Posted on March 31st, 2008 by mitten
One of the tricks they used to tout for helping tiny babies go to sleep was to play a special cd with quiet, muffled whooshing noises. It was meant to simulate the noises a baby would hear while in the womb (her mother’s blood rushing past, presumably) and thus calm and console her enough to [...]
Posted on March 30th, 2008 by Barbara
Something they teach you in business school (and should do in high school) is basic financial accounting. Something else they teach you in business school is managerial accounting. These two topics are related like competitive and social Magic the Gathering. One emphasizes the rules, while the other emphasizes the story, but they’re both based on [...]
Posted on March 23rd, 2008 by Barbara
One of the themes of Not An Employee is collaboration. Here we’ve created a little website and a small business run by people who have never once sat down and said “Ok, we’re going to start a business and have a website and Laura will design it and Barbara will handle the paperwork and Brian [...]
Posted on March 22nd, 2008 by mitten
Paul Graham has posted an essay on the idea that human beings were not meant to have bosses. He argues that we, as a species, are simply not meant to be organized into very large groups. It goes against our evolution.
Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the difference between the two [...]
Posted on March 22nd, 2008 by vaguery
From The Federalist No. 10: The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection (continued), appearing in the Daily Advertiser of Thursday, November 22, 1787:
Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, [...]
Posted on March 20th, 2008 by vaguery
A gentleman of my passing acquaintance, who is a prominent local businessman, mentioned today that he was “happy to see another talent collective” in our town.
I went to substantial lengths to correct him. Which leads me to jot a few notes, and to share them with you.
Sure, yes, there’s Not An Employee, LLC, a company [...]
Posted on March 17th, 2008 by bkerr
From Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0 by Trebor Scholz in First Monday Vol. 13 No. 3:
The language of Web 2.0 is a placeholder for several agendas. It burns the torches of 1960s–style rebellion, a “business revolution” of self–declared anarchists who frown upon authority and control as bad and deem openness as always [...]
Posted on March 14th, 2008 by bkerr
From The Man Who Was Thursday by that ancient asshole G.K. Chesterton:
“Do you see this lantern?” cried Syme in a terrible voice. “Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted [...]
Posted on March 10th, 2008 by vaguery
As a point of clarification, since we’ve received a number of comments and emails about the site design. Mitten did all the visual work, the typography, the design, and established the overarching aesthetic impact of the Not An Employee site herself.
But the items you see in the margins? The phrenology bust, the Gammatron transmitting tube, [...]
Posted on March 7th, 2008 by bkerr
Star Wars: A New Hope; you remember this part. Think about it:
Grand Moff Governor Wilhuff Tarkin (to Darth Vader): The Jedi are extinct; their fire has gone out of the universe. You, my friend, are all that’s left of their religion.
Posted on March 6th, 2008 by bkerr
Party like it’s 1674! Paradise Lost (book II, ll. 910 — 920):
Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus’dly, [...]
Posted on March 5th, 2008 by Barbara
One of the events that lead to the formalization of Not An Employee was the threatened, enacted, and then rescinded sales tax on services in the state of Michigan. Some of us were expected to charge sales tax on some services (like graphic design) and not others (web design). (Or perhaps more interestingly, on phrenology [...]
Posted on March 5th, 2008 by bkerr
From The people, yes by Carl Sandburg. There’s more where this came from, but you’ll have to go to the library and see for yourself:
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Posted on March 4th, 2008 by bkerr
Arlo Guthrie sings Cooper’s Lament:
Hey brothers, now and then
There’s something that ought to move you
More than a pen
You don’t need no school or knowledge
You’ve got something else to lend
And all the people in the world
Can make it better again
And it ain’t easy, yes I know
It’s a hard and rugged road
Don’t be swindled, don’t be fooled
Just [...]
Posted on March 3rd, 2008 by bkerr
From Works and Days by old Hesiod. Some things never change:
For the gods keep hidden from men the means of life. Else you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked [...]
The Not An Employee Blog is proudly powered by WordPress
