Michael: A 2013 study found that people in cubicles have the highest rates of unhappiness of any office setup. But here's the twist: the guy who invented the cubicle thought he was creating a utopia. He died thinking he'd failed humanity. How did we get it so wrong? Kevin: Wow, that is a gut punch. To invent something with the best intentions and have it become a global symbol of misery. That’s the kind of story that keeps you up at night. It feels like the core of every workplace comedy, from Dilbert to Office Space. Michael: It’s the central question in Nikil Saval's incredible book, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. He digs into this exact problem: how our physical workspaces have been shaped, not always for the better, over the last 200 years. Kevin: And Saval is the perfect person to write this. He's not just a historian with a PhD from Stanford; he's a labor organizer and now a Pennsylvania State Senator. He comes at this with a real-world perspective on worker dignity, which you feel on every single page. It’s why the book got such a positive reception, I think. It’s not just academic. Michael: Exactly. He's not just telling us about desks and chairs; he's uncovering the hidden power dynamics that have shaped our entire working lives. And the story doesn't start with a modern office building or a tech campus. It starts in a place you'd never expect: with the deep, personal anxieties of 19th-century clerks. Kevin: Clerks? Honestly, when I think of a 19th-century clerk, I picture some poor soul from a Dickens novel, hunched over a ledger, probably getting consumption. It doesn't sound like a job anyone would want. Michael: That’s the paradox. On the surface, it was tedious, poorly paid, and seen by many as unmanly work because you weren't producing anything tangible. But it held a promise that factory work or farming didn't.

Kevin: What was that promise? Better hours? Free quill pens? Michael: The promise was upward mobility. The dream of becoming a partner. Saval tells this fantastic story about a young man named Edward Tailer in 1848 New York. He gets a job as a clerk at a dry goods importer. The office is tiny, dimly lit, and his job is just filing receipts and delivering bills. Kevin: Sounds thrilling. Let me guess, the pay was terrible. Michael: You have no idea. He was making fifty dollars a year. Kevin: Fifty! A year? That’s not a salary, that’s a rounding error. That’s like the 1840s version of an unpaid internship where they give you a travel stipend. Michael: It basically was! Tailer was constantly complaining in his diary. He was worried about his eyesight from the poor light, he hated the manual labor, and he was deeply status-conscious. He knew people looked down on clerks as weak or effeminate. But he stuck with it. He asked for a raise to $150, arguing he needed it to be self-sufficient. His boss stalled, and Tailer grew more and more resentful. Kevin: I can relate to that feeling. So what happened? Did he get the raise and live happily ever after? Michael: He eventually got it, but he was never satisfied. He saw the company's profits soaring and felt his contribution was completely undervalued. After a couple of years, he left for a sales job. His old boss actually said Tailer's greatest failing was his "excessive ambition." Kevin: But that ambition is the whole point! That’s what the office sold him on. It wasn't about the work itself, which was mind-numbing. It was about the possibility of escaping that work and becoming the boss. Michael: Precisely. The office was born from this tension. It was a place of both hope and deep anxiety. You were in this strange social purgatory—you weren't a blue-collar laborer, but you certainly weren't an owner. You were an apprentice capitalist, always performing, always trying to prove your worth, living in fear of being seen as unproductive. Kevin: That sounds exhausting. And it explains so much about modern office culture. The performative busyness, the obsession with looking productive even when you're not. It’s been baked in from the start. Michael: It has. And this environment created a unique kind of psychological strain. Herman Melville captured it perfectly in his story "Bartleby, the Scrivener." Bartleby is a clerk who one day just... stops. When his boss asks him to do a task, he replies with that famous, haunting line: "I would prefer not to." Kevin: Oh, I know that feeling. That’s the internal monologue of every person in a pointless two-hour meeting. Michael: Exactly. It’s the ultimate passive resistance. Bartleby represents the human spirit hitting a wall in the face of meaningless, repetitive work. He’s the ghost in the machine of that early office, a quiet rebellion against the whole system. But that intimate, small-scale office, where you could at least see the boss and dream of taking his place, was about to be completely obliterated. Kevin: What happened? Michael: One man, and one very cold, very rational idea.

