Only 6 more newsletter issues to go before Art of Gig wraps up on April 30th!
A couple of weeks ago I said one of the remaining issues of this newsletter will be devoted to an AMA (Ask Me Anything).
The AMA issue will be next week’s issue (March 25), so if you are interested, reply to this email with your question by Monday, March 22nd. If you want to remain anonymous, please specify that.
Keep your question short and focused so I can address as many as possible within whatever word limit budget I impose. It can be about anything, ranging from big macro trends to personal situations/tactical challenges you’re personally facing in your gig career.
This is the last call at the Art of Gig bar 🍺🥃🍸🍹🍷🥤😎
By way of a prequel, this week, I’ll tackle one of the questions already sent in, by Benjamin Taylor, since it is a nice, broad one, for which I have a longish answer (for the AMA, I’ll be prioritizing questions where I can think of short answers that make me sound clever).
What do you think is the future of indie consulting? Are new patterns emerging?
I don’t think there is such a thing as the future of indie consulting. In a way the whole point of indie consulting is to break free of the company-sized shared futures that bind paycheck employees (that’s the “indie” in indie consulting).
So the real question is, how do you figure out a future for yourself under this umbrella concept of indie consulting? That’s the personal futurism question.
I’m going to attempt an annoying teach-people-to-fish answer, ie lay out how I think indies should tackle the challenge of personal futurism.
As my use of the qualifier personal indicates, we generally assume futurism is for institutions, not individuals. Think tanks conduct futures exercises for countries, corporations, and militaries. Individuals make plans for the future, but don’t generally conduct personal futures exercises.
There is a good reason for that.
Most individuals are employees. For employees, personal futurism gets radically simplified to the future of a specific employer or a set of adjacent employers you might easily move to. So you just have to make plans. The futures pre-work is already done by the context. In fact one of the attractions of working a paycheck job (or joining a religion, or signing up for the military) is that you can outsource futures thinking to a leader. Your own futures decision gets reduced to — does my future lie with this leader or elsewhere?
For indies on the other hand, the future is wide open, and subject to invention, not just choice. As open and subject to invention as it is for institutions.
When I do futurism, I tend to do so obliquely, via design fictions or scenarios. I’ve used both in recent issues of Art of Gig:
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Design fictions: In my issue last week (March 11), I used the device of excerpts from future books to lay out some broad scenarios.
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Scenarios: In my Feb 25 issue, I laid out 4 scenario stories — A New Technocracy, A New Socialist Hope, More Neoliberal Than Thou, and The Empire Strikes Back that help me think about the future as backdrops.
The thing is, neither of these is a prediction/forecast mechanism per se. Design fictions and scenarios only give you an approach to testing your plans, without providing you with a way to actually make plans. They’re like wind tunnels in which you can test airplane designs. But you still have to come up with designs to test.
But you can get to plans from these oblique testing mechanisms via a sort of chicken-and-egg iteration I call test-driven futurism.
Test-Driven Futurism
Suppose you make two shitpost-level starter plans like so:
Plan A: I’ll quit my job now, move to SE Asia and learn Chinese and build an indie consulting career out of China expertise, living on savings in the meantime.
Plan B: I’ll teach myself PyTorch and learn about the retail industry, so when AI in retail takes off in a couple of years, I’ll be able to quit my job and walk into a lot of gigs.
You can test both plans against the four scenarios above, and conclude that (for example), Plan A would work best under More Neoliberal Than Thou, and worst under The Empire Strikes Back, and then based on the relative likelihoods of the four scenarios, you could compute a weighted probability of the plan working well. You could do something similar with the design fictions, which are really implicit scenarios. Then you’d do the same thing with Plan B and compare the results.
As a side-effect, you can also compute the relative attractiveness of different futures across the plans you are considering, which gives you a sense of the future you should be rooting for and trying to make happen. Obviously you should root for, and work towards, futures that play best to the strengths that inspired your plans.
This can lead to surprising conclusions. For example, if you are skilled at crisis management and fire-fighting, and make plans that reflect those strengths, you might find that the most attractive future for you is one that is in constant crisis!
You might feel like an asshole for rooting for such a future, and repress your natural futurism instincts, or rationalize what you’re doing, but there’s no denying your strengths.
