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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

• jsemrau 5y ago
  Though provoking article. The main problem that play-to-earn games have is that they need to rely on external cash-inflows to reward the players. This makes them very close to Ponzi schemes or Casino's. If the moral product is to earn a livable wage in Web3, that is not the way.
• VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago
  >People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005. Excuse me, I sold my Shortsword of the Ykesha for real life money in 1999 on EverQuest via eBay.
• bdr 5y ago
  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.
  • Kiro 5y ago
    Yeah, I sold stuff in Ultima Online much earlier than 2005. Lazy research in this article.
    • TheDong 5y ago
      That doesn't come off as "lazy research" to me. The author didn't write "the earliest time this happened was 2005", but rather "at least as far back as ....". The author's correct in their wording, and the point was simply that getting real money out of games in some way is not novel to this new "play to earn" genre. The point of the article was to talk about Axie Infinity and Bullshit Jobs in the present, not to spend significant time on historical background. To be honest, I think using Second Life, or runescape, or such as an example, instead of Ultima Online or such, actually is better writing in that it's more likely to be something the audience is familiar with, or at least can google and read more about. In that sense, using a well known historical example is less lazy writing than finding the oldest possible thing that others are unlikely to relate to for a peripheral comparison which already explicitly was worded as "at least as early as" ("kinda old, but not necessarily the oldest").
• ggm 5y ago
  A reminder that the Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis at one point in his pre parliamentary career did extensive work on the economics of MMOs for valve, eve online.
• sfblah 5y ago
  I’m getting tired of this Ponzi scheme stuff. Can we have some kind of protests to insist the Fed raise rates and put an end to this? I’m not a big activist by nature, but that’s something I could get behind.
• moneywoes 5y ago
  If they can ban players fir cheating how is the game decentralized?
• seibelj 5y ago
  I disagree entirely with the thesis of "bullshit jobs". Unless it's a government job or mandated by regulations, someone is paying for a task to be done voluntarily. Therefore it isn't bullshit to the payer, even if it might seem like bullshit to the worker. I have never stumbled on a single job that wasn't government-required labor that had no purpose whatsoever, and furthermore the laborer wasn't able to quit.
  • withinboredom 5y ago
    Sure you can quit. But often these “bs jobs” are a form of scope creep so you face the thought that eventually, it may change.
    • seibelj 5y ago
      Can you provide an example of a bullshit job?
      • xracy 5y ago
        Did you read the article?
        • seibelj 5y ago
          Yes! However, as stated in the article, earning currency or items in videogames and reselling them have been around since the earliest days of online gaming. Plus these people are entrepreneurs working for themselves. I'm really not getting the link.
          • xracy 5y ago
            "In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially people performing useless work." I would treat a bullshit job as any job/living that requires you to do useless work. How do you define "useless work"?
          • 5y ago
• ridiculousthrow 5y ago
• api 5y ago
  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 have some hidden function within an organization that is essential (and may not even be the "primary function" of the job as per the job req), and many very important looking jobs may create little to no value. There are probably companies that could knock out the CEO but would have a tougher time without one of their office assistants, but where telling which office assistant this is would be almost impossible without spending months observing the intricate details of operations. The fact that markets are bad at optimizing out this obvious cost center makes me wonder if it might be "non-computable." The only way we know of to discover this is to use Darwinian methods, but this is incredibly destructive. Deep recessions take out a lot of good but not-yet-robust businesses along with the bad and the obsolete. The modern practice of pumping economies along forever and not allowing deep recessions probably leads to a ton of dead wood building up but it's also probably why we have progress in quantum computers, electric vehicles, and space flight among other speculative areas that would probably implode in a deep recession (without being specifically subsidized). Forest fires burn the dead wood but they also burn a shitload of trees, especially immature ones who don't have layers of flame retardant bark. Lots of old and injured animals die but so do the babies who can't run fast yet.
  • duxup 5y ago
    It’s also very “easy” to identify a BS job, especially when you don’t know much about it.
    • api 5y ago
      Yup, and it gets worse when you consider that everyone is usually trying to make their job look important regardless of how important it actually is. It's likely that a deliberate attempt to weed out BS jobs would select for good fakers, ass kissers, and con artists and weed out a lot of heads-down productive people.
  • 5y ago
• duxup 5y ago
  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”.
