Only 3 more newsletter issues to go before Art of Gig wraps up on April 30th!
Fifteen years ago, when the modern gig economy was just starting to take off, there was a certain homogeneity to the rosy-eyed takes on the future of work being bandied about. The idea of using the internet to do things in a whole new way was new. Everybody loved all the ideas in the air relatively equally and uncritically — Kevin Kelly’s 1000 true fans, Chris Anderson’s long tail, Tim Ferriss’ 4-hour work-week. It was all good. We were all going to create the brave new world together.
Now that we have more experience, opinions and tastes have started to diverge, and there is the beginning of schools of thought about how to gig. This is a great thing. Dissent is the voice of progress.
I think four main schools are emerging, as shown in the 2×2 below:
I think I personally belong to an emerging pragmatic-romantic school of gig work, where our sensibilities are mainly defined by having a true experimental mindset.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I’m fairly opinionated on various detailed matters like hourly vs. project billing, but here I’m talking about high-level gestalt ideas that people use to organize all their thinking. Ideas that define their style of gig-working.
Bad as in Defaults
In the experimentalist school, we try things, and stick with them if they work, and abandon them if we don’t. We try to get our shit together, but we don’t try to overfit complicated life philosophies to rough-and-ready working theories of what works for us. We don’t read divine meanings into our own fates.
Often, it’s easier to define yourself in terms of what you reject. With divergence and the rise of different schools of thought, this is inevitable. What you accept tends to be complex, plus you’re too close to it to see it clearly. What you reject on the other hand, is sharply defined and clear.
It struck me that I’ve never actually listed out all the ideas that I think are, to varying degrees, bad. Not perhaps bad for everybody, but also not just bad for me as a matter of personality fit and personal tastes. They are less than universal, but more than personal. They are school-of-thought level beliefs about what is bad that I think are shared by a lot of people, not just me.
I think these are ideas that are bad by default, good by exception.
Most of these ideas are ones I associate with either the Gig Optimizer or Gig Supremacist schools. The Gonzo Gigster school — the romantic idealists — is one I have a lot of sympathy for. They are the mad poets of the gig economy who come up with the biggest new ideas, mixed in with a lot of harmlessly bad eccentric ones. They are the ones who often end up drunk and bankrupt and possibly even dead on the streets, but on rare occasions they get really important flashes of inspiration.
I just don’t have the risk appetite to be truly gonzo myself, but I do have my gonzo moments. But there are people who seem to be almost permanently in gonzo mode (no famous ones — all the famous ones tend to be from the left of the diagram), almost like they’re seeking martyrdom in pursuit of the essence of pure gigdom.
So here’s a list of 10 bad ideas. Again, I emphasize — not universally bad, just bad by default, good by exception. If you’re one of the exceptions for whom it could work, by all means go for it.
The List
Since I’m winding down this newsletter, I’m not really looking to pick beefs or even get off some parting shots. Mostly, I’m just trying to sort of complete the package of ideas that’s been this newsletter. Such a package would not be complete without an honest inventory of what I’m against.
These are not necessarily the top 10 worst ideas (those tend to get weeded out since they work for nobody). These are more like 10 representative bad ideas that illustrate overall bad patterns. They work just often enough that schools of thought can coalesce around them. I think they cluster roughly according to the 2×2, but the classifications are not clean.
So in no particular order…here we go.
