Just because free agents don’t free associate through shared employment in paycheck corps doesn’t mean they are lone wolves who either stay out if each other’s way or compete 1:1 in Hobbesian ways. Economic sociability is not limited to markets and corporatized entities.
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That said, infrastructure for doing anything other than engage in bidding wars on upwork is very limited. There’s no way to simply form a team to bid for an opportunity beyond trawling your general social network. There’s no way to talk about gigwork beyond vanilla social media.
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The “enterprise” is a stack of complex software with way deeper collaboration/workflow capabilities than social media. Free agents cobble together ersatz imitations of this stack from underpowered free tools. We need a gigtech software distinct from both consumer and enterprise.
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I wasn’t aware of these problems until recently because in 9 years as a free agent, I did *very* little collaborative work with other free agents. Just farmed out some subcontracts and used a few support people off and on. I used to rationalize this as “I just like working alone”
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Now that I’m actually consciously trying, I think what actually held me back is sheer lack of even the most basic infrastructure. Even just a few months in, the
@yak_collective experiment is revealing just how enormous the potential is if we can get the infrastructure right.Show this thread -
“The fortune in the combinatorial space of free agents” A group of n free agents has at least 2^n ways of creating value, not just n. And that’s an underestimate, since even the same team can collaborate in many different ways. Free agents radically unbundle the corporation.
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While there are a million product ideas in this observation, that’s not where the action is, and I’m not particularly interested in imagining or building “SAP for free agents.” A startup corporation to build a product to unbundle the corporation would be kinda ironic.
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The real action is in figuring out, and validating ways to work in the combinatorial space of free agents. Cobbled-together tools are fine for early experiments. The key is to focus on the content of gig work first, and tools to sustain it second.
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If you start with the tools you’ll simply reinvent a commodity labor market like upwork, or rhapsodize about spherical blockchains in a vaccum we can’t actually use to work or collaborate. To actually unbundle the corporation with free agency you have to work in new patterns.
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I’ve been writing thinking, and even building products for free agent work for over a decade. Even have a patent for multilevel recursive auction collaborative marketplaces, which my team actually built and deployed internally at Xerox 10 years ago
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8086501?oq=marketplaces+venkatesh+rao …Show this thread -
But only now have both the technologies and the free-agent sector matured to the point where you can build out the infrastructure for real. Back then I think I was too early. It was pre-blockchain, pre- Stripe, pre-Freshbooks, pre most of the tools in the “passion economy” sector
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The ideas back then were *really* primitive. Mturk seemed like the bleeding edge. Read books like Tom Malone’s Future of Work (inspiration for elance which eventually got absorbed into upwork) and Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation for a historical view. A lot has changed since 2010.
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It’s time for a free-agency renaissance. The pioneer days are over. There’s no need to larp a dangerously and unnecessarily precarious cowboy economy. Time to do some settling and town planning.
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No this is not Metcalfe’s law (network effect). That’s O(n^2). It’s not even Reed’s law (powerset effect), which is O(2^n). It is Reed’s law *as a lower bound* on possibilities https://twitter.com/cedricgc/status/1279511408317591552?s=21 …https://twitter.com/cedricgc/status/1279511408317591552 …
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I once actually tried to compute a formula for the size of this space in closed form and failed. If somebody wants, it is *at least* the set of all possible graphs, directed and undirected, defined on every component of every partition of every subset of the universal set.
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Informally, it is the “number of ways n people can organize into teams” (with only full membership; fractional head counts make thid even bigger). The space of “organizations” is so huge and high dimensional, the part of it we occupy is barely a degenerate crumpled corner.
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Note on navigating the space. You can't just enumerate and brute force search it for good configs, it is too big.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1279520092489781248 …
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