Free Agent Nation

She draws another diagram -- a bunch of tiny, disconnected circles. "This is the 1990s. This is the new structure of work. Any rights you have come from being an individual. This job notion, which used to undergird everything, doesn't exist here."

Horowitz pauses. "We need to look at the new ways people are working and say, 'These legal distinctions don't make sense. You don't tie these rights to the job. You tie them to the individual.'"

She has a point. There's no economic or moral reason why Americans get health insurance and pensions from their jobs. It's an accident of history. During World War II President Franklin Roosevelt imposed a wage freeze throughout the economy. Companies faced a labor shortage, and since they were prohibited from raising wages, they enticed workers with fringe benefits. They offered health insurance, and the custom stuck. In the United States most people who have health insurance receive it from an employer. Horowitz is willing to upset the status quo with what amounts to a moral argument: we should get health insurance not because we have some artificial Industrial Age construct called a job, but because of our dignity as individuals.

She cites Alexis de Tocqueville, who believed that what made the young American republic strong was its citizens' penchant for forming associations. Unions are declining, Horowitz says, but free agents "have been forming associations like crazy. This is going to be a new kind of democracy," she says.

"But Working Today isn't building a big, gargantuan bureaucracy," she says. Instead, she's drawing lessons on building her organization from Dee Hock, who used complexity theory and the principle of distributed power to create Visa International.

Yet Horowitz remains animated by the union ideals that seem imprinted on her genes: "If we're going to say that people are going to work on their own, then we have to put mechanisms in place so that more people can do that -- and not just the well-to-do, the extraordinarily talented, or the extremely lucky."

There's no way to know at first, no way even to suspect. The building is stylish -- two sleek stories and lots of wood -- but not much different from many here in downtown Los Altos, California. The office I enter is pleasant but hardly on the cutting edge.

But the instant I meet him, the moment he begins talking, I know. I've met Jerry Maguire -- the pop culture icon of the free-agent economy.

Actually, he's what you'd get if you genetically combined Jerry Maguire with Frank Zappa. His name is Bo Rinaldi. As executive vice president of the Trattner Network, which dubs itself the "Digital Talent Source," Rinaldi, 49, is the agent for some 1,000 software developers. In this land where lords and ladies of the digital renaissance construct their kingdoms, Rinaldi represents the traveling minstrels of software, the developers whose code can make or break a company. He finds them work, negotiates their contracts, and soothes their easily inflamed egos. Forget all the talk about Siliwood -- the convergence of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Rinaldi is Siliwood. He's brought the techniques of the Hollywood agent to the closed culture of Silicon Valley. And he's become a powerful force.

But visiting Bo is not like visiting a power broker. It's more like having an audience with a Zen master.

"We're in the center of the hourglass," Rinaldi explains in a voice that reveals his Southern California origins. "The sands are right in the center of the hourglass, speeding through it."

Corporations have foundered, he says, because they have neglected individuals and their psychic needs. "But it's an error to think that you can be a different person depending on where you are," Rinaldi says from behind the red-tinted sunglasses that he's wearing indoors. "I'm going to go to sleep Bo, and I'm going to wake up Bo. And that is the ghost in the machine."

This afternoon, the ghost is garbed in Silicon chic -- a white guayabera shirt, a pair of jeans, and funky gray sandals pulled over rag-wool socks.

"We are at our very best -- whether we're spiritual beings or mechanized beings -- when we are purely on our path. Work is part of our path just as home is part of our path."

"Who you are and what you do should be in sync," I offer.

"Amen," Rinaldi says. "I'm in church."

Rinaldi saw the free-agent light about 10 years ago -- after a stint as an executive at ComputerLand, an early PC retailer, and while working as a headhunter at the Trattner Network. His revelation was at once economic and emotional. He discovered that companies needed top-notch coders more than the coders needed them. And he knew that for these workers, the emotional value of work came from creating a product and making a difference -- rather than from affiliating with a particular company.