Walk into almost any coworking space today and you’ll encounter a peculiar hum. Not the raucous laughter of a café, not the rattle of a typewriter in a 1920s garret, not even the concentrated hush of a library. Instead, it is the low murmur of laptops opening and Slack notifications pinging, punctuated by conversations that circle the same themes: tax optimization, passive income, and content funnels. A modern salon, yes—but a salon of the entrepreneurial self.
This is not to dismiss the energy of these places outright. There is a charge that lingers in any room where strangers assemble with their own projects, their own half-formed dreams. But the character of that charge feels unmistakably shaped by the culture we live within. Coworkings promise serendipity, the possibility of connection, but what they most reliably produce are atomized subjects of neoliberalism: the solopreneur, the self-entrepreneurial project, the business-of-one.
In this way, coworkings reveal themselves as paradoxical sites. On the one hand, they feel like incipient crucibles for something generative—a place where ideas might spark across difference, where a conversation at the coffee machine could spiral into an unexpected collaboration. On the other hand, they seem almost structurally designed to narrow that potential into banality: a logic of self-branding, of "freedom-based" entrepreneurship.
This banality should not be mistaken as a failure of imagination. It is, in fact, the precise imagination late capitalism demands. When you overhear people swapping notes about moving their tax residency to Paraguay or which platform they host their courses on, you are not listening to creativity cut short. You are hearing the default imagination of an economic system that has hollowed out the conditions for collective thought, and replaced them with optimization rituals. This is the texture of the contemporary coworking salon: not absence of thought, but a managed abundance of the wrong kind.
Coworkings as incubators of the entrepreneurial self
If 1920s Paris tempts us with the glamour of rupture, coworkings tempt us with the glamour of freedom. A desk, wifi, coffee, and community: the simple promise that you can work from anywhere, belong anywhere, build something of your own anywhere. Yet behind this promise lies a quieter architecture.
Spend enough time inside one and the patterns become visible. The bulletin boards advertise workshops on scaling your solopreneur business, mastering personal branding, and optimizing productivity stacks. The meetups are themed around growth hacking, SEO tricks, and investment strategies. Even the architecture whispers it: hot desks for flexible commitment, glass-walled meeting rooms for the performance of professionalism, and subscription tiers that map directly onto hierarchies of access. Everything is designed to reinforce a particular imagination of freedom: freedom as making money without the need to depend on an employer, or a location-dependent job.
This banality is not incidental. It is structural. As Guy Debord wrote in The Society of the Spectacle, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Coworkings are spectacles of productivity. They mediate our relations with each other through the visible posture of being busy. What is produced in these rooms is not just code, copy, or design files. What is produced is a subjectivity: a person who lives and works as if this were the only imaginable mode of existence.
Ivan Illich, in Tools for Conviviality, warned of the danger of tools that shape us more than we shape them. Coworkings seem convivial on the surface—spaces for encounter, collaboration, exchange. Yet within the culture they inhabit, that conviviality is often overlaid by a deeper rhythm: the neoliberal expectation that each of us operate as a business-of-one, accountable only to ourselves, responsible for our own safety nets, measuring others less as collaborators than as potential clients. The result is less community than parallelism: a room of isolated entrepreneurs pursuing personal freedom in ways that quietly echo the very economic logics they might believe themselves to be resisting.
But again, the banality of coworking is not the failure of imagination, but rather the exact imagination late capitalism demands. To overhear yet another conversation about dropshipping, tax advantages in Portugal, or the relative merits of online shopping cart platforms is not to witness boredom—it is to witness the triumph of a system that has replaced cultural ferment with perpetual self-incubation.
Of course, there are moments that cut against the grain. A writer sketching notes for a poem at their desk. A software developer working on an experimental tool that has no business model. A conversation about art or politics that sneaks in during the break between calls. These are the cracks where other imaginaries leak through. But the structure of coworking, as it currently exists, does not amplify those cracks. It seals them, smooths them over with the next round of networking events.
The coworking space is thus a strange hybrid: it borrows the aura of the salon, but its function more closely resembles that of the incubator. Its real output is often not ideas in collision, but entrepreneurial selves polished for market readiness.
