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One counterexample to your theory is that if bosses limit autonomy, then large universities should limit autonomy significantly; however, they're generous in autonomy. Now on the theory underlying your essays. If it's barbaric to work, then one should note that it's feasible to stop working immediately, without significant wealth. It can be done piecewise: many of my friends save up and travel for a year or two, or get schools to pay for their traveling. Assuming one is investing, and not increasing spending, it will get easier rather than harder to take more and more time off from jobs over the years. Of course most people shoot themselves in the foot by taking out loans or increasing spending, but that's their problem. If autonomy is important, then why assume startups and develop lots of minor contradictions with autonomy? Why not assume autonomy, and see where this leads? Given your value set, which seems centered around autonomy and creating/hacking, I can't see why you promote startups as a lone solution rather than promoting a variety of solutions. For example, living cheaply, moving to cheaper nations, taking years off to travel, only reproducing when one's children need no longer work (so as to make the problem of work globally and locally decrease, rather than increase), working to bring high tech to areas without it (which might give different kinds of autonomy, as well as cheap living), working contract type jobs where taking say six months off isn't a problem, working in journalism in the areas of high tech or art (more traveling, less pay), or working in academia, where the problems with autonomy go away and hence work becomes non-pernicious. Your work with startups is really great, but I think there are lots of other options that are equally consistent with the values of long-term autonomy and creating/hacking. I don't see that you have any particular duty to present these options, but I do think that hackers should be trying to increase the sphere of jobs known to be consistent with their values, by discussing them publicly. |