In 1938, a London stage play told the story of a husband who drove his wife insane. In order to convince the wife that her own brain had become an unreliable narrator, the husband dimmed the gaslights in their home and told the wife she imagined the change. The play gave rise to the term “gaslighting,” which came to mean an insidious kind of emotional abuse.

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This past spring, a duo of Dutch designers managed to gaslight an entire small freelance workforce. First, they created a co-working space full of perks, then shifted those surroundings over the course of a month. What started out as a hot, new workspace full of eye-popping furnishings and even a resident bunny soon morphed into rows of gray cubicles watched over by a controlling virtual boss. While some freelancers stopped coming in to work, others stuck with it. Meanwhile, the artists measured their reactions.

Celine de Waal Malefit (left) and Jorien Kemerink (right).

Unbeknownst to the workers, Studio KNOL’s Celine de Waal Malefijt and Jorien Kemerink had been enlisted by contemporary art gallery MU to take over the institution’s space on the second floor of a revamped factory building. “We had the space for one month, and we could do whatever we wanted,” Kemerink recalls. Soon, the two were advertising the area as a new “flex” working space, a trend that’s become more popular in the Netherlands as companies experiment with flexible hours and creative benefits. De Waal Malefijt and Kemerink started off by making the space as over-the-top and Google-esque as possible, throwing in a zen rock garden, a swing, and even a bed that a person could crawl into with a laptop. Workers subscribed for just $5 a month, and after just two weeks, de Waal Malefijt and Kemerink had 50 regulars.

Credit: Christian Bakker, Anna Dekker, Celine de Waal Malefit, and Jorien Kemerink.

But that’s when the surroundings began to change. One day, a rug disappeared. Then all the plants. The workers became most upset when they found out the rabbit, named David Brent (after the British The Office character who was the even-more caustic predecessor to Steve Carrel’s version), had left the zen rock garden for good.

“We told people that the rabbit was gone because some of them were allergic,” de Waal Malefijt says. The workers had also been told that the space would be transforming in response to their own input from user surveys. So when de Waal Malefit and Kemerink drained all color from the room and moved the furniture to a central area, the designers reported that user surveys had asked for more “concentration spaces.”

Credit: Christian Bakker, Anna Dekker, Celine de Waal Malefit, and Jorien Kemerink.

“After a while it became clear something strange was happening,” Kemerink says.

By the end of the month, de Waal Malefijt and Kemerink had slowly converted all the furniture to rows of numbered gray cubicles watched over by a screen with a virtual boss, played by well-known Dutch actor Steye van Dam. Every few hours, van Dam’s remote boss character led the room in a series of exercises meant to prevent cramping. The designers had also installed movement sensors so that if a worker got up to get a cup of coffee, van Dam might catch the crime and issue a warning: “Please, number 14, it’s not time for a break yet.”