by Doug Casey, International Man:

It’s hard to remember how hard it was to look for work – or leave your current job – before technology changed everything.

Consider what LinkedIn does for you. It allows you to have your own identity apart from your current employer, as if you own your labor. You gather your own network and keep it as you move from job to job.

You can job hunt without seeming to betray your boss. You can be available for job offers too, even if you don’t think of yourself as being on the market. When you change jobs, you can add that to your profile with a few clicks and have that change announced to your network. Otherwise everything is the same. You are faced with a daily variety of choice among employers competing to hire you for your skills. Or you can very easily go solo, choosing to gig and contract as your own personal business.

This is emancipation. This gives you freedom of choice.

Maybe that doesn’t impress you too much. We take it all for granted. But actually social media platforms have changed everything about the right to work. Before you had the ability to make a public profile page that people could follow, moving jobs was fraught with risk. You had to send in your resume, but you could not use your current employer as a reference or let your coworkers know you were in the market. You were stuck looking through help-wanted ads or getting news of open offers from a word-of-mouth network.

It was hard to make or take calls about possible new positions from the office because you didn’t have a cell phone. You had to scramble on nights and weekends. You dressed for a job interview — everything depended on the interview because there was no way for people to post testimonials about you — and everyone at the office would get suspicious. When you left your job, or got fired, much of the capital you developed in your last job you had to forgo. You had to start over entirely. The prospect alone was enough to discourage you from even looking for a new position.

Technological limitations and government interventions hobbled labor market adjustments. It could not clear as a market should.

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