We acknowledge that the views in this letter may be controversial, especially among our peers in Silicon Valley. But we felt a need to put a stake in the ground that we believe all workers deserve to be treated with dignity and to have a minimum level of benefits and protections.
And yet: we were born to give up what we love. To respect the sanctity of autonomy is to make your choice and let other people make theirs. The only way for us to consolidate our fractured selves—to become whole—is by fully inhabiting our choices.
This model may work when major network or scale effects are at play. These are powerful forces that blunt competition and protect margins. Think Google, Facebook and Uber.
As it evolves, BaaG can mean new ways of allocating human, digital, and financial capital to projects, more seamless employment, and new ways of crowdsourcing, prototyping, and simulating products and business models.
While Path did indeed fail as a distribution provider, I would argue that keeping the network’s size small can still have benefits in line with my signaling theory: Deliberately limiting the number of people who can join a network (e.g. by charging a membership fee) creates scarcity which in turns makes the network more interesting. Network... See more