And yet—there is still the hum, the charge, the sense that something more could happen here. The question is not whether coworkings are banal. They are. The question is whether that banality can be bent, misused, or ruptured into something else.
Archival hunger: 1920s Paris and the myth of genius scenes
To invoke the salon is, almost inevitably, to invoke Paris. The 1920s linger in cultural memory like a half-smoked cigarette: the smell of Gauloises, the chalk on café tabletops, the constellation of names that have become shorthand for genius. Hemingway writing in the corner of La Closerie des Lilas. Gertrude Stein hosting Picasso and Matisse in her apartment on Rue de Fleurus. Fitzgerald and Zelda drifting between cafés on the Left Bank, seeking escape from their own dramas in the company of other exiles. To imagine a salon is to imagine these smoky interiors, these clusters of artists and writers and thinkers gathered together, reshaping language, painting, politics.
The nostalgia for 1920s Paris is seductive precisely because it feels like a moment of rupture: a place where difference collided, where modernism took shape, where avant-garde movements announced themselves. Yet, this canon of genius was always stratified. Access was circumscribed by race, class, gender, and nationality. The salons of Montparnasse may have welcomed broke American novelists, but they did not welcome everyone. They were not neutral crucibles of creativity. They were curated spaces of privilege, their borders just as policed as coworkings and the countries they exist within today.
Gertrude Stein herself, often mythologized as the patron of genius, was selective in her invitations and ruthless in her dismissals. The “Lost Generation” was lost in part because they were unmoored from the economies of their homelands, but they were also buoyed by privilege: passports that allowed them to settle in Paris, currencies that stretched further in the wake of war, and networks of publishers and patrons who amplified their voices. It was a Eurocentric canon in formation.
And even in that mythic Paris, the exclusions were stark. Black artists and writers such as Langston Hughes and Josephine Baker did make their mark on the city, but their presence is often footnoted rather than foregrounded. The Harlem Renaissance had its own salons in New York—spaces like A’Lelia Walker’s “Dark Tower,” where Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Countee Cullen gathered. These rooms, too, were crucibles of art and politics, but they are rarely folded into the mainstream imagination of what a “salon” looks like. Nostalgia for Paris blinds us to these other genealogies.
Feminist consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s functioned as salons of another kind—spaces where women gathered not to perform genius, but to name the structures of oppression shaping their lives. These were not banquets of brilliance; they were crucibles of survival, articulation, transformation. Zine-making collectives in the 1980s and 1990s extended that lineage, convening around folding tables in apartments and bookstores, turning scraps of paper into counter-publics.
To yearn for Paris is to yearn for rupture. But rupture did not belong to Paris alone. It has flickered in Harlem apartments, feminist kitchens, anarchist squats, university cafés, and makeshift libraries across the globe. When we cast coworking spaces as “modern salons,” we import the romance of Montparnasse, but we risk ignoring the exclusions that defined it, and the alternatives that have always existed elsewhere.
Perhaps our hunger is not really for Paris at all. Perhaps what we crave is density: the proximity of difference, the possibility of encounter, and the sense that history is being written in the margins of the café table.
The nostalgia persists because it points to something real: the desire for spaces where art, thought, and life rub against each other, producing sparks. But to transpose Paris 1920s onto digital nomad coworkings of the 2020s without critique is to repeat the exclusions of the past. If coworkings are to be remembered as crucibles, they must learn not only from Montparnasse cafés but also from the Harlem salons, feminist gatherings, and zine circles that broaden the lineage of rupture.
Coworking otherwise: incipient infrastructures for cultural rupture
If coworkings today are designed as incubators of entrepreneurial selves, then the task is not merely to critique them, but to imagine how they might be otherwise. For spaces are never neutral—they carry the politics we bring into them, and they can be bent toward logics not yet fully realized. To sit inside a coworking is to feel, faintly, the hum of possibility: the potential for encounter, for dialogue, for rupture. What would it take to seize that possibility?
