I had a bunch of stuff I was going to write about today, but then this one particular news story came along and so completely blew my mind – kabang! – that I just had to devote a huge chunk of my time to it.

It is the story of a visionary leader of our time, although to be fair, he probably just thinks of himself as a guy who got caught doing some insanely clever and wishes he had been just a tiny bit more clever so he could continue to gloat over how god damned clever he was.

But then again, then nobody would have known how clever he was, and where’s the fun in that?

It is the story of the man who outsourced his own job.

Known, at this point, only by his new Internet nickname of “Development Bob”, this man had the idea to get a job writing code for Verizon, then simply hire a Chinese firm to do the actual code writing part, paying them just a portion of his salary.

Thus, “Developed Bob”, hereafter referred to as “DB”, could sit on his computer watching cat videos and surfing Reddit all day while earning not just his salary, but glowing reviews of his performer as a coder, producing code hailed as “clean, well-written, and submitted in a timely fashion”.

He was, in fact, hailed as the best coder at his workplace for several years. Hey, let’s hear it for Chinese code, huh?

(I wonder… do they code in English? Or were they coding in some strange form of Chinese C and then had to translate it? Or did they just send him the executables?)

Reports suggest (but don’t confirm) that he was pulling this beautiful, magnificent con at several workplaces, pulling down “hundreds of thousands” of dollars in salary and only paying the Chinese firm about $50K for their work.

That sounds a little too good to be true. But even if he only worked one job this way, I still consider the man a genius and a leader of our ages because he outsourced his own job.

And if he can do it, anybody can do it! Well, OK, not anybody. Actually, the vast majority of jobs require physical presence and cannot be outsourced. You can’t hand people their orders at Burger King via computer.

It is only a specific set of information heavy high level jobs that could possibly be outsourced this way.

The basic rule is this : if you can telecommute, your job could be sent overseas. Something for a lot of well paid professionals to think about, I would think.

But anyhow, the point is, DB outsourced his job himself, and thus it was he who pocketed the profits and not the global megacorp for which he worked.

And that, to me, is a revolutionary act. He took the profit for himself, just like a corporation would if it had done the outsourcing itself, and I think this is not only brilliantly subversive, but a sign of how corporations are happy to behave like sociopaths themselves, but when their worker drones dare to act that way themselves, it is the blackest of sins.

After all, there’s no I in team, right drones? You must sacrifice for the good of the group that would never dream of sacrificing anything for you, but is more than happy to sacrifice as much of your time, energy, hope, dreams, and anything else that it can!

And that hypocrisy is, I believe, the weakness to be exploited in changing corporate culture and thus society for the future.

I think that every worker simply needs to declare themselves to be an individual corporation that sells labour to their employer. Incorporate and everything, if you can afford it, with your own stationery and business cards and everything.

Then go and renegotiate your contact with them from this basis. You are not an interchangeable cog in the great machine of business. You are one corporation negotiating with another. Your labour is your cost and your salary is revenue.

Sounds scary, I know, but this is where it gets good, trust me.

See, as owner and sole shareholder of the corporation of yourself, you have a fiduciary responsibility to yourself to maximize your profits.

That means you are legally obligated to do as little work as possible for the same salary!

Anything else would be corporate malfeasance! After all, corporations keep telling us that they have no choice but to do whatever will generate the most value for their shareholders, regardless of ethics.

Well, fair is fair. Let’s do the same thing to them. Become your own corporation and not only bargain extremely hard for your labour, but once you have the contract, do only what you are legally compelled to do, and do absolutely everything in your power to maximize your effective wage.

After all, if you are paid for 40 hours a week but can get away with only doing 30, then it is the equivalent of a 25 percent hike in hourly wage, isn’t it?

You are getting paid the same amount for lower cost. Sounds like an increase in profits to me. It is just like when a corporation boosts profits by cutting costs.

It is just that your costs happen to be labour.

And just imagine how the corps will react to their employees treating them exactly how they treat their employees (and everything else). They will scream bloody murder, and yet… what exactly can they say?

What argument could they possibly summon up for why your corporation should treat them better than their corporation treats you?

Any attack on your behaviour would be an attack on the very justifications they use for their own selfish and amoral behaviour.

So three cheers to DB! I think more people in his position should do what he did, and what is more, I think it should be perfectly legal.

After all, his employer got exactly what they wanted from him.

He just used a very high level programming language called “money”.