Is academia the opposite of self-employment since you have many bosses?

Question

In particular, the people involved in peer review of your work could be considered not just bosses but bosses who don't particularly care whether you succeed.In fact, they may not even want you to succeed if your research threatens their research.

PaulHoule · Accepted Answer

If you are self-employed and have 10 clients you have 10 bosses. Somebody like
https://www.youtube.com/c/techmoan
has no "boss" but he's at the mercy of his fans, the Youtube algorithm, etc. For instance in 2017 there was a moral panic over ads running against terrorist content so people like that got demonetized until Youtube improved their content filtering.