Maybe you should ask the businesses before you give away their wifi passwords. via screenshot
One of the singular phenomena of the modern age has been the exponential growth of the freelance workforce. Over the past decade they’ve come to command the vote, dominate the cultural narrative, and are now having a bigger effect on the city’s physical landscape than ever. Art studios are losing their spaces to co-working complexes as the sliver of NYC’s work-from-home professional pie grows ever larger. Coffee shops are becoming library-like spaces full of glowing Macs. And now, there’s even a new app called Workfrom that’ll show you “the best places in the city” where you can work remotely. Oh, and it also gives you all their wifi passwords.
Workfrom is a directory of coffee shops, co-working spaces, public library branches and the occasional Whole Foods. The directory includes places like the Greene Grape Annex in Fort Greene which, as you may know, doesn’t exactly like you treating them as your personal workspace. No coffee shop does, frankly, nor should they.
It only takes talking to a barista or two in order to understand why BK coffee shops don’t want to be filled with tappity-tapping freelancers all day long. Some shops — including Greene Grape Annex — have even started to limit their wifi access so they can at least enjoy business turnover, if not genuine human interaction in their establishment.
When we first made our exhaustive list of BK co-working spaces, we never thought coffee shop culture would land here, quiet rooms of hushed voices and “what’s the wifi” customers. Workfrom caters to these very customers. The app, which launched last week on Itunes and Google Play, goes beyond basic coffee shop campout etiquette into territory that feels like an affront to the already volatile state of New York’s dwindling café culture. (more…)
