The side hustle to my side hustle is helping make the social side of side hustles more fun. So many people seem to think the collective noun for free agents is “market” as in, Hobbesian gig market with race to the bottom pricing dynamics and ugly ratings manipulation games.
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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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You should look at Hollywood and the film industry: they have a strong union that provides labor protections and a social safety net, along with very specialized collaborations of hundreds of people for several months to produce very complex movies and pieces of art.
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The “Hollywood model” was very popular among free agency/gig economy researchers about ten years ago. Many books written then referenced it. It’s great for explaining the problem, but Hollywood’s actual solution is lousy outside the peculiarities of the film industry.
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