But don't confuse the economic boom times and labor market crunch that made it easy and lucrative for so many techies to become their own bosses with the broader reasons for the independent-worker phenomenon. Dan Pink, author of the new book "Free Agent Nation: How America's New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live," argues that there's a lot more to "free agents" than the glorified tech workers that the dot-com boom made front-page news.

Free agents include everyone from the creative director who quits her job at a big ad agency to sell her services back to her former employer and other clients at three times her former salary to the stay-at-home mom who starts a home-based "microbusiness" to make money while spending more time with her kids to the perma-temp office worker who toils for years at the same company but can't get health insurance or other benefits.

In 1997, Pink quit his job as a speechwriter for then Vice President Gore, and took a cross-country road trip with his wife and young daughter to perform his own unofficial census of independent workers. Now, with the release of his new book, he's both a member and a chronicler of the free-agent nation. In Chicago, where he was giving a presentation at consulting firm Arthur Andersen, Pink spoke to me from his cellphone -- in true free-agent fashion -- from the city's Navy Pier, with seagulls cawing and wind whistling in the background.

Do you think the appeal of going independent has dimmed now that when people aren't leaping out of companies, they're getting pushed out by layoffs? Has the glamour of free-agent work lost its sheen?

	Free Agent Nation: How America's New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live By Daniel H. Pink Warner Books 356 pages Nonfiction Print story E-mail story

Maybe a touch. But the most important question to ask yourself is, compared to what? Compared to working at Dell, which just laid off 10 percent of its workforce? Compared to working at Cisco, which just laid off gigantic numbers of people? There isn't long-term security in any realm.

Why do you think more people are striking out on their own? Does it represent some kind of failure in the way that companies work now? Is working for the Man really that bad?

It's partly that. Companies really did poison the well by treating workers so badly, especially in the late '80s and early '90s with endless downsizing and layoffs, and treating people like commodities. I think that a lot of people felt incredibly scorched and are going to be fearful about going back close to the flame.

We had this age of corporate paternalism where corporations took care of people. You had companies like Kodak that called itself "The Great Yellow Father," the phone company that called itself "Ma Bell." And by the early 1990s that was over. IBM used to have a no-layoffs policy. No matter what happened, it said, "we'll never lay anybody off." And then in the early '90s it laid off something like 50,000 people. There was a big "Never mind!"

Technology is obviously part of it, too. It's Karl Marx's revenge, because workers can now own the means of production. The tools that you need to create wealth used to be extremely large, expensive and difficult for one person to operate. Now, they're the exact reverse.

But big reality check for all of you liberal arts majors out there: Roughly one out of four workers is a free agent; that means three out of four still have regular jobs. Traditional jobs are not going away. This is not the end of the job [market].

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.