Conversation

Replying to
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 experiment is revealing just how enormous the potential is if we can get the infrastructure right.
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“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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Replying to
Imagine a true free agent economy backed by a very strong social net, perhaps with UBI as well. Would be a really interesting hybrid of freedom and safety.
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I don’t believe the gig economy on its own will produce the kind of robust economy you want. I support the gig economy, but I think it’s only one piece of the future. Perhaps not unions but we need new ideas for the labor side of the equation.
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Sure. I’m mainly interested in the part that increases creative freedom, risk-taking and entrepreneurial imagination of a non-startup variety. Most labor mechanisms aim to resist and reverse risk being shifted onto them by capital. A zero-sum game that’s good for what it us.
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