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FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early): An article I found via Paul Millerd led me to doing this short thread on the FIRE idea. In brief, I think it’s a bad idea for most people to plan around hating work and aggressively solving for “retirement.” It is better to process your feelings about work until you find a way to enjoy and pursue it roughly as long as most people around you. To 65 in most parts of the world today. Because work is actually one of the pleasures of life, when done right. FIRE strikes me as a version of what Bruce Sterling calls acting dead. School: Gig Optimizers
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Gigworker unions: I’ve been open about this. Unions are an obsolete mode of political organization and action that’s both ineffective and entirely captured by a class of untrustworthy leaders. “Solidarity” as an uncritical socialist value has acquired all the baggage on the left that “patriotism” has on the right. There are emerging alternative novel mechanisms worth exploring that don’t require you to subsume your individuality within some sort of 1920s class identity. School: Gig Supremacists
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4-Hour Work Week: All credit to Ferriss for starting a big part of the gig economy conversation, around how hard you should work, but the specifics of the 4HWW model turn me off. Work should be enjoyable, impactful, and serve a purpose for others beyond just you making a living. When it meets those conditions, most people want to work more than 4 hours a week. Solving for minimal work around passive income streams is another way to act dead. If working 100 hour weeks is masochistic, solving for 4 makes you vulnerable to becoming a grifter. School: Gig Optimizers
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Systems and Processes Consulting: Many indies build careers around personally branded process models. The Vogonlogy Pipeline Matrix Method™ or whatever, complete with polished collateral and highly choreographed workshop offerings. 90% of the time, this is vanity bullshit. Quick-and-dirty commodity mental model (a la Weick, What Theory is Not, Theorizing Is) is vastly more valuable and honest. Test of whether your Thing™ is vanity or real: if you open-sourced it and stopped doing it yourself, would others run with it? Or would it be instantly forgotten? The whole advantage of being an indie is that you’re not a part of some bureaucratic machine. If you can’t bring the bespoke quirkiness without the vacuous props, you’re giving the rest of us a bad name. School: Gig Optimizers
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Studio Structures: If an indie tries to operate in “studio” mode, trying to package what they do in the form of a Serious Art and Design Institution™ engaging in the Self-Important Critical Practice of XYZ™ while incubating a Portfolio of Pretentious Projects™ … no. It never ends well. It is barely a good idea for proper firms or partnerships of 4-5 people taking on genuine entrepreneurial-artistic capital risks together. But when a single indie acts like they’re a “studio,” it’s almost invariably bad news. Stop posturing and just do shit, and let the shit speak for itself. The “studio” packaging adds nothing but your visibly aestheticized insecurities. Build what infrastructure you need. Don’t fetishize it, or sell it as a theatrical end in itself. School: Gig Supremacists
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Certifications: This one especially needs the reminder that I’m talking good defaults. While some consulting-specific certifications are worthwhile, and represent unusual or rare skills (like say specialized training dealing with nuclear disasters or something), and others might be required to operate in particular industries (like PMP or Lean Six Sigma, which I think are bullshit, but worth getting for access to certain kinds of gigs), most “soft” certifications are useless bullshit. Like certified life coach? Come on. Either go get an actual psychiatry or clinical psychology degree, or own your advice-giving shtick without attaching sketchy quasi-credentials. In the worst cases, shady certifications are signs of exploitative grifts. School: Cusp between Gig Optimizers and Experimentalists.
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Performative Lifestyles: It’s great that you live on a farm in Podunk, to achieve Work-Life Balance Close to Nature™ or enjoy a Location-Independent Lifestyle. Good for you. But outside of other gigworkers you might be swapping tips with (or more likely showing off to), nobody else cares unless it compromises what you do for others, in which case it is a liability. Keep that shit in the backend. Lead with what you do for others. What you do primarily for yourself, with no benefit (and perhaps even active harm) for anyone else from your doing it, shouldn’t be part of your brand. That just creates narcissistic and self-indulgent optics around the whole gig economy. It’s a bad look for all of us. School: Gig Supremacists
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Resentment as a Service: There is a kind of indie posture that involves basically a continuous muttering and whining about the evils of corporations, middle managers, and the paycheck world in general. It is of course, deeply hypocritical if at the same time you’re deriving much of your income from that world. Often this becomes part of the brand: “You are part of the corrupt mainstream world, and I, pure soul, bring to you the cleansing holy water of the indie economy!” Give it a rest. You made a lifestyle choice that worked for you. Don’t presume to sit in judgement of choices made by others. School: Gig Supremacists
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Missionary Overcompensation: Many indies have trouble processing the fundamentally mercenary nature of what we do, and an undercurrent of guilt about what feels like taking the easy, privileged way out because you can, while others, mostly in paycheck jobs, do more important things. This shows up in the form of mission statements, values statements etc. on websites. This is a bad idea for most people because it tends to foul up more pragmatic marketing, and also keeps your introspection terminally confused. School: Gig Supremacists
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Contrarian Smugness: Contrarian smugness is the posture that results from the idea that you’ve swallowed some sort of work-related red pill and abandoned some false consciousness that others are still laboring under. Something like “Lean Six Sigma is a lie, you should do the OODA Chi-Square Quality instead!” It’s usually just a beef elevated to an assumption that you’re on the moral high-ground. It combines resentment and missionary overcompensation into a kind of contrarian preachiness. School: Gig Supremacists, but with some spillover into Gonzo where the preachiness turns into messianic delusions.
So that’s it for my list of bad ideas. Bad by default, good by exception. What are yours? Do you know which school you lean towards? Do you fit into one of my 2×2 of 4 schools, or does the scheme not apply to you? How would you define your school?
Note: This newsletter will be shutting down on April 30th, 2021, and the archives published as an eBook.
To simplify the shut down, new subscriptions have now been turned off and existing subscriptions have been paused. Existing subscribers will still be able to access the paywalled archives until the list shuts down in May. The rest of you will have to wait for the ebook.