The Atlantic's cover asks whether the age of reading is over, arguing that a postliterate society is not one that cannot read but one that increasingly chooses not to. The same week, Fast Company reported a new tactic workers are using to resist return-to-office mandates: essentially performing presence while being mentally absent. These two stories are the same story told in different registers.
The Attention Economy Comes for the Office
RTO resistance is not primarily about commute time or childcare, though those are real. It is about attention architecture. The open-plan office was designed for an era of analog focus, where the hardest thing to do at work was avoid a specific colleague. The digital attention environment means the hardest thing is focus itself. Sending someone to an office does not restore their reading brain. It just adds fluorescent lighting. A 2026 arXiv paper, Economic Evaluations of Language Models by Wan, Hatgis-Kessell, et al., notes that LLMs are now performing economically valuable cognitive work but are not assessed for it. Which raises the question: if AI can do the reading and the drafting, what exactly is the office worker returning to do?
Monday.com Answers the Question
Monday.com laid off hundreds of employees this week, explicitly citing the AI era as the reason. The work management platform is replacing knowledge workers with the tools those workers were using to manage knowledge. The postliterate thesis and the RTO debate and the AI layoffs form a triangle: reading made knowledge work possible, knowledge work filled offices, offices are now half-empty because the work itself is being automated. Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick's essay on enshittification called the internet a condition rather than a tool. The office is now the same kind of problem.