In this sense, companies like Automattic are returning work to its roots. It's not a new, radical idea for work to have meaning and for workers to have both great freedom and pride in the work itself. Instead those ideas are rooted in the origins of work; we've just lost our way. Through the last two centuries, work has become increasingly abstract, which of course, is, in some ways, progress. Fewer people (at least in the First World) are exposed to dangerous, backbreaking labor. But at the same time, we've lost the beneficial effects work used to have on our psychology.
