The digital hermitage: How “remote work” has changed over 20 years

Enlarge / Not my actual home office, but you get the idea. (credit: Manuel Breva Colmeiro / Getty Images)
As we look back on the past 20 years of Ars Technica from our 'orbiting HQ,' one of the things we've gotten to witness firsthand is how the nature of working from home has changed. Today, everyone at Ars works from home—and actually, that's how things have been since the very first post on the site's forums.
These days many people work from home in some way, whether they want to or not. Smartphones and perpetual connectivity have pushed work life into our home lives, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. (Thanks, Slack.) But when you work from home full-time, as I have for most of my adult life, it completely redefines the notion of work-life balance.
While I can't and won't speak for all of the Ars staff, I admit that it would be extremely difficult for me to return to working in a traditional office at this point. Though I've only been with Ars for the past seven years, I've been working from home in one form or another since 1990 (as a freelancer and side-gig tech consultant) and full-time since 1994. I have been through each stage of Internet connectivity, from dial-up to ISDN to DSL to cable broadband, and have the battle scars to prove it.
Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments