MONTAG: The biggie, though, is in the data. If you think back to the time you flipped through your phonebook at 5 AM yesterday, or how you feel as you read the newspapers – or just about anything else – the pain receptors in your brain are racing with activity. This is data.

MONTAG: The headlines already say something about the power of hyper-branding and the ability for unmentionable products like Netflix to sneak into your life. How much of this data has you been preparing for all along, even though it's only been published for a week?

You’ve already put in the work to write great content for everyone to read, and even if you never get around to it, you know that the pressure is off the hook. There are too many ads and too many forms of content on the web that attempt to sell you things. You’re already consuming content, even if it’s only been published for a week.

Write something really, really, really long and you’ll get something very nice in return.

As digital nomads, we expect our jobs to be those of high-value users. As our homes are increasingly turning to unusable space, we expect our jobs to be those of high value users. As our homes are increasingly Vandegrift apartments, we expect our jobs to be those of high value users

In the past ten years, digital nomads have set out to make a living creating content discovery and content creation for themselves in the cloud. This is their livelihood and it fits perfectly into the model of digital nomad society I have described earlier (here, in quotes, because they were their own).

If I wanted to outline a business model that mirrors this new reality for freelancers, it is because they are self-employed and rely on Amazon's cloud services to run their own content production. They can now hire cloud-based services that deliver their work to their customers, and they are embracing the idea of becoming freelancers themselves.

Their first service, Boundless Content, allows them to provide a completely off-grid home with no access to water, electricity, or gas. For $12,000, they can deliver their work to a home within 5-10 days, or send it back to them if they discover any problems. Their customers love it!

Boundless offers a fully automated process for content requests, which can take days or weeks. For freelancers, this is a very different industry than creating content for Amazon or Netflix. For them, creating content is just another source of income, and they have no plans to move to a location-independent model any time soon.

But just like the Digital Nomads, they take what they can get, and make money from it. For them, Boundless offers a level of freedom that most other platforms can only offer: a way to disappear completely.

"We are freelancers, and we will never be real."

Content mediation is a process first described in the chapter on "Negotiation,"in which the parties reach an agreement on a "solemnity" and "equality of opportunity." The agreement says nothing about what this is, or should be. It says that "we," in this case, refer to the client and not to the services rendered. It's not quite complete, but it reveals a much more complicated relationship between freelancer and client than most are able to fathom.

The terms of the "permissive" agreement (which is not a corporate name, but is a small piece of paper that says "I will do whatever is necessary to allow you to continue living your dream life" and "I reserve the right to reject any offer of more than reasonable compensation.") list the obligations specified in the contract, including living a happy and productive life. Under the terms of the agreement, "I will do whatever is necessary to allow you to continue living your dream life."

As soon as we experience existential crisis-as-we-should-experience existential crisis situations, we tend to think about how we should deal with them. We have contracts that describe how we should deal with them, and we deal with the infinite variety of human interactions. Even if you could wrap your head around any situation that challenges your immersion in the Wild West, there's no reason not to deal with them.