The early case for telecommuting—made most prominently by Alvin Toffler in his best-selling The Third Wave in 1980—had a strong romantic flavor to it. For futurists like Toffler, the home office would be an “electronic cottage” that might “glue the family together again,” provide “greater community stability,” and even trigger a “renaissance among voluntary organizations.” Forget about bowling alone: In Toffler’s future, we’d all be telecommuting together! (Toffler, it must be said, was only popularizing ideas that had been aired many decades earlier. For example, Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, had already speculated in his landmark book The Human Use of Human Beings about how an architect in Europe might use a fax-like machine to supervise the construction of a building in America.)
The business press eagerly swallowed such stories of emancipation through technology; the San Jose Mercury News enthused in 1983, "Home computers are nurturing working mothers.” Back then, it didn’t seem unreasonable to expect that the "electronic cottage” might one day allow us, as Karl Marx once famously put it, “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.” For Toffler and his followers, humans would use computers to get more work done in less time while bypassing the alienating experience of a 9-to-5 city job.