  • beckingz 5y ago
    web3 is whatever the newest startup is doing. But yes, blockchain.
  • victorvosk 5y ago
    Web3 as a concept is decentralization primarily, though it was invented by people championing crypto. The idea that the web can't be censored or controlled by gov't or large corporations. Everyone should be able to easily contribute and maintain web3. The blockchain is the "logical" place for it to live since a blockchain is just a distributed compute and database platform. 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.
    • duxup 5y ago
      Thank you.
  • beambot 5y ago
    Generally refers to decentralized technologies that somehow benefit from blockchain-like data structures. For example, you can compost these three technologies to build a decentralized webserver. - Filecoin & AR Weave: decentralized file storage. Spend tokens to store files, earn tokens by storing others' files. - ENS (Ethereum Name Service): DNS-like system for addresses. - Smart Contracts of various sorts (e.g. Ethereum): Similar to perpetual AWS lambda functions. Spend tokens to publish & call functions; earn tokens by executing functions. The blockchain aspect is merely a way to have verifiable incentives without explicit trust between actors.
• beckingz 5y ago
  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.
  • mattcwilson 5y ago
    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.
    • beckingz 5y ago
      Scale increasingly becomes constrained by organizational interfaces. At a certain point, trying to add people to an organization actually makes it less productive unless their contributions can be abstracted globally. At a certain extent, the system must become inhuman: metrics and interface contracts are needed to prevent overhead growth.
  • kmeisthax 5y ago
    One of the interesting things about Graeber's typology is that it includes things that you wouldn't consider to be bullshit jobs. There's an entire category of his typology dedicated to jobs that destroy productive output; like if a business were to hire lawyers to sue the pants off of competing businesses. They get a competitive advantage by increasing everyone else's compliance and legal costs. I believe this particular categorization could apply to game development in the context of NFT or microtransaction driven gameplay. The economies that these games provide are specifically engineered to increase user spend by targeting "whales". Someone being paid to play a game for someone else is providing a valuable service; but the game doesn't just exist naturally. It's designed. Building a game so that you need to pay to skip the grind is a bullshit job. And if that's a bullshit job, then the people selling their Axies and other game resources have transitively bullshit jobs, even if their own job is not inherently bullshit.
• jimbob45 5y ago
  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, etc). Now, there's a small voice for players of these telling them that this time is productive. They're earning money and that's a noble goal to ourselves. Even worse are the games like League of Legends and WoW where there are professional scenes. It's very easy to deceive yourself into thinking you're just practicing those games in order to one day go pro.
  • nightski 5y ago
    I'd be careful telling people what they "should" and "shouldn't" be doing with their time based on your contrived opinions.
    • frankbreetz 5y ago
      Telling other people what they should and shouldn't do is the basis of society
    • throwaheyy 5y ago
      I’m fine with telling them that they shouldn’t. We already went through all this with bs degrees that leave people in massive debt and without sufficient income to pay it back.
    • jimbob45 5y ago
      Reading books and maintaining personal cleanliness are controversial activities now? In what clown world should anyone ever be advised to play video games instead of doing those things?
    • stale2002 5y ago
      The point that the other person was making, is that if you are arguing that these "games" are actually a good/effective way of making money for kids, you are lying. That's the problem. The issue is they there could be people who are tricked into believing that this is an effective way of making money, when it is clearly not for most people.
• mosdl 5y ago
  So instead of banning gold farming in their game, they just made it a feature and collect a %?
  • brazzy 5y ago
    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.
• HWR_14 5y ago
  How is this not a Ponzi scheme?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • renewiltord 5y ago
    So a Ponzi scheme works like this: * You take money from investors * You then claim that you are making money from some legitimate business * You return money to earlier investors by just feeding them the money later investors put in So who are the early investors here, what's the legitimate business, and how are we taking money from later investors to give to early investors? EDIT: Guys, it's not a zero-sum game. You can breed new axies, etc. By the logic espoused by everyone in the responses, the stock market is a ponzi scheme because later participants buy stock from earlier participants. This may be my fault with the defn lacking some things, but clearly the stock market isn't a ponzi scheme, so something is wrong.
    • ragona 5y ago
      Early investors: people who “invested” hundreds of dollars to play. Legitimate business: “we’re a game studio.” Later investors: newer players who see the earlier ones making money.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • jeremyjh 5y ago
      Read TFA. Your questions are all answered in it.
