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.
Conversation
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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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.