History reminds us that rupture rarely announces itself in advance. The Montparnasse cafés of the 1920s were not branded as incubators of modernism; they were simply places where artists and writers gathered, where arguments stretched long into the night, where the boundaries of form were tested in conversation before they were tested on the page. Similarly, the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s did not market themselves as world-historical laboratories of theory. They were living rooms where women spoke, sometimes for the first time, about experiences of oppression that had been rendered invisible. These modest spaces became incipient infrastructures of cultural rupture: not because they were designed for it, but because those inside bent them toward other purposes.
Coworkings, too, could be bent. Imagine if, instead of marketing meetups, the weekly calendar included sessions on critical theory or collective art-making. Imagine a room where solopreneurs turned their parallel work into shared projects: not just freelancing side-by-side, but co-creating zines or experimental media together. Imagine if the common table became less a staging ground for laptops and more a staging ground for conversation—for speculative pedagogy, for debates about politics and aesthetics, for the messy ferment of thought in public.
There are precedents. Black Mountain College in North Carolina (1933–1957) operated as an experimental school where artists, poets, and thinkers collapsed the distinction between pedagogy and practice, living and making. It seeded generations of experimental thinkers precisely because it resisted the logic of productivity and embraced the logic of encounter. Zapatista encuentros in Chiapas, Mexico, convened autonomous communities and global allies not to scale a brand, but to share strategies of resistance and worldmaking. DIY zine circles in punk and queer subcultures turned kitchens and backrooms into publishing houses of refusal, offering infrastructures of circulation outside the logics of profit.
Each of these examples suggests that rupture rarely happens in optimized environments. It happens in spaces porous enough to allow for collision, friction, experiment. Coworkings, as they stand within a globalized economy of corporate capitalism, are optimized to prevent friction: to smooth out difference into marketable networking, and to turn encounter into transaction. To imagine them otherwise requires reintroducing friction deliberately.
This does not mean rejecting the infrastructure entirely. The high-speed wifi, the tables, the proximity—they are useful. What matters is how they are inhabited. What would it look like to misuse coworkings as commons of thought, rather than offices of optimization? Could the same glass-walled rooms host reading groups instead of networking sessions? Could the coffee breaks become opportunities for collaborative critique, rather than sales leads? Could these spaces be remembered, one day, as crucibles of new movements—today’s Montparnasse cafés, where the banal tools of productivity were repurposed into the scaffolding of rupture?
It is tempting to say this is unlikely. And perhaps it is. The neoliberal gravity is strong. But history offers us countless examples of spaces repurposed against their design. Squats turned into cultural centers. Classrooms turned into free schools. Cafés turned into revolutions. Why should coworkings be exempt?
To imagine coworking otherwise is not to declare them utopias. It is to acknowledge that every gathering space carries latent potential, and that potential depends less on architecture than on intention. The question, again, is not whether coworkings are banal—again, they are—but whether their banality can be interrupted. Whether, in their cracks, something else can take root. Whether we are willing to misuse them, to bend them, to gather not just around laptops but around questions that matter.
For the salon is not a fixed form. If coworkings are to become crucibles of rupture, it will not be because they were designed for it. It will be because those inside insisted on it.
Between banality and potential
Coworkings today oscillate between banality and potential. They are pseudo-salons where neoliberal logics dominate. But they are also fragile cultural technologies, humming with a possibility that has not yet been fully claimed.
It is easy to dismiss them as irredeemably banal. But to do so would be to miss the quieter truth: these spaces are what we make of them. They carry not just the politics of their design, but the politics of their use. The Montparnasse cafés of the 1920s were banal, too, until someone began to argue, to draft, to disrupt at the table. The feminist living rooms of the 1970s were ordinary until women began to name their oppression aloud. The Harlem apartments of the Renaissance were simply rooms until they became crucibles of art and liberation.
Coworkings are sorting rooms of privilege, shaped by passport regimes and income disparities. They are nodes in a global economy. But they also gather bodies in proximity. They also create opportunities for meaningful encounter across people from different places. And such opportunities, however banal, can always be bent.
So the question lingers: what conversations might we seed here? What projects might we birth, if not only ourselves? What would it take for a coworking space to be remembered not merely as another social productivity hub, but as today’s Montparnasse café—a crucible of rupture, a room where something shifted, a table where a future otherwise was spoken into being?
