The Dawn of the Collective Career Era

The last 80 years were about the growth of the multinational corporate state and an individualist career ladder as the only path. The next 80 years? It will be about the growth of intimate collectives with grassroots systems. It's time for the people to take their power back. Are you ready?

Go to school. Get a degree. Find a job. Climb the ladder. Go to sleep. Rinse. Repeat.

The old world of work:-

• The charismatic corporate climber who doesn’t do much of anything but gets promotions on an annual basis
• The networking schmoozer
• The conference circuit connector. Business card pusher who only promotes themselves
• The stage talker where their keynote (who was written and designed by a junior employee) is titled “This is dead. Adapt or Die.”
• Loyal to one company forever. Follows every rule.

The new world of work:-

• Quiet maker and builder
• Introspective and deep thinker
• Connection over attention. Amplifies others as a way to build reputation
• Writes a thought piece titled “The Dawn of the Collective Career Era.”
• Builds multiple revenue streams, career paths, investments and opportunities.
• Navigates the rules as they go or just builds entirely new systems and rules.

The last 80 years of post World War II in the United States followed a consolidation trajectory that if we follow the law of physics is being unraveled right before our very eyes. Corporations and brands allowed for many to join a firm, move around that firm and have a decent life. This has now been disrupted by independent network effects, the rise or "revenge" of the small business owner, how the larger internet unlocks opportunity and how we collectively organize as humans to work and live in the 21st Century.

We probably can learn a bunch from the printing press and how that impacted society at large. If anything, it had a massively disruptive effect. Since everything is a remix, let's study its impact on society at large for a few minutes.

The printing press ushered in the Industrial Revolution. The World Wide Web has ushered in the Intelligence Age but also the Creative Economy. It also has ushered in, to a larger degree, a techno feudalistic new world order that benefits a small amount of technocratic owners. In the past if you were an artist, a publisher or someone with the means of production would exploit you for your gain. In the present? That power has shifted to an algorithmic and AI concentration. If you're a creator or a maker, you need these online tools to help you produce or distribute the work and these same tools to get paid for that work. But the "Lords" are making fees that when compounded add up to much more than the "Serfs" or producers. This is the technocratic battle of now. A "Revenge of the Humanities" we're all going through to gain more meaning about our reason for being. One where groups of people, understanding context, can form collectives in lightning speed and prototype products, solutions and teams in a matter of days, not years. If the Boomers were given the luxury of cheap property, Gen Z and Gen Alpha have been given the keys to cheap ways to build new movements that speak truth to the old power from scratch.

When we think of it, from a commercial standpoint the World Wide Web is really only 35 years old. That's it. It's original promise of being "open" has now been consolidated. This is another pain point. I remember logging onto it in 1990 from a terminal at Lehigh University. It cost about $30 per 30 minutes to use Lexis Nexis. We've come a long way since that time but to say we have felt all the effects of that is just not true. We're feeling the beginning portions of it. And this will lead to more and more change as the old world moves on and is creatively disrupted as the new world emerges.

So let's get back to my original path. Nowhere are we seeing this change more than in careers. How we develop our careers and how we search, find and secure work. The systemic architecture that exists for work is built around a premise that people work one job for 40 hours a week at an hourly rate or a set annual salary. Once this person secures this work, they stay for a period of time, gain knowledge within that organization, share knowledge throughout that organization, build alliances internally and move up ladders for opportunities.

The analogy for this is living in one room on the first floor of a house and maybe visit another room upstairs once you learn everything you can about the one room you've occupied. You don't leave the house and you only get to know people who live within those walls.

But this is not how economics works in a post-scarcity world. What we're starting to wake up and realize is that maybe how we've designed society for much of the past 500 years no longer fits the containers of the present.

