Complete Entanglement (Modern Slavery)

If you sell a product or service, you get to choose what goes into that product or service. Look at apple: If they listened to the general public, the Ipad would have never been released.

" You will compromise yourself at a time or another."

You don't ever need to. Plenty of companies release what they want and it just so happens to coincide with what other people want.

I started from the point of slavery mostly in response to other authors who describe the modern system of employee/employer as slavery, which I think is the wrong word, but it seems I didn't do quite a good enough job of making that clear.

It isn't that consumerism & 50 hour work weeks are inescapable, only that they are difficult to escape and remain in mainstream society at the same time. Looking at people who have chosen alternate lifestyles (Like ERE or being a bum as someone else pointed out) are often marginalized ans ostracized - the system does not seem to like that they challenge the basic assumptions of what is good about our society.

I personally have been trying to bootstrap a startup as a way to escape some of the control a 9-5 brings with it, but I don't see entrepreneurship as a catch-all solution. As another article I am working on will point out, Startups are better off in some areas but are also often forced to trade off in others. Depending on the structure, leading a startup may often be worse from a lifestyle design perspective than working for a corporation.

I don't have a general purpose "solution" to the problem of dis-satisfaction in modern society, but I do know that what we have going for us is sub-optimal, and I would like to find alternate ways of living and structuring society to address some of the issues I tried to bring to light.

Thanks for the feedback - I think perhaps I will expand on the areas you mention in the future to help make it more clear. I would appreciate your input :)

I thought of doing a 'point by point' because that seems to be the only way to respond a pile of nonsense like this without getting that particular response.

I choose not to because that would be overlong and it would not add anything.

The only thing this article shows is that if you use your creativity that you can stretch any term to mean anything. The only other party that I'm aware of that plays word and mindgames like this with its audience is scientology.

If you don't want to be a part of society you're free to opt-out, or to organize politically in order to effect change that makes society into what you want it to be.

No slave ever had that option, and no modern day slave has that option.

The author makes it seem as though we are all part of some gigantic mechanism that enslaves us all, and that we collectively would be better off by following his 4 step plan to 'independence', but he fails to notice that his 4 step plan simply leads to a much higher level of dependency but on different entities (aka customers).

Society is built on those dependencies, we enter into them voluntarily and there is absolutely nothing wrong with them.

Bad choices lead to feeling bad, so think before you commit to something, including starting a business.

Fast forward 4 years and we'll be seeing blog posts about 'how I'm going to free myself from being a slave of my customers'.

Slavery has absolutely nothing to do with it, not even in spirit or peripherally. Entanglement is a meaningless term, we already have a word that fits perfectly well: citizenship, which happens to have the opposite meaning of being a slave.