In a weird way, the pandemic is almost a dream scenario for epidemiologists (so long as they have protective equipment). And seismologists get to shine when earthquakes happen (so long as they are far from the epicenters). If I were either, while I wouldn’t wish for big pandemics or earthquakes, I’d probably secretly want enough small, contained epidemic/earthquake incidents so people are concerned enough to invest in preparedness — and hire me to help. This is even a trope in some thrillers — the mad scientist who triggers a small crisis because people refuse to listen to their warnings about the Big One.
And back in the real world, arguably the Culture War exists because 15 years ago, a lot of unemployed young people got very good at culture-warring on online forums, and decided to make indie careers out of that strength. Had they been a bit more self-aware about the interplay of personal strengths and preferred futures, maybe they wouldn’t have invented this dark, Gawkerized future for the rest of us. Maybe they’d have found a way to use their powers for good instead.
Anyhow, back to the test-driven futurism process.
Once you’ve ranked various plans (by preference and likelihood of success) and made opening moves on one that seems robustly set up for success in the most likely futures, you can then refine it. And along the way, you can work to make those futures more likely, using the chicken-egg process of planning-and-futures-thinking as an engine of self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is easy to reduce to a spreadsheet exercise. Therein lies a problem…
Death by Spreadsheet
Even if you are okay with test-driven futurism leading you to root for (and work towards) dark futures that play to your strengths, there’s actually still a problem, an amoral one.
I think exercises like spreadsheet futurism are important, but they leave the question of how to make plans in the first place unanswered, especially imaginative plans with an element of invention to them. I mean, isn’t that why you went indie or are contemplating doing so? To invent or reinvent yourself? Do you really think you’re going to get there by matrixing out plans and scenarios on spreadsheets?
There is a chicken-and-egg problem running on empty here. You speculate to create background scenarios to work with, then make plans inspired by them in illegible ways, and then try to test them against refined versions of the original scenario, which leads to refined plans, which leads to further refined scenarios, and so on ad infinitum.
You do that and you hopefully bootstrap a probabilistically future-proof plan out of a shitpost-level initial casual thought.
In all likelihood, if you do this, you’ll converge on slightly dull, imitative scripts that are just as confining as the ones you left behind/plan to leave behind.
In my experience, by itself, test-driven futurism is a dispiriting, demotivating, and tiresome exercise. It is death by spreadsheet. A distant cousin of death by powerpoint. All you need to kill yourself that way is more rationality than sense.
Test-driven futurism leaves you with a general sense of the overwhelming complexity of the future and the dozens of ways it can and will prove you wrong, even in the “known unknowns” department, and an uninspired plan with which to meet it. And we haven’t even talked about unknown unknowns/black swans. The only way to future-proof your life is to act dead to greater or lesser extent. Test-driven futurism is futurism within the iron cage of spreadsheets.
That’s the reason it is primarily risk-averse bureaucratic organizations that approach futures this way. It does work to bootstrap plans, but the plans that emerge tend to be uninspired and conservative, like a hedged portfolio constructed by a doomsday prepper with a lot of money. A case of risk-management procedural skill overwhelming imagination and openness to experience.
You don’t even have to go through the exercise to land on the “answer” it is rigged to produce when pushed to the limit of absurdity with enough money in play — save enough to build a bunker in Wyoming or New Zealand, and pack it with guns and supplies.
You’re not going to end up doing interesting, noteworthy things with your future if you limit yourself to this kind of test-driven futurism. It is a fundamentally nihilistic way to approach the future. The more you have to lose, the more apocalyptic the futures you will imagine.
How do you look at the future in a way that might make you can a differentiated part of a living, growing, thriving condition? How do you avoid becoming a bunker-secured survivalist in an apocalyptic future predicted by your spreadsheet, and which you help turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy?
How do you avoid death by spreadsheet?
How can you become one of those who, in some small way, helps invent the surprising, serendipitous future rather than predict the doom-and-gloom one?
A different, complementary approach to futurism helps you approach planning from that angle. I call it fixed-point futurism.
Fixed-Point Futurism
Fixed-point futurism is related to the idea of inventing the future rather than predicting it.
You’ve probably heard the Alan Kay line that it is easier to invent the future than it is to predict it. The line is generally invoked in relation to huge inventions, like semiconductors, or the personal computer (which Kay had a hand in) that “invent” the future for everybody.
Much as I like that sort of thing, and though indies generally are pretty creative and talented, I definitely don’t expect 99.9% of you to participate in such revolutionary acts of invention. I’ll be really happy for the 0.1% of you who do end up being part of such big inventions. When you do, I hope you’ll remember the rest of us and toss us some juicy gigs.
