Fuck AI

They are police, no more, no less.

Unfortunately, I can’t make enough money doing that in my area without being attached to a company.

Most of that is because Google, Facebook and other giant tech companies gatekeep you from finding any customers. It's not because the customers don't exist, it's because the customers have been trained to find you with Google search, then look at Google reviews, check you out on your Google site, and maybe if they're really serious check Facebook too.

The question then becomes, without the tech giants standing in the middle, how do you find customers and how do customers find you? Easier said than done, you might think, and you might be right. But I believe with patience and an understanding of old-school, pre-tech-giant advertising and some creativity on how you adapt it to today's world and tomorrow's, whatever that will be, I think it might be easier than you imagine. Remember that the tech-giants and gatekeepers also propagandize their dominance so that you don't see any other path as viable. They don't want you to try other things, and they'll come at you sideways to make you believe it's too risky, that you're already failing or prevent you from committing enough to actually succeed.

Part of the problem is patience. They've built their platforms based on instant gratification and shortening attention spans. It may take time to build a business outside their system. You will need financial runway, maybe more than you think, and you'll need time on the runway to start to get enough air under your wings to lift off, and at first it won't seem like you're making any progress no matter how hard you're pushing. This is enough to make most people quit. They count on that.

If I could work out of my garage

The economy is ripe for this kind of shift, I think. I don't know if we're there yet, but "shop small, shop local" is the only way out of this tech-giant megacorporation dystopia, and I see signs that people are starting to figure that out, or even just be forced into it while looking for the gray and black market economic options as people increasingly find themselves priced out of the "normal" economy in sector after sector.

If the economy is no longer working for people (and it's clearly not), they will naturally seek alternatives. This isn't even really a philosophical choice as much as it is a practical inevitability.

When the existing economic system becomes unfair, unjust, and unlivable, the only rational choice is to opt-out of that system. This is one potential path out of it, if enough people choose it, it can succeed. There are many other possible paths out of it too, most of them are far less pleasant. Time will tell where we end up.

For real. There's a lot of jobs that I'd truly enjoy doing full-time, but they just don't pay enough.

If governments do UBI, capitalists will just raise prices by that amount and people will still be struggling the same. What we really need is for the people to grow a brain and do a socialist revolution.