Introducing Via Libera

The community for people who think differently about work, money, and freedom

Most people spend their lives trading autonomy for security without ever questioning it.

Get a good job. Build a career. Work for someone else until retirement. For most of history, this was the only option. Independence required capital most people didn’t have. The internet eliminated those barriers. Yet the default path hasn’t changed.

Let’s explore why independent work matters more than ever. How the economics of production have shifted. What it means to own your productive capacity in the information age.

Welcome to Via Libera.

The Trade We’re Taught to Make

I’m a millennial. My parents came from a generation where having a career and a stable job was the safest option for your kids. I don’t blame them. Any parent wants their children to be safe, to have a respected job and a reliable salary.

Before the internet boom, economies were more localized. The values were different. Being the architect or the doctor of the town, were respectable positions. But those aren’t the referents anymore. Now we look at Silicon Valley. We look at YouTube, at people traveling for a living making more money than those old—and still need it—professions. The models have shifted, but society’s view still hasn’t changed.

The responsible path is still the same. Study, get a good job, trade your time and expertise for security and retire in 45 years—if you are lucky and there is something left.

For most people this trade makes sense. We argue that we want freedom, but in reality what we want is our basic needs met. And if that’s all we want, employment provides exactly that.

But meeting your needs and directing your own life are not the same thing.

The Dignity of Productive Work

There are two ways to meet your basic needs. You can exchange your productive capacity to an employer who pays you regularly. Or you can create value directly and exchange it in the market yourself. Both involve work—often hard work. But the relationship between you and that work is fundamentally different.

In employment, you’re separated from what you produce. You solve problems and create value for someone else that owns the results. They decides what gets built, how it gets built, and what happens to it afterward. Your expertise becomes an input in someone else’s productive system. The connection between your effort and the final value created is mediated through layers of organizational structure.

When you produce independently, you own the entire chain. You decide what problems are worth solving. You determine how to solve them. You capture the value you create directly. You own your means of production in the most literal sense: your knowledge, your skills, your capacity to create value, all remain under your control.

This distinction matters. Independent production means direct exchange with the market. You create something valuable and someone else pays for it, no intermediary required. You maintain full ownership of your productive capacity and everything you create with it. This is the foundation of genuine economic freedom: the ability to create value on your own terms and exchange it freely.

This isn’t a moral judgment against employment. People working corporate jobs are producing real value and contributing meaningfully. But there’s something about self-directed work that employment structurally cannot provide. It’s the difference between contributing to someone else’s dream or building according to your own.

How We Got Here

The corporate employment model isn’t the natural order of work. it’s only the most dominant one. For the vast majority of human history—hundreds of thousands of years—people worked independently. They hunted, gathered, farmed their own land, practiced trades. Even through the medieval period and into the early modern era, craftsmen owned their workshops, merchants controlled their trade, professionals built their own practices. The mass employment model we know today only became standard in the last 150 years, driven by the capital requirements of industrial production. In the entire span of human history, traditional employment represents only 0.05% of how humans have organized work. You needed factories, machinery, distribution networks. Building your own business required capital most people didn’t have.

The internet changed this completely.

Knowledge workers no longer need physical capital to produce value. You don’t need a factory, a storefront, or a logistics network. You need expertise and the ability to communicate it. The barriers that made employment the only viable option for most people have collapsed. For the first time in generations, independent production is economically accessible to anyone with valuable knowledge.

The internet made independent production possible again—and easier than ever. You can create content and build an audience. You can freelance and connect directly with clients across the world. You can package your expertise, distribute it, and sell it in the market.

You own your means of production—your knowledge, your skills, how you communicate them. Build assets and exchange them directly with people who value them.

We’re going back to a model where individuals can function as independent economic actors, creating and exchanging value on their own terms. Employment was a temporary necessity when production required massive capital. But that necessity is gone.

What Via Libera Means

Via Libera. Latin for “the free path.” Not freedom as escape, but freedom as the ability to direct your own work and build according to your own values.

We live in the information age. For the first time in history, knowledge itself is the primary means of production. If you have expertise, you have everything you need to build independently. The question is if you know how?

This newsletter exists to explore both why independence matters and how to actually achieve it. The philosophical vision and the practical method. We’ll examine the economic principles that make independent work viable—why direct value creation works, how markets reward genuine expertise, what it means to own your productive capacity. But we’ll also cover the strategies that actually get people to pay attention: how to build through online writing, how to make people value what you offer, how to communicate in ways that persuade, how to sell without feeling like you’re selling. How to turn expertise into digital products people want.

This is for you if:

• You’ve felt constrained by traditional employment and want real autonomy and ownership over your work.

• You have valuable knowledge and want to exchange it on your own terms.

• You’re tired of contributing to someone else’s vision when you could be building your own.

• You want to build a business that isn’t tied to any single location, that gives you the freedom to live and work from anywhere.

• You think differently about work, money, and what it means to live freely.

The Path Forward

Independent work gives you control over your productive capacity in ways employment structurally cannot.

You decide when you work. Your productive hours belong to you. When you create, when you rest, when you focus. You don’t fit in anyone’s schedule.

You decide where you work. Your capacity to create value isn’t tied to any location. Traditional work gives you two weeks off and ties you to one place. Independent work gives you complete location freedom, permanently.

You decide what you earn. Your compensation reflects the value you create directly. No salary caps, no corporate policies limiting what you’re worth. The market determines your income based on what you deliver.

You decide what you do. A few focused hours each day and you own everything else. Where you live. What you do with your time. No one questions your choices.

Complete autonomy over your productive capacity means complete autonomy over your life. This path demands clarity, discipline, and self-direction. But everything you build is yours to keep.

Via Libera. The free path.