of Finding Your People to Take Collective Action in your coworking space.

It's a perfect format for members to sit together, talk honestly, and leave with next steps — no posturing, no pitches, just people connecting. Request a screening here.

No agenda. No product pitch. Just real people, ready to unplug from the Matrix and build something worth waking up for.

The coworking industry stands at a crossroads. We can continue drifting toward consumer comfort and corporate consolidation. Or we can reclaim the radical promise that brought us here in the first place.

The choice is ours. But we have to make it consciously.

Because if we don't choose the Citizen Story, the Subject Story will choose us.

Thank you for your time and attention today

Bernie 💚🍉

p.s. - Listen and read with us twice a week on the Coworking Values Podcast