Michael: That man was Frederick Taylor, an efficiency expert. And his idea was summed up in a chillingly simple quote: "In the past the man has been first. In the future, the system must be first." Kevin: Yikes. That sounds like something a movie villain would say right before unleashing an army of robots. What did that mean for the office? Michael: It meant the end of the office as a place of apprenticeship and the birth of the office as a "paper factory." Taylor’s philosophy, which became known as Taylorism or Scientific Management, was all about efficiency. He believed any job could be broken down into its smallest possible components, timed with a stopwatch, and optimized. Knowledge and skill were taken away from the worker and given to the manager. Kevin: So, you’re no longer a clerk learning a trade. You’re a human cog in a giant information-processing machine. Your only job is to perform one tiny, repetitive task as fast as possible. Michael: Exactly. And to make these new paper factories run, corporations needed a massive new labor force. This is where we get what Saval calls the "White-Blouse Revolution." Between 1870 and 1920, the number of clerical workers exploded from 80,000 to 3 million. And by the end of that period, nearly half of them were women. Kevin: That’s a seismic shift. Why women, specifically? Michael: For a few reasons, some of them quite cynical. They were seen as more dexterous and better suited for repetitive detail work. And, crucially, they could be paid far less than men. One manager, a disciple of Taylor, literally wrote that women were preferable for secretarial roles because they weren't "averse to doing minor tasks" that would "irk and irritate ambitious young men." Kevin: Wow. The quiet part said very, very loud. So women get access to the workforce, which is a form of independence, but they’re immediately siloed into these lower-status, factory-like roles. Michael: It was a double-edged sword. It offered an escape from domestic servitude or grueling factory work, and a path to a certain middle-class respectability. But it also created intense social friction. The office, once an all-male space, was now a place of charged gender dynamics. Kevin: I can only imagine the tension. Michael: It sometimes boiled over in tragic ways. Saval recounts the story of Shirley McIntyre, a stenographer at Chase National Bank in the 1920s. An accounting clerk named Walter Mayer fell for her and proposed. She initially accepted, but then, after getting a "taste of the high life" being taken out by her superiors, she rejected him, calling him an "inferior." Kevin: Oh no. Michael: Mayer was devastated. He confronted her at the office, she rebuffed him again, and he shot and killed her before attempting suicide. The media coverage was even more shocking. It portrayed Mayer, the murderer, with sympathy—as a symbol of "ailing white-collar manhood," a victim of a woman whose ambition and higher salary had threatened the natural order. Kevin: That is absolutely chilling. He murders her, and he's the victim? It shows how deep the anxiety ran. A woman's economic independence was seen as a direct threat to a man's identity. Michael: It was a powerful and dangerous current running just beneath the surface of this new, "modern" office. The space was becoming more efficient, more "scientific," but also more fraught with these very human, very volatile emotions. And the physical design of the office was about to go through another radical change to try and manage it all.

