>"What the troubled history of telecommuting tells us about its future"What will the Covid-19 pandemic look like from the future? Perhaps the exceptional imagery will be most lasting: personless cityscapes, protesters in masks (and anti-mask protesters), the empty shelves where toilet paper used to be, death-count infographics, and denialist comment threads. But for the middle class and its remnants, those who worked from home, this period will be remembered with a different array of images. Theirs was a narrower horizon: a semipermanent Zoom meeting with colleagues in AirPods and athleisure, interrupted by the occasional surprise of a pet or a child. Exile from the office has been cast as one of this plague’s few consolations—and, we are told, a transformation that is already set in semipermanence.