For the remaining 99.9%, how do you apply the invent-the-future idea at a more modest, personal scale?
It’s simple: don’t make plans, choose fixed points.
Choose one thing to make true, force to be true, about the future. Something that is likely to be within your control, no matter how the future plays out. Something that isn’t rationally derived from something else more basic, but is sort of arbitrary and self-defining. The more nonsensical the better. The fix for the default disease of having more rationality than sense is to aim at more nonsense than sense.
It could be as simple as “I’ll only wear blue shirts from now on.” Now that’s something you have a good chance of making true whether the future is a zombie apocalypse or fusion-powered starships.
Whatever the future, you’ll be wearing a blue shirt in it, dammit! That will show the universe who’s in charge!
It sounds silly, but it’s really amazing how such small acts of assertion of personal agency, far short of putting a “dent in the universe,” can magically make life feel more meaningful. You’re arbitrarily using your life to declare that futures where you wear blue shirts are better than ones in which you don’t.
Many people intuitively do fixed-point futurism. In fact, in the US, the so-called “American Dream” has historically been based on the standard fixed point of home-ownership. As in, “no matter what happens in the future, I’ll be a homeowner.”
A way to understand fixed-point futurism is to think of it as a priceless commitment. No matter what happens, and no matter what else goes wrong or off-the-rails in weird ways, you’ll make sure one thing goes really, really right, even if you have to go crazy making sure it does. In other words, you’re committing future agency and surplus resources unconditionally to the defense of your fixed point. You can’t predict the future, but you know what you’ll value as “priceless” within it.
The nice thing about fixed-point futurism is that you don’t have to worry about tradeoffs. You don’t have to constantly revisit cost-benefit analyses. You don’t have to worry about competing priorities.
The fixed point is priceless, so you can commit to it without knowing lots of important things about the future. For example, if your fixed point is home ownership, then you have no idea what interest rates will be, or how you’ll make the mortgage payment in March 2032, but you know that psychologically you’re invested enough in the idea of being a home-owner that you’ll do what it takes, and sacrifice other things as necessary. Home ownership is the standard by which you have chosen to measure the value of everything else in your personal future. In your personal futurism exercise, all roads lead to home ownership. If you find yourself googling rent-vs-own calculators, you aren’t truly committed to home ownership as a fixed-point. You’re committed to maximizing money, which is another way of saying you have no fixed points. Money has become the measure of your life, because there’s nothing you measure the value of money with.
Your chosen fixed point is basically a proxy for your identity. To contemplate giving up the fixed point is to contemplate changing who you are at a deep level. Those are the stakes of fixed points. It’s not that you’re not willing to change at a deep level, even a death-and-resurrection rebirth level. It’s about what stakes represent the existential cost of that depth of personal change (there’s an old Simpsons episode where Homer has an existential crisis over looking for a replacement pair of blue pants).
So your choice of fixed point is an indirect expression of your identity attachments, in particular the priceless parts. This is why the fixed points people intuitively pick are typically the obvious identity-linked ones in a given culture:
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Providing for family
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Participation in religion
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Building a home
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Car/vehicle
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An element of lifestyle like camping or surfing
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Community service
Here’s the thing though, it doesn’t have to be limited to these obvious ones. In fact, unless you are super pessimistic and lacking in confidence about your own ability to do more with your life than merely survive, you probably will have life energy to do more than “provide for family,” no matter what happens in the future. Your fixed-point future is what you solve for assuming you have a surplus beyond what it might take to meet these basics. Your passion mission, as I called it in an issue about a year ago, but generalized to life beyond gigs.
Here’s an unusual one from my own planning. For the last few years, the question of where I might want to settle for good, after 25 years of nomadism, has seemed too complex to tackle. There are too many variables, and the test-driven futurism approach drags me down gloomy, dispiriting, risk-focused bunnytrails like figuring out places most resistant to climate change, a crashing dollar, and earthquakes.
Do I really want to plan my 60s and 70s around fearfully cowering in the safest place I can think of, with potential disasters front and center?
