[0x12]

What a load of junk. Pardon my French, but this is not slavery by any stretch of the imagination.

This is modern slavery:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery

Poor impulse control with respect to buying gadgets, thinking you have to keep up with the neighbours, assuming that you can be part of society without having to pull your weight, calling employers 'owners', ignoring social security (which is quite effective in many countries), these are all choices and the writer of the article seems to miss the point that these are choices.

Modern society works because we want it to work, we choose representatives which enact the laws which in turn create incentives to participate in society. For the most part, we govern ourselves through our ability to vote. Slaves could not vote.

Sure it isn't all roses, there are plenty of areas where there is waste and there is lots of unfairness.

The deck can feel stacked against you, that's a fact. But that does not mean that this equates to slavery, even in a modern sense. That does a great disservice to those that actually are in slavery today and whose plight makes the one of someone that has a hard time to refuse buying the next generation iGadget look like exactly what it is: A luxury problem.

There are factors at work to improve the situation (not always equally effective): technological progress means more pay for far less work, unions that give people that work collective power, and that have in some cases toppled governments (see Poland, ca. 1986) and so on.

Slavery is a serious issue, not living above your means and matching your expenses to your income so you don't run into debt is a bookkeeping problem and a psychological one.

The option to 'self employ' instead of being a part of the system is a false dichotomy, the third (unlisted) alternative is to be a bum.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing to be a bum.

Care should be taken to distinguish between societies that have a proper social security system in place and those that don't. For those countries that do not the number of choices people have may be seriously reduced and typically those countries have a larger percentage of their population below the poverty line or in the homeless category, and definitely not by choice.

Even in those situations you'd be hard pressed to call them slaves.

[bryanlarsen]

Did you read the article? To me, the first half of the article basically said, "the term slavery is not applicable". And then the second half introduced the term entanglement instead.

In other words, the author agrees with you.

[0x12]

One of the most tiring responses to a comment is 'did you read the article'. Yes, of course I read the article.

I thought of doing a 'point by point' because that seems to be the only way to respond a pile of nonsense like this without getting that particular response.

I choose not to because that would be overlong and it would not add anything.

The only thing this article shows is that if you use your creativity that you can stretch any term to mean anything. The only other party that I'm aware of that plays word and mindgames like this with its audience is scientology.

If you don't want to be a part of society you're free to opt-out, or to organize politically in order to effect change that makes society into what you want it to be.

No slave ever had that option, and no modern day slave has that option.

The author makes it seem as though we are all part of some gigantic mechanism that enslaves us all, and that we collectively would be better off by following his 4 step plan to 'independence', but he fails to notice that his 4 step plan simply leads to a much higher level of dependency but on different entities (aka customers).

Society is built on those dependencies, we enter into them voluntarily and there is absolutely nothing wrong with them.

Bad choices lead to feeling bad, so think before you commit to something, including starting a business.

Fast forward 4 years and we'll be seeing blog posts about 'how I'm going to free myself from being a slave of my customers'.

Slavery has absolutely nothing to do with it, not even in spirit or peripherally. Entanglement is a meaningless term, we already have a word that fits perfectly well: citizenship, which happens to have the opposite meaning of being a slave.

[Cushman]

There is a strong political movement in America, where we do not have what the civilized world would think of as a proper social security system, that believes that bums deserve to die.

Just sayin'.