First, on expectations (once more): What makes you think there is no call to action here? As I asked Dan above, what right have we to wait until whatever ideas we’re husbanding become fully formed, “polished”, edited and made into consumable goods of broad appeal?

We have stickers for that.

Other people are writing books, and making a living selling those books and coworking facilities and the whole indypreneur/antipreneur/polypreneur lifestyle.

You invoke “polish”. What’s that, exactly? A demonstration of technical design expertise, or a kind of “inauthenticity” when there’s no “message” behind it? I imagine Chesterton, GS Lee, Milton, and (maybe) even George Lucas would feel there was content and therefore an arguable “message” in their works, so I’m not sure you can make a case that it’s absent in extracts.

You ask for a “call to action”. What right have we to be passive and silent, like an audience for our own content, waiting for a gleam of sloganicious koanic brilliance to take us all by storm and convince of the obvious truth of something-or-other? What right have we to ape everybody else, or to fall into trite aphorisms of received wisdom? Where’s the value in that?

And while we’re on value: you and Dan have pointed out this site’s apparent inutility.

See, it seems to me that whenever one encounters something that appears useless, or ill-made, or incomplete, one is presented with a series of choices.

What do you want? If it’s not here, and yet everything seems “polished” in a way that makes you expect it, then what is it about human nature that drives you to assume a mistake has been made on our side of the screen?

Maybe it’s all just a poorly-executed joke. That ever come to mind? Many find solace in that explanation of the world.

A lot of people, most people even, faced with enigmatic things they don’t understand, dismiss them and move on. Life being short, work being hard, and the economics of attention and the costs of discourse and insight being what they are. All that stuff is expensive and hard. Thinking, talking, discussing, finding, paying attention, engaging, participating. Hard, slow, and boring.

On that note, can I suggest a quick side-trip into WIlliam Byers’s How Mathematicians Think. Or Gerald Stanley Lee’s The Lost Art of Reading if you prefer. Either might do, in a pinch.

Now, onward:

Who the hell told you we thought society doesn’t need bosses, or that any of us here imagine “all people” would be better off without them? That’s lunacy, and I’ll thwack the person who said it explicitly. Indeed, we say explicitly we’re not against bosses, and that one can be employed and still be Not an Employee.

So I’m not sure what website you’re reading, but it ain’t any of our stuff.

Bosses have money, and as it happens they are also people. Almost all people these days need money. So it’s pretty damned obvious that of course there should be bosses, somewhere out there, giving money to people who need it. That right there, with minor variation, is a core design pattern for economic life in the world.

We’re not an organization. We’re not a union. We’re not consultants, or organizers, or authors. If in the course of your life you should encounter a person who does answer all your questions, then (not to put too fine a point on it) either they or you are an idiot. Maybe both.

If you want simple and succinct solutions and rabble-rousing clear-seeming calls to action, go see the guys at Not An MBA. They are all over the straight answer and the useful link, and they’ve got their finger on the TOC for the book of Alexandrian Design Patterns for Sustainable Worklife. They’re doing a fine job bringing together all the threads other people have been discovering in the last ten (110? 3010?) years or so. They’re developing a nice clear message, which luckily is sounding less like “We can do it! Yeah! Stick it to the Man with Collaboration and a New Book!”

Those guys got all the focus, and bring to bear clarity enough for most, and if you watch them over time you can see they’re learning things we’ve suspected for a while around here but just not bothered to share.

You want to use community and helpful list-making to save the world? Go see Dave Pollard and his surprisingly vast communitarian conspiracy over at How to Save the World. He’s smart, he’s full of dialog and thoughtful commentary. It’s good stuff. Go participate. It’s a whole fully-formed community, just sitting there waiting to be joined.

We’re not writing a book here. Shop around.

See: Either you see the dichotomy clearly, or you don’t. There’s no middle ground. Right?

There are two basic reasons I feel a need for bosses.

One reason is to solve problems of how to make an income, which thus far I have consistently failed to solve without bosses. But if I strike on a solution to that, so long as it isn’t just as boring as cubicle work, I’ll leave the cubicle world forever. One great thing about this blog would be to collect resources toward how to get clients or an audience, and all the other bits of “how to be your own boss” that school doesn’t teach you when teaching you how to practice a skill.

The second obstacle is that, so far as I know, you either have bosses, clients, or an audience. I don’t know about audiences, but in my experience, clients are consistently worse than bosses, without any of the responsibility that bosses take.

I see you changed your “About” page since I last visited. It’s much better.

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/583934