To be valuable, you have to stand out.

Converging trends of algorithmic automation & democratized access to technical education will soon create a world where simply being a skilled practitioner is not enough to secure meaningful & fulfilling work. Venkatesh Rao says that people are either “above or below the API” - abstractable to a request for “a human”, or indispensable & differentiated.

Differentiation relies on being able to tell compelling stories: of yourself, your work, and your desired contribution to the collective.

One way to lose the ability to tell those stories is to work for corporations.

This is intentional: technology corporations are designed to hoard talented people, keeping them out of the labor market & away from competitors. They’re pipelines from “human” to “human resource”. On one side: golden handcuffs & comfortable perks; on the other side an insistence on mundane & derivative work, deferring to sharing by corporate PR or bound by agreements of secrecy.

Being able to tell our own stories is a fundamental right of the workers of the rapidly emerging economy that will dominate the rest of our lives.

The intersection of cryptocurrency & the Creator Economy returns power to individual contributors, equipping them with the tools to find autonomy & leverage outside of the narrow range of jobs & freelancing roles previously available, and celebrating storytelling & personal experience over the alienation of seeing humans as “Human Resources”.

I am here to listen to those stories.