Corporate Slavery, Runaway Slaves, and Virtual Corporation

Once upon a time slavery was widespread in society, and at that time it all seemed normal. If someone asked then the slave how he lives, the slave would say that in general, he has a good master, feeds him every day, doesn’t beat him much, and that it’s hard to work, of course, but who is easy now? But there is stability and confidence in the future ...

Three years ago, I quit my last job and during that time, working independently, I managed to lose much of the corporate environment, and now, when dealing with traditional companies, I’m never tired of wondering how people agree to such an independent position by signing labor contract?

Now it is not clear to me how you can promise someone to do everything that he tells you for an indefinite period, without being able to give up work that you are not interested in now. At the same time, you secretly allow this person to contact you at any time, interrupt, give instructions that you must listen to, whether you need them or not. You cannot, wanting to participate in another project that is interesting to you at the moment, tell your employer that now you will work on his tasks for only half a day. Either give all your time or go. What is it, if not slavery?

During the dismissal, I had one permanent project that brought me a few hundred dollars a month, over time new projects appeared and I needed help for their implementation. Usually, an agreement with assistants is no different from employment in a regular company and it sounds like this: I pay you N dollars a month, you work from 9 to 18 and do everything I ask for as part of your specialty. It's very simple, you take people and make them your continuation, in other words, you scale yourself. And the germ of a new slave type company appears.
')
But maybe because I did not have a sufficiently stable source of money, or maybe because of my belief that all relations between people should be built only on goodwill, I acted differently.

I met people who also recently quit and wanted to start an independent activity, and I offered them free business relationships that would be built according to the following rules.

• The one of us who found a job acts as a customer, he draws up the work as separate tasks with a clear required result.
• The customer also sets the cost and deadline for the tasks and offers them to be performed by other participants.
• If a potential performer is interested, he takes the task. if not, he refuses.
• The performer performs the work in such a way, then and there, as, when and where he considers it necessary and transfers the result to the performer.
• In any case, the customer must pay at the agreed price, regardless of how the task is performed.

And that's all, there are no more obligations between the participants, it is even more likely the unilateral obligations of the customer to the performer who is simply given the right to perform the proposed work.

And after three years, I can say that it works. Moreover, I believe that this is the most effective cooperation system of all existing, which is the next step in the evolution of labor relations. As once hired workers worked much more effectively than slaves, now free performers, in my opinion, are much more efficient than hired workers, especially when performing complex and creative work, such as creating modern information systems.

Of course, the person in charge of the project is much calmer to have people subordinated to, strictly bound by the conditions of a long-term contract, who are ready to do everything he says. But after all, once the slave owners were afraid that if they were given freedom to the slaves, they would stop working altogether, and these fears were in vain. I think it's time to move to the next level of freedom in labor relations.

Imagine a network of people connected with each other by free business relations. These relations are channels for the monetary-labor flow, structured in the form of microcontracts, each of which is so small that, firstly, the requirements for the final result can be quickly described, and secondly, the success of such a microcontract cannot significantly affect its side. .

In my opinion, with a sufficient number of participants and connections between them, such a network could become the basis for a new type of company - a virtual corporation in which there is no fixed hierarchy of subordination, and for each task the most optimal structure that disappears after its implementation is self-organized. Each person in this network is associated with only a few partners with whom he has a trusting business relationship, major tasks are broken down into smaller ones and transferred further along the chain.

In creating such a network, an important role will be played by an information system that will allow you to easily manage work and money flows, so that processing hundreds of tasks a day for a dozen projects conducted simultaneously, each with different people and with different roles in them, as well as taking into account mutual settlements, profits , debt, financial and time planning would not take more time than regular business correspondence.

Our partners, mostly in practice, developed the concept of such a system and are currently developing its fully functional prototype, in 2-3 months we will be able to submit it for beta testing. We started to make the system, as usual, for ourselves, but then we decided to try to implement it in the form of the “social network” described above. Of course, being sane people, we understand that the task of creating a virtual corporation is akin to building your own spacecraft, but on the other hand, because someone is building them ). At the very least, we want to test the viability of the described concept on our team and a few of our partners.

We would be interested to hear your opinion on the ideas described, are there any other people who see the situation in the same way as we? Are there people using similar approaches in collaboration? Would you be interested in a similar control system?