After yesterday’s rant on the Great Inevitable Future of Work, I stumble onto this article in WiReD about ‘Indie Capitalism’. This article, itself, quotes another article in Businessweek on the same subject– arguably a more mainstream/non-techie publication, which indicates that the idea has ‘arrived’, I suppose.

So, ‘Indie Capitalism’ now has a name. Which means that it is now a Thing (ie a meme or concept that I now expect to see mentioned or bandied about all over the place over the next few months).

Another cultural indicator: Amanda Palmer’s TED talk on ‘The Art of Asking’ (via boingboing), giving a pop-musician’s view on how to use Kickstarter and social media. Note that the self-named ‘Happy Mutant’ set is precisely the well-off, largely self-employed demographic I referred to yesterday, so those circles bear watching.

I’ll just wryly note that now that ‘Indie Capitalism’ is a Cool Thing, then (almost by definition) that means that exclusionary networks are sure to arise (or existing ones re-enforced) to limit access to the Cool Thing… because otherwise, the Thing would cease to be Cool.

This was essentially what I was trying to get at with yesterday’s post– Damien Walter’s article is the only one I’ve read on the subject that doesn’t make the implicit assumption that all class/social barriers to entry to this new ‘regime of work’ are either already gone, or about to disappear.