On Autonomy
Many business owners believe they have a marketing problem.
They do not.
What they have, whether they recognise it or not, is an autonomy problem.
They’ve poured their hearts and souls into their dream — and built businesses dependent on structures they do not control, people they cannot compel, or platforms owing them nothing.
And then they express surprise — and sometimes indignation, outrage, and fury — when these arrangements prove unreliable.
Any system requiring the ongoing permission of third parties to function is not neutral. It is hostile by default.
And the longer you operate inside it, the more dependent you become.
Autonomy, in business, is not a lifestyle preference.
Nor is it a personality trait, a “mindset”, or a feel-good slogan to be expressed authentically in your feed.
Autonomy is…
doing the work you want,
with whom you want,
when you want,
how you want,
where you want,
for the price you want,
— and if and only if you want to do it at all.
Given this definition, then, autonomy is a structural condition…
… and most people do not have it.
The modern illusion of independence
Nothing about this is independent.
What presents as autonomy is, in practice, a lattice of permissions granted by systems whose interests are not aligned with those who rely on them.
They depend on:
- an Internet connection to give them access to markets
- algorithms to give them visibility
- platforms to permit their presence
- prospects to behave reasonably
- clients to honour informal expectations
- goodwill where terms should exist
This is hopium-numbed dependence with better branding.
A business that cannot reliably initiate attention, payment, or dialogue without asking permission is operating on sufferance, not autonomously.
And sufferance, by definition, can be withdrawn.
Why this is mistaken for strategy
This is routinely mislabelled as strategy.
What’s being exercised is hope — hope dressed up as method, and patience mistaken for positioning.
Business owners behave as if the need for the market to know, like, and trust them places them in a popularity contest — vying for approval among countless competitors from whom they cannot be distinguished.
They speak of “building relationships,” “nurturing trust,” “warming the market,” and other such comforting abstractions when what they mean is: someone else must decide in my favour.
Waiting is not a strategy.
Large numbers of people waiting together does not make it strategic.
It makes the dependence only fashionable.
Control is not optional
Control is treated as something to be earned later.
It is deferred until visibility has been achieved, reputation established, and an audience sufficiently “warmed.” In the meantime, businesses accept dependence as a temporary inconvenience rather than a permanent risk.
This framing is backwards.
Control is not a reward for success. It is the precondition for it.
A business that lacks control does not become independent by growing larger. It becomes more exposed.
If you cannot reliably initiate contact, name your price, set your terms, and demand secure payment before work commences, then your business is structurally incomplete and unsound.
And incompleteness is not cured by hope or optimism.
Control is also not binary. It exists on a spectrum, and most people operate far closer to the dependent end than they care to admit.
Ask yourself a few unflattering questions.
- Can you initiate a commercial conversation at will, with a person you have deliberately selected?
- Can you do so without entertaining them, educating them, or courting their approval first?
- Can you name a fee without apology, justification, or caveat?
- Can you insist on payment before work begins, without fear of refusal or being perceived as difficult?
- Can you walk away cleanly when your terms are resisted?
If the honest answer to any of these is “no”, then what you have is not a marketing problem, nor a confidence problem, nor a positioning problem.
You have a control problem.
Control problems do not resolve themselves. They worsen.
Markets do not reward patience in the absence of leverage. They exploit it. Platforms do not protect contributors. They monetise them. Prospects do not spontaneously become respectful. They respond to boundaries — or treat them as suggestions and ignore them.
This is why autonomy cannot be wished into existence and must be designed.
Control, then, is not optional.
And pretending otherwise doesn’t make the dependency any less real.
It is the price of autonomy.
—
The Evil Bald Genius