But then, getting back into amateur astronomy last year during the pandemic suddenly made me realize that is a potential simplifying fixed point in my personal futurism. I’d like a future involving a nice big telescope in a place with really good visibility. Miraculously that dissolves a lot of complexity, and changes even the risk perceptions. Like for example, suddenly earthquake risks loom less, and the risks of failing eyesight increase… but there’s a solution to that as well! I could get into amateur radio astronomy, with headphones instead of eyepieces! Might the dollar crash creating a Mad Max world? Well, I should learn to build my own telescopes from junkyard parts in a Mad Max world!
Fixed point futures are strange attractors. Everything else starts revolving around them once you truly commit to them. You’ll know because from rational, spreadsheet perspectives, nonsense will start pulling ahead of sense. Which is a good thing. A decade ago, my motto was Be Slightly Evil. Now it is closer to Be Slightly Nonsensical.
Astronomy is also something of a “priceless” interest for me. While it is not literally priceless, I don’t make decisions about indulging the interest based on cost/benefit utility calculations. But if I commit to it as a proper fixed, point, I will be making decisions about other things based on their friendliness to an astronomy-centric later life. And there will be nothing rational about that. To compare — ten years ago when I went indie, I was choosing where to live based on the very rational criteria of which cities had good airports and a decent flow of techie types traveling through them.
This is a very silly example, but it demonstrates how fixed-point futurism works. By introducing an arbitrary, almost nonsensical stable element in your futures thinking, one that is outside of the calculus of ordinary utility computations and rational expectations, it gives you a simplifying lens with which to view the future. It provides something like a Schelling point for all futures to converge towards, for you personally.
The world may be going to hell with zombies crawling all over the place, but dammit, you’ll be there in your blue shirt, chopping off the heads of the zombies attacking your precious telescope.
The world may be melting down with climate change, but damn it, you’ll be building telescopes that can peer through weird weather patterns. In your blue shirt. While chopping off zombie heads.
Now that’s a hill worth dying on.
The problem with the zombie apocalypse was never that zombies might kill you. Something is going to kill you eventually in any future, and zombies aren’t actually much worse than Covid, car crashes, climate change, or cancer. The question is, what hill is worth dying on, in all futures?
In my December 10th issue, I wrote about how you should not build a hill to die on, when it comes to your indie career. Well, this is how you should build one: In the most nonsensical way you can get away with, unmoored from rational considerations, but capable of shaping those rational considerations.
When one person does something like this, it is merely eccentricity. When large segments of the population start doing things like this, you can get a weirdly miraculous-seeming flourishing of entire cultures. There’s a reason why Victorian Britain was simultaneously the leading superpower of its time and a hotbed of weird eccentrics doing their own thing, creating their own personal futures.
I mean, it is exciting that we live in a time where Elon Musk is trying to invent a future where thousands might be able to travel to Mars. But I think the possibilities of a world where thousands of eccentrics are planning around weird fixed-point futures is even more exciting. And there’s no reason why both can’t come about.
Pursuing fixed-point futurism is the temporal multiverse equivalent of the Archimedes principle of the lever: “give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.”
Give me a fixed point to plan around, and I’ll move the multiverse. It may not be for a big, lofty ambition, but you don’t need lofty ambitions for personal futurism.
You can be like Rick Sanchez on Rick and Morty moving the multiverse to get at the Mulan McNugget sauce.
I usually have several candidate fixed-point ideas floating around in my head at any given time, with varying degrees of commitment attached. Right now, they include: astronomy, a “mansion” (code for something I’m not quite clear on myself yet), a Mars rover, and an idea for a fictional extended universe I want to develop. There’s a lot of the best kind of nonsense driving me right now.
To bring this riff back to earth, of course practicality is important in futures thinking. But if practicality is all that goes into your thinking about the future, it will be a very dull future you script for yourself. And it will be your own fault. Why would you expect to get interesting things out if you don’t put interesting things in?
In practice, fixed-point futurism and test-driven futurism work well together as complements. One is rational and left-brain dominant, the other is emotional and intuitive, and right-brain dominant.
Anyhow, that’s my long answer to Benjamin’s question.
And don’t forget…
The AMA issue will be next week’s issue (March 25), so if you are interested, reply to this email with your question by Monday, March 22nd. If you want to remain anonymous, please specify that.
Note: If you are forwarded this newsletter, please be aware that it will be shutting down on April 30th, 2021, and the archives published as an eBook. So if you’re interested in subscribing, I recommend waiting for the eBook instead. If you do subscribe, please use the monthly option, not the annual one, to save me trouble wrangling the refunds.