I'm moving to France in September and reading posts on this site has already helped me a lot! Thanks for putting it up. I'll be sure to post my own review once I've settled in!
This is super inspiring and really makes me want to try a similar experiment. I've been wondering how I can make income while doing month long stays in different countries throughout the world, and this seems like it would be about perfect. New country, new project, enough income just to get by. Keeping the price low is not necessarily a mistake. It will allow you to pick from a much large range of products and if you can live for two months on $2000, why not just keep it low. The world doesn't necessarily always have to be profit-maximizing.
P.S. I checked out your essay about the first person view. I think you should watch this video from the BBC. It describes how this first person view that you describe is not actually making the decisions for your body, an MRI machine can predict what decision you will 6-7 seconds before you become conscious of making a particular decision. This doesn't necessarily answer your question, but the video shifts the question from why am I making decisions to why does brain make me think I'm making decisions.
Does this seem exploitative to other people? Although it is exciting that his app launched, the fact that this entrepreneur is being called "The Homeless Coder" seems wrong to me.
I think the difference is nobody is exploiting anybody else. "Leo the Homeless Coder" is exploiting himself for profit, but Patrick McConlogue is not exploiting anybody. I'm not 100% sure what his specific motivation was, but it doesn't seem like Patrick is attempting to profit off this in any way.
Wesley Willis was schizophrenic and no amount of casual intervention was going to meaningfully improve his circumstances. And, yes, Willis was exploited terribly.
This, today, is just a guy who wants to learn how to code. Good for him; I wish him the best.
I guess the point I didn't make in this blog post, but that I usually do make when I'm discussing this topic in real life, is that the system we have right now, call it corporatism or whatever, will always develop out of capitalism. Because the people do not have the capacity to make checks on the government or business, given enough time, capitalism will start to crumble and create a system that is littered with problems that are practically impossible to fix by an uninformed public.