There's even a larger issue at play beyond all of the tech feudalism at play. Toby Daniels says it better than I can in a piece drafted for his On Domain Substack:

"Technology made us more efficient, but it also fractured our focus. It gave us access to everyone, but little intimacy with anyone. The systems built to help us collaborate have, in many ways, turned collaboration into chaos. Each platform handles a fragment of the process: communication, documentation, scheduling, but none keeps the idea itself intact. Context splinters across channels, and the consistency of our thinking breaks apart as it moves from one tool to another.

Meanwhile, the networks that should be our greatest advantage, our communities of peers, mentors, clients, and collaborators, sit idle. LinkedIn keeps us connected but not collaborative. Slack connects teams but not networks. Social media gives us visibility, not depth. And AI, in its current form, risks amplifying the problem: more noise, faster repetition, less originality.

The next revolution in work won’t come from adding another productivity app to the pile. It will come from rethinking how we work altogether, from a world of fragmented tools to one with connected contexts."

We have a human organizational design issue. Not a technological issue at play.

When we think of context, we seem to not have captured the depth and nuance of what modern work and life now is. It is no longer the simplicity of one job with a livable wage. It is no longer one W2 employee wage per tax year. It is no longer "apply with your resume to this role." It is no longer even about what's on your resume. Large Language Models, ChatGPT, Generative AI, Agentic AI, network bots, grifters, fast talkers, charlatans, Upwork, the gig economy and post-capitalism have all changed the meaning of what work is now. And because of this, we need systems that allow for a novel way to approach this new normal. Here are some considerations and questions we should be prompting that are slowly being architect-ed.

• Someone may have one or possibly two W2 jobs, but also may have an LLC business, 1099 pay and a number of other ways they make income that isn't simply from one source. How will the tax code evolve to address this?
• Tying universal healthcare to one steady job is now meaningless. People need a larger network they can purchase from to be covered at anytime of the year. Systems like COBRA are washed if you've never had a health plan (because you never had a corporate job in the first place) and if your work doesn't pay for your car or life insurance, why is it covering your health insurance?
• References are nice but are only used once a person has an offer in hand. New systems of human validation are required to cut down on AI bot applications. "Before applying, you need two people in your network who can validate you have done this work and verify you are human." Sure, we have Captcha forms, but do we need other systems of human validation? What are they and is an intrusion on privacy?
• I applied and I have no idea where that resume ended up beyond the fact the company I applied to probably sold my data. Regulation is probably in order on every job one applies to now. And companies probably need to be required to "close the loop" and be fined for posting ghost jobs. What is real and what isn't in hunting for work?
• Intimacy helps people find work. No longer is it about hanging around waiting for work. It's about using your smaller, human network to help you find and secure it. Yet the popular narrative and overall systems that people must use to apply to work? Antiquated machinery like Indeed, LinkedIn, Workday. How do we make speaking to strangers who don't know us and judge us off a digital rolodex make sense in building trust in a zero trust world?
• The portfolio career seems to be taking off. You have a skill, someone has a project. You are greenlit to do the project, you kickoff, deliver and get paid. This is the temporary reality of modern work. Is that enough to sustain larger systems? If you're a corporation making mass profit, should you be required to pay into a larger community benefit fund which those who are underemployed can tap into to keep society afloat?

Work and how we map careers is broken only because the industrial era of the past is being left behind for cognitive capital, machines, automation and multiple workstreams over the specialized one-size-fits all job archetypes that used to sustain us. The corporate model worked for a period of time when it wanted to concentrate power and keep employees within their domain and under their control. All of this has shifted. The veil has been lifted. Work is now an era of free agents, collectives, webs, networks and generalist skillsets. While searching for work is based on an outdated model of convincing a stranger (a "Lord") to hire us (a "Serf") it is time we break free from the chains that bound us and operate outside the confines of a strangling corporate model which is neither efficient, human or truly free. Where the most unique of us have the ability to create beyond what is simply offered to us on a job board. Where the need for the supporting infrastructure that supports this next economy being shaped by the people is in dire need to be conceptualized, developed and delivered.

A "New" New Deal awaits.