Kevin: So if these offices were becoming such miserable, high-pressure paper factories, how did we end up with the slick, perk-filled corporate campuses we see today? The Googleplex, the Apple "spaceship"—places that look more like resorts than offices. Michael: That's the next chapter of the story. After World War II, corporations started fleeing the crowded, diverse cities for the suburbs. They built these sprawling, self-contained headquarters that Saval calls "corporate sanctuaries." Think of AT&T's Bell Labs or the Connecticut General headquarters. These were architectural marvels, designed by the best architects of the day. Kevin: What was the thinking behind them? Michael: The idea was to create a perfect, harmonious environment that would foster creativity and loyalty. They had beautiful landscaping, modern art, flexible open-plan interiors designed by geniuses like Florence Knoll, and tons of amenities—recreational facilities, classes, you name it. It was a "private corporate welfare state," as one writer put it. Kevin: It sounds amazing. A workplace designed for human well-being. What was the catch? Michael: The catch was conformity. This was the era of the "Organization Man," the man in the gray flannel suit. These utopian campuses were also designed to create the ideal corporate citizen. Companies like IBM had strict dress codes—dark suits, white shirts, black ties. They used personality tests to weed out anyone who wouldn't fit the mold. The goal was a harmonious, efficient, and totally homogenous workforce. Kevin: So it’s a gilded cage. You get security and comfort, but you have to surrender a piece of your individuality. The system is still first. Michael: The system is always first. And this brings us back to the cubicle. The open-plan offices of these corporate sanctuaries, while beautiful, were often chaotic and distracting. They were just a prettier version of the paper factory. And one man, a designer named Robert Propst, had a vision to fix it. Kevin: The man who died full of regret. Michael: The very same. Propst worked for the furniture company Herman Miller. He hated the open office. He saw it as a wasteland that destroyed privacy, focus, and identity. He wanted to give workers back their autonomy. So in the 1960s, he designed something called the "Action Office." Kevin: Which became the cubicle. Michael: It was the direct ancestor. But Propst's original vision was brilliant. It wasn't a small, fixed box. It was a flexible, three-walled, modular system with adjustable-height desks, display surfaces, and different components you could arrange yourself. It was meant to be a tool for liberation, giving knowledge workers a private, customizable space to think and create. Kevin: Hold on. That actually sounds... fantastic. An adjustable desk, privacy, a space I can make my own? I would love that! How on earth did that beautiful idea become the soul-crushing beige box we all know and hate? Michael: It was a classic case of a great idea being corrupted by cost-cutting and a lack of imagination. Companies saw the Action Office and, instead of seeing a tool for liberation, they saw a way to cram more people into less space. They stripped it of its flexibility, made the walls a uniform height, used cheap materials, and arranged them in these rigid, monotonous grids. They created the "cubicle farm." Kevin: They took his dream of a personalized cockpit for the mind and turned it into a human veal pen. Michael: That's a perfect way to put it. Propst was horrified. He called the bastardized version "monolithic insanity." He spent the rest of his life trying to distance himself from it. And that brings us full circle to that viral video from 2008, the one titled "Security Cam Footage of Cubicle Rage to the Extreme Is Every Cube Dweller’s Fantasy." Kevin: I remember that video. A guy just completely snaps. He throws his monitor, kicks down the partition walls... it was both terrifying and, for anyone who's worked in a cubicle, deeply, deeply relatable. Michael: It's the modern-day Bartleby. But instead of quietly saying "I would prefer not to," he's screaming his frustration through violence against the physical environment that cages him. It’s the tragic, unintended outcome of a utopian dream.

Kevin: This whole history is just incredible. It completely reframes how I think about the place I spend eight hours a day. It’s not just a building with desks. It's a stage where these huge battles over control, status, and freedom have been playing out for two centuries. Michael: That's the core insight of Saval's book. From the anxious clerk dreaming of becoming a partner, to the woman in the paper factory fighting for her dignity, to the enraged cubicle dweller smashing his monitor—the office has never been a neutral space. It is a physical manifestation of our deepest conflicts over what work is, and what it should be. Kevin: It makes you look at your own desk differently, doesn't it? Whether it's in a cubicle, an open-plan office, or your own home. You start to ask: Is this space designed for me to thrive, or is it designed for a system to control me? Michael: Exactly. And that's the question Saval leaves us with. The history of the office is a series of well-intentioned failures and unintended consequences. But by understanding that history, we can start to be more intentional about what we build next. We can demand spaces that respect our humanity. Kevin: It’s a powerful thought. It’s not just about asking for a better chair; it’s about asking for a better way to work. For our listeners, what's the one thing about your workspace—past or present—that you'd change if you had a magic wand? A wall you’d tear down, or maybe one you’d build? Let us know on our socials. We'd love to hear your stories. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.