It’s been twenty years since Dan Pink published his landmark book, Free Agent Nation, or FAN, in 2001. It remains, in my opinion, the most prescient among the many such books that were being published around that time. The other big one was Future of Work, which inspired the development of eLance. Elance, after merging with oDesk, turned what is today Upwork, the default entry-level gig marketplace.
I read Dan’s book in 2007, and it inspired a gig marketplace product I developed at Xerox (during the course of which I had a lot of interactions with the people then running oDesk). I also got to know Dan a bit (he blurbed my book, Tempo).
In the twenty years since FAN was published, the free-agent nation has turned into the free-agent world. It is more than just an economic sideshow now. It is a young, but full-stack model of civilization. A way to run a world. It boasts a relatively full set of folkways spanning culture, politics, economics, and lifestyles. Since Covid, it is beginning to increasingly look like the default along many dimensions, such as working from home (WFH).
Many other big and interesting ideas have emerged in the 20 years since FAN, the most well-known being Tim Ferriss’ Four-Hour Work Week. Among my own favorite ideas are Marci Alboher’s idea of “Slash” careers in One Person/Multiple Careers (here’s my review from 2009), named after the way people tend in the gig economy tend to describe themselves with slash-separated descriptors, like blogger/consultant, and Hugh MacLeod’s Sex and Cash theory.
All this stuff is like water now, so it’s hard to see, but all the ideas we take for granted today were not obvious ten or twenty years ago, let alone engineered into an entire stack of tools and a growing cottage industry of startups that expressly set out to serve our needs in the what Li Jin dubbed the Passion Economy.
Among the ideas that were new and strange ideas to most of us sometime in the last twenty years:
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Looking for gigs on online marketplaces
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Coworking spaces
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Networking on LinkedIn
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Parleying online activity into a speaking career
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Teaching and coaching online
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Managing a personal brand
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Professional website hosted on your own domain
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Showcasing your technical abilities on Github
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Working “under the API” with an algorithmic boss
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Uber for everything
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Turking and crowdsourcing
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Raising money for speculative work via GoFundMe, Kickstarter
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Getting paid via PayPal
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Videoconferencing and VoIP
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Cloud-based subscription software for every business function
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Self-publishing your own paper and e-books via self-serve tools
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All of social media
The list goes on and on. Those of us who grew old alongside this technology learned to work with each new capability as it became available. Seeing it listed all-at-once gives me a bit of nausea frankly. Did I really live through the arrival of all those things on the scene? Am I really that old? Did I really leave the paycheck world I was factory-manufactured to inhabit, and learn a whole new set of work-ways, ways new to humanity, over the course of the last 10 years?
Those of you who are entering the workforce now (whether via a YouTube channel or TikTok at 14, or straight out of college and failing to find a job at 21) are faced with a nearly complete stack of economic life-support technologies, but a mainstream economy that still acts like it is some strange weird new thing that nobody knows how to use, even though to you it is likely already second nature, and most things in it are already over a decade old.
Over twenty years, literally tens of thousands of blog posts and magazine articles were written, exploring the future of work that we now inhabit.
Dozens of them went on to become classics. Remember Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans? That was 2008 and was not obvious before. How about Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail? That was 2004 and again not obvious before. Many individual books and blog posts were faddish, but their cumulative effect was to map out an entire emerging new world. Hundreds of blog posts and books contributed little bits and pieces of ideas, but were then forgotten.
Though this newsletter is under 2 years old, I’ve been part of this conversation for as long as I’ve been writing online. Some of you who were following my writing 13 years ago may remember that in 2008, I won a prize from the audio equipment maker Plantronics for coming up with the term “Cloudworker” to describe the newly emerging class of workers.
All that seems a lifetime ago.
But the conversation started, I think, with Dan Pink and FAN. When you compare FAN and books that came after with books like Michael Gerber’s 1986 classic, The E-Myth (revised and updated in 2004 as The E-Myth Revisited, but unable to shake the pre-2000s vibe — the E- stands for entrepreneurial, not electronic), you can sense that something important changed around 2000, which Dan was among the first to spot.
While E-Myth is a good book for the gig economy, with a lot of good advice for people wanting to start solo small-business lifestyles, it is fundamentally rooted in a pre-Internet world. Just like “executive suites” existed before “coworking spaces” but fundamentally represent a different mindset (and a unit-economics structure that is closer to motels).
Dan realized that the internet changed the game radically, and spotted many of the early signs. Including the important fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was not meaningfully tracking free-agents (and still doesn’t), confusing them for either contractors or 1-10 person small businesses. What was remarkable is that he spotted many of the signs before they turned into clear and obvious markers.
Remember, this was when even videoconferencing was a special, expensive thing, VoIP was some sort of new-fangled magic, people actually paid big money for international calls, and getting paid electronically via PayPal was only just starting to become a common thing.
It’s kinda funny that “strategic foresight” people within paycheck organizations still continue to write ponderous “future of work” trend analyses that seem to think stuff we’re doing today is stuff to expect in 2030. The future that Dan Pink foresaw in 2001 is already here, and is not even unevenly distributed. It’s all over the place, and easier to get into than the paycheck economy, which increasingly looks like an exotic science fictional universe that’s harder and harder for ordinary people to break into.
I think we are at another moment like 2001. A phase shift in environmental conditions is being triggered by the exit of Donald Trump and the inauguration of the Biden administration. This time, the changes being triggered today (and early signs and portents are visible) will be mostly around politics, taxes, and other such non-technological things.
It’s time to pay attention again because the game is about to get reinvented again. The Free Agent World is past its technological origin story, and is about to start growing up.