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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#101

Post by beaconstudios »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #78
beaconstudios wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I paid you a salary to dig a hole and fill it up again, ad infinitum, that job would have inherent value just because I'm paying you to do it? If so, welcome aboard.

Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance officers. You can call these jobs “bullshit” if you rely on an oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist. Unfortunately, that’s also the exact view I often see in tech, wher…

David Graeber is an anarchist, his criticism of bullshit jobs is about sustaining the centralisation of power, not techbro idealism.

There is no reason outside of power dynamics why airline desk staff need to exist to comfort disgruntled passengers, because the existence of disgruntled passengers who need to be shooed off is a consequence of the airline industry.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#102

Post by bdr »

Slightly OT, but for the historical record:

> People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005.

I saw it happening at least as far back as ‘98 in DragonRealms, a MUD and (when it moved off of AOL) one of the first online games with a monthly subscription.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#103

Post by mattcwilson »

beckingz wrote: post #7

Certain jobs sufficiently far from the obvious value creation have a tendency to look useless. In many cases they are useless and could be bundled into other jobs, but when a job is over loaded there is efficiency to unbundling them. Factor in the communications synchronization overhead and it's no wonder that small organizations can perform incredible work. Large organizations have scale though.

I think there’s something to this comment and the one from zzbzq about Graeber’s “canonical bullshit job.” I’m also drawing some threads from Goedel Escher Bach.

Perhaps the growth in the administrative sector is a new class of job, that results from scale, coordination costs, Metcalfe’s law, and Goodhart’s law.

The job is to combat the diminishing returns on communication decay due to scale by measuring the system as a whole or in part and attempting to optimize that part.

There is no “product” other than the change in metric selected. There is no external or intrinsic value other than whatever 2nd, 3rd, nth order effects the measurement focus has on actual observable inputs and outputs of the system.

The job, in a GEB sense, is just a theorem that references some or all of the system itself, and which may not mean anything whatsoever outside the context of the system.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#104

Post by netcan »

zzbzq wrote: post #85
netcan wrote: post #42

As I was reading Graeber, it's useful to imagine useless job economies of the past. Is a medieval abbey "useless?" Clergy? Servants to the clergy? How about courtiers? Courtiers' dress makers? These classes represented a small part of most societies in the past, though not always that small. In any case, it's obvious that whatever needs these jobs serve are cultural. Don't underestimate culture. Money is a cultural c…

In the book version of his essay, one of the things he talks about is how most of the things people would write to him about being "bullshit jobs" were not his original definition of bullshit jobs. He gives the example of how a lot of people wrote to him about how useless hairdressers were, since people could just style their own hair. But, to Graeber, these are very much real jobs, because it's easy to see what was…

So... I think a lot of people (not you) missed the fact that graeber writes from what I think is a traditional anthropological perspective, as opposed to other social philosophy traditions.

Bullshit jobs described as such by the worker was a very big part of his definition. I think the definition has to drift, since an anthropologist won't typically want to impose a typology.

In any case, if medieval monks themselves considered monkery bullshit... there are snug places in Graebers' typology for them. In fact, I believe an average monastery could man every type of bullshit job category. It would depend on whether or not they themselves believe in the monastic institutions... and I would not necessarily assume that they did.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#105

Post by gitfan86 »

duskwuff wrote: post #52
nlh wrote: post #38

A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking about / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in the project? 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 l…

> 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? Alternatively, even simpler: where is the money coming from ? A bunch of people playing a game are a closed system, and no value is created by playing the game. If the only reason why players are earning money from this game is because more people are continually b…

This is what people don't seem to understand about BitCoin. It is cashflow negative, Money has to keep coming in to keep the price up due to paying miners. It is totally fine if you think BTC is better than the USD or Gold for whatever reason. But Bitcoin is still cashflow negative. You have to keep pumping money into it to keep up its value. Where is that money going to come from? Is it coming from Tether? Is it coming from people looking to make quick money? And when BTC hits 1M/coin, then what? You still need more money coming in to keep it above 1M.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#106

Post by xg15 »

ericjang wrote: post #79
nlh wrote: post #38

A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking about / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in the project? 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 l…

I agree with your point that the operative word here is "earn", and not "play". To play the devil's advocate: many crypto developers continue to build in the space (or have done it in the past) despite large drawdowns in token prices (denominated in USD). Would that constitute a sufficient signal that "there is something real there", distinct from the question of "is the valuation too high"?

I'd say no.

This might just as well be an "emperor's new clothes" situation, in which a significant number of people are either deluded in thinking there is something of value or heavily invested in making others believe so. Neither of which means there is actually anything "real" there.

Shared delusions are a thing.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#107

Post by sam_lowry_ »

>Games that maximize property rights (as Axie Infinity wisely hasn’t) >are bound to be overrun with cheaters and bots, which in turn will >just bring down the value of in-game assets anyway.

Bitcoin comes to mind as a good example. A the beginning there were geeks mining it on their gaming machines and buying expensive video cards to both play games and mine.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#108

Post by joshgrib »

nlh wrote: post #38

A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking about / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in the project? 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 l…

Agree with this reasoning - NFTs seem like they clearly have little to no real value and I think the people buying them understand that and are just doing speculation (and we know how that ends up). BTC/ETH are a little harder to gauge because they market themselves as alternative currencies rather than a product in-and-of-itself, but I still get the same fear that it's entirely based on sentiment and nothing in the real world. One article (or Elon tweet) could cause it all to drop overnight.

The USD might fall the same way, but it'd be slower and would require real-world change to happen instead of people just deciding not to use something anymore, and it's so tied up in the global currency exchange that we'd have way bigger problems to worry about than "my investment account lost all it's money". I'm pretty risk averse so I get that other people would want to play that game, I'm just not much of a gambler.

Ethereum seems slightly better than Bitcoin for the reasons you stated as well - ETH could drop to almost zero value and smart contracts would still be cool, but ultimately I'm into the tech. Feels a lot like having a lot of reddit karma to me - it's cool to the people that think it's cool, but doesn't mean much outside of that, unless you can convince someone that does think it's cool to take your fake assets and trade them for "real" assets.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#109

Post by brazzy »

mosdl wrote: post #12

So instead of banning gold farming in their game, they just made it a feature and collect a %?

The point seems to be that the game is nothing but gold farming, and the only money going into the system comes from prospective gold farmers paying a participation fee.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#110

Post by diarrhea »

duskwuff wrote: post #52
nlh wrote: post #38

A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking about / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in the project? 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 l…

> 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? Alternatively, even simpler: where is the money coming from ? A bunch of people playing a game are a closed system, and no value is created by playing the game. If the only reason why players are earning money from this game is because more people are continually b…

Probably a Ponzi, not a pyramid, scheme, no?
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