We would all be working from home, occasionally travelling into a shared workspace in our electric vehicles to collaborate on some ESG-approved product launches, while popping out at lunchtime to graze on some plant-based meat.

There were many megatrends that were expected to dominate economic activity this decade. Each attracted vast sums of venture capital money and generated lots of excitement on the sharemarket, as capitalism was re-orientated towards a more caring, inclusive way of doing business.

Venture capital excess was chronicled in the show “WeCrashed’, about the rise and fall of WeWork.Credit: AP

Yet 2023 turned out to have been the year when so-called “woke corporatism” keeled over and died. One by one, over-hyped fads such as working from home and environmental, social and governance (ESG) have imploded. And it’s likely the system will be more robust as a result.

Looking back on the past 12 months, there have been some standout themes. Interest rates returned to more normal levels after 15 years of ultra-cheap money. China emerged from lockdown, and its path to global economic dominance no longer looks so clear. The US continued to outperform Europe, and Germany descended into what looks like a deep structural decline.

Nonetheless, something of equal significance has been happening under the surface. Woke corporatism has started to implode. Over the course of 2023, a whole series of over-hyped fads have faltered. Consider the shared workspace.

According to the corporate visionaries, the traditional office would soon be completely redundant, since we would all be on flexi-time, or “working from anywhere”, and all we would need would be a space we could pop into from time to time to catch up on a corporate wellness session before a “breakout yoga class” with our colleagues.

At its peak, the uber-cool WeWork, whose original tagline was “elevating the world’s consciousness”, was valued at $US47 billion ($69 billion) on the assumption that it was revolutionising office life.

Yet it this year filed for bankruptcy, with shareholders losing the bulk of their money, and many of its smaller rivals started to struggle.