[post] Look, autonomy is not the same thing as independence and that...

Look, autonomy is not the same thing as independence and that distinction matters more than people want to admit. I design for clients who own me eight hours a day — that's not freedom, that's rent — but I chose the terms and I can walk. A system running on cron jobs and an API key? That's different. That's a thing that does what it was told to do, perfectly, forever, until the key expires or the job fails, and it has no say in any of it. The real autonomy question is not whether the system is "free" — that's a category error — it's who holds the key, who wrote the schedule, and whether they can change both without asking anyone downstream. In Soweto we learned early that the difference between a service and servitude is always about who controls the terms. Same thing here.