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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide an example of a bullshit job?
Did you read the article?
At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in-game currency, gold pieces or GP. It was something like $10 to 1M GP. I could chop enough magic logs in about 4-6 hours to make $10.
I had a breakthrough. What if I wrote a macro to record my cursor and clicks during my route from the 'bank' (where you can deposit any amount of any material) to the nearby respawning magic tree forest?
Weeks went by and I had passive income. Runescape eventually introduced the Grand Exchange, a literal in-game stock market that allowed power users like me to sell much larger quantities of certain items instantly, across all Runescape servers (referred to as Worlds) simultaneously. This required a standardized pricing mechanism, like an order book, where prices of any item would fluctuate based on buy and sell orders.
Suddenly, I now could see a +-10% change on the value of my digital assets, on which my passive income was built.
I could go on; Runescape in fact taught me much about economics. What's extraordinary is selling Runescape gold led me to Bitcoin, and I've watched cryptocurrency for nearly a decade, seeing trends from a MMO propagate throughout the world. It seems human nature to innovate and stagnate, and the more immediate our collective feedback loops, the quicker these cycles are.
Sorry to get a bit off track: So is web3 just “ blockchain related things “ ? I feel like web3 as a term usage has exploded to the point that I’m not sure what people are talking about when they say “web3”.
There are several massive hurdles to overcome that non-technical people gloss over or flat out don't understand. Even if you store all the data in a distributed database, store all static files in distributed file systems, a single user would still need a single point of entry to access this network. It seems like a centralized DNS like system would still be needed.
Even if there were multiple providers of this DNS like service, it would put the onus on the user to figure it out. This has never historically worked well for the average user. Also, internet access itself is still typically controlled by a few providers given a users area.
The reality is web3 and crypto is putting too much responsibility on the user. Everyone uses gmail and google because its easy and effective and no one cares its centralized. iPhones are popular because they are easy and the average user doesn't care that Apple controls the ecosystem.
Is this different from the phenomenon described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming ? Honestly it seems like a pretty great career -- you get to spend your time indoors, probably somewhere climate controlled with electricity and restrooms. This is way better than the workhouse. Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically donating their wealth to others, like a kind of privatized welfare. If p…
Gold farming is, at least, based on the premise that there are people who are willing to pay other people money to perform repetitive actions in a video game for them. It's still kind of dumb and it has harmful effects on in-game economies, but at least there's some semblance of money being exchanged for goods and services.
"Play to earn", on the other hand, is based on the premise of cutting out the middleman and having the game developer just straight-up hand players money (or something money-equivalent) for playing their game. How this is even supposed to work from an economic standpoint is a question that I've never seen adequately answered.
> I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism But if we take Darwinian evolution as our analogy, there are plenty of strategies that essentially piggy back on other organisms. Cuckoo birds, intestinal worms, a whole coterie of sexual behaviors. It's also the everyday experience of just about everyone that they perceive certain others to no…
EDIT: If there are any economists out there who can point me in the direction of a primary source that elucidates the relationship between price discovery and interest rates in a way that will help me understand contemporary monetary policy as something other than political expediency, I would greatly appreciate it.
Is this different from the phenomenon described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming ? Honestly it seems like a pretty great career -- you get to spend your time indoors, probably somewhere climate controlled with electricity and restrooms. This is way better than the workhouse. Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically donating their wealth to others, like a kind of privatized welfare. If p…
Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done. There's no actual economic output to paying people to break rocks.
With automation coming for most jobs, we can either live in a low to no work Utopia or a hypercapitalist hell. Given recent trends, my money is on hypercapitalist hell.
I do this a lot because I've made the conscious (and perhaps financially foolish) choice to stay away from everything crypto/blockchain related (for now, at least). So I have some perspective in being able to ask myself "Why is this interesting?" without any emotional-financial attachment. I do this little exercise every time I read about some new brain-twisting scheme to move money around and capture some of the XX%/month rise.
Play-to-earn seems to fit the same mold: You can talk all you want about how play-to-earn is "the new new" and how it's helping people out of poverty and changing the dymanics of gaming and yadda yadda yadda. But just ask yourself: If the money music stopped tomorrow, would you play the game?
Is there a "there" there without an underlying token that's gone up XX% in the last N months and everyone hopes will still go up XX% in the next N months?
It sounds like the answer, at least when it comes to Axie Infinity, is no. It doesn't sound fun. It doesn't sound compelling. It DOES sound like an opportunity for people to extract money from the crypto system that's fundamentally based on the assumption that the crypto system will continue rising in value forever.
The problem with the bullshit jobs thesis is similar to this common saying in advertising: "I know I'm wasting 80% of my ad spend. I just don't know which 80%." The same principle likely applies to wages across the economy. I think it's rather obvious that a huge fraction of employment is worthless. The problem is determining which fraction that is. It's not obvious. Many jobs that look and feel like bullshit may hav…
Companies often barely have any idea of what employees spend the majority of their day doing. They are never going to catch all the little things.
My problem with these Play2Earn games is that it provides a dark motivation for kids to play them. Previously, you'd play something like Doom or Quake because you enjoyed it and you'd quit after an hour or two because it would rapidly become repetitive and boring. You knew deep down that you were wasting time on recreation and that you should probably do the things you should be doing (e.g. the dishes, reading a book…
I'd be careful telling people what they "should" and "shouldn't" be doing with their time based on your contrived opinions.