Table of Contents
G. Rise of Entrepreneurs and Returning of Freelancers, Creators
Computer and Internet Age
The way the second world war changed employment forever, the next profound change in livelihood came when the personal computers arrived with Apple I. By 1991, more and more clerical and blue color jobs were replaced by computers. The way machines started eliminating physical labor from the Industrial era, now it was the turn for human brains to be replaced.
Jobs such as bookkeeping, accounting, inventory management, supply-chain records, and publishing all started becoming computerized. Now those with technology skills had a profound upper hand over the others, and mere education was not enough.
Windows 95 contributed massively to this extraordinary speed of the computer age. And by 1995, the Internet revolution happened. Netscape Navigator, and thereafter Internet Explorer alongside HTML technology just changed the way we communicated, and consumed information.
This gave rise to several individual Internet Entrepreneurs, who were offering the Creator Economy around the Internet. Even though the bubble busted in 1998, the time for Internetpreneurs and Internet Creators had arrived. Several companies like Amazon, Google, PayPal, Yahoo, and Alibaba took the conventional businesses over the internet.
Entrepreneurs and Startup Economy
Earlier, establishing a company, and thereafter taking the company to become a publically listed and traded corporation required decades. Building a business was hard and often went through an evolution process.
However, the internet brought new technologies such as software platforms, APIs, tools, and frameworks. Solving extraordinarily impossible life challenges with these technologies became simple. In the beginning, scaling a website was a tough challenge. Then appeared the hosting companies who offered this for the businesses.
One did not have to work entire life to acquire enough experience to build a company. More and more youngsters joined the bandwagon and Technology companies skyrocketed. These tiny technology solutions were called startups.
Startup Transition to Corporations
All these technologies were the creator’s economy to start with. The capitalists(later came to know as venture capitalists) saw an opportunity to transform the creator’s economy and small businesses into companies and then took the companies to the corporation stage.
Technology builders now could focus on creating technologies and solving business and technology problems, whereas venture capitalists took care of scaling and operationalizing the creator’s economy.
Thus arrived the modern-day internet corporations like Google and Amazon. What is important to know here is that we do not know Google and Amazon the way they are because of the creators, but due to the scaling by the venture capitalists. The money invested in the startups was the money from the early industrial age returns and the VCs were the bloodline of the past capitalists and industrialists.
As the startup economy grew, founders or creators became employed by the VCs.
Return of Freelancers
As the personal computer was available at a cheap price to more households and more and more businesses, technologies could be created without any other infrastructures other than a personal computer and the internet, more and more youth preferred to become freelancers and preferred to work for themselves.
Several websites like Fiverr offered services of connecting freelance service providers to service seekers. From music composition to Graphic designing to coding, to writing, Freelancing became mainstream over a period of time.
Authors started publishing their own books. Good coders started publishing their own software and tools.
Mobile Phone and Smart Economy
Even though computers are spread in a large number of households, they still have only 15-20% penetration. Computers needed space and tables and not many households even had that space. All of these were about to be changed by Steve Jobs and Apple with the public announcement of the iPhone in 2006, and thereafter iPad.
In India, Reliance made mobiles available to everyone for less than $20. Now over 80% of the global population had access to technology. Productivity tools were created for the mobiles. Now technology could be scaled to the entire population rather than limited to 20% of the population.
This gave rise to App Economy. Technologists created mobile apps and connected service providers with service seekers. There were literally no businesses that couldn’t be run on mobiles. Freelancers with mobiles became solopreneurs. Freedom became the new norm.
Now machines are producing in the industries, computers were producing tools needed for businesses, businesses were run on mobiles, and the last bit of human value, that is social interactions too went virtual with WhatsApp.
People forgot that there were humans. By 2020, humans were breathing, eating, sleeping, dreaming, dating, talking, reading, writing, interacting, thinking, and feeling nothing but technology.
The Rise of AI
Humans did business with humans. When there were fewer and fewer humans left, and humans had become merely biological being beneath technologies, cyborgs, how can businesses target humans? Where were the humans? Physical strength had already been downgraded. Mental strength is reduced to a bare minimum. Machines were working, machines were earning, machines were talking, machines were thinking, machines were making machines.
Just as humans do business with humans, machines do business with machines; this simple theory gave a push to Artificial intelligence(AI).
Humans forgot physical work, learning, empathy, loving, interacting, humanizing, and socializing and so, capitalists see no reason as humans should exist in the workplaces, and why humans are to be served.
Venture Capital Theory of the Future
If unnecessary humans can be eliminated, families are broken, gender confusion is created, childbirth is made unaffordable, and men and women are taken away from each other, they will anyways not live for long. We have the money, we have the machines. Machines will serve us, and we will continue to survive.
Now Elon Musk talks about putting a Neurolink Chip on the human brain to finally convert a human being into a Cyborg.
It is at this point in time that this post is written. Because if you do not pause and take notice of what is happening, you are doomed, your future is doomed, and life has already been ruined and doomed by the capitalists.
Therefore, we will again take a look back into the whole notion of employment and try to figure out how to survive in today’s time when evil forces are hellbent on taking away basic living rights from humans.