    • foxfluff 5y ago
      > So who are the early investors here "Gameplay requires the purchase of three Axies, which currently cost in the hundreds of US dollars each." > what's the legitimate business "By blurring the line between “player” and “worker”, the game has effectively built a Ponzi scheme with built-in deniability. Sure, some users will be net gainers and other users will be net losers, but who am I to say the net losers aren’t in it for the joy of the game?" So I guess the "legitimate business" is making the game interesting for people who.. enjoy it? > and how are we taking money from later investors to give to early investors I don't know how the in-game mechanics work but later investors also purchase Axies and somehow that money ends up in the hands of the former investors. Maybe not automatically, I guess it depends on what in-game actions you take, but given that you first have to invest before you can play...
• lordnacho 5y ago
  > 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 not be contributing anything at all. The surprise is that some people are willing to admit they are one of those people as well. It's not hard to think of how this would work, either. Convince someone to hire you, and then don't contribute, while taking a salary. If it's hard or expensive to detect the non-contributor, there will be NCs in the organization.
  • boppo1 5y ago
    I hate when people refer to our regime of interest-rate intervention as capitalism. The primary feature of capitalism is price discovery, which we have intentionally given up. 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.
    • 8note 5y ago
      The defining feature of capitalism is the private ownership of capital. You can have whatever pricing mechanisms you like as long as the profits go to the owner
  • sam_lowry_ 5y ago
    > coterie of sexual behaviors Are you saying we can witness that in people too?
    • lordnacho 5y ago
      Hmm I think I meant menagerie. But yes, evolution and especially sexual selection creates a lot of interesting behaviors, and some of them a purely win-lose, and yes in people as well. There's a reason cheating on your partner is a trope of soap operas.
• originalvichy 5y ago
  It seems that after a few years of relative calm in the crypto scene (bitcoin just used to transact, mine or invest) the easier it got to roll-your-own-crypto the more magical ways we are finding uses for it. I had no idea this existed before.
• k__ 5y ago
  A bit like social media points, right? Followers, likes, karma, all aren't directly worth anything. But it takes work to get them. I know a bunch of prominent internet people who don't make much money with this status, because it's not easy to monetize it without compromise yourself.
  • badlucklottery 5y ago
    Charlie Booker had a similar take back in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjGh_lE6EGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjGh_lE6EGY
• mherdeg 5y ago
  Is this different from the phenomenon described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming 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 people are buying these things as a speculative investment, they're participating in a private lottery. That all seems … fine?
  • advisedwang 5y ago
    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.
    • 999900000999 5y ago
      But there's an economic drain if you fire all the rock breakers, and they end up on the streets. 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.
      • foxfluff 5y ago
        This fits Graeber's thesis; "The book [..] makes the case that the ruling class stands to lose from the proletariat having extra free time on their hands"
      • nradov 5y ago
        People keep claiming that automation is coming for most jobs, and yet we still don't have reliable, affordable robots that can do basic tasks like cooking a decent hamburger or stocking store shelves or snaking a plugged toilet. This belief in major automation advances is more like a religion than something grounded in hard science. Sure automation will gradually increase over time but it's going to be a long, slow grind.
• TeeMassive 5y ago
  > David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially people performing useless work, as a sort of subconscious self-preservation instinct of the economic status quo. Isn't it unavoidable in a world with food surplus and automation?
• Cypher 5y ago
  I prefer it over the mobile microtransaction loot box culture of the last decade.
  • jeremyjh 5y ago
    Have you played the game? Is it actually fun?
• 58x14 5y ago
  In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. 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.
  • steveylang 5y ago
    I'm hoping the rest of the story was you putting some of your magic tree earnings into a few hundred Bitcoins when they cost pennies, and you are now a Runescape multi-millionaire.
  • jonathan-adly 5y ago
    Very similar story here.. I had a few party hats in Runescape which made the whole NFT thing and to a lesser extent Bitcoin so much easier to understand.
    • jayd16 5y ago
      I still don't get it. We already sold digital assets so why do we need NFTs or Blockchain? What does it add here?
• nlh 5y ago
  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 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.
  • duskwuff 5y ago
    > 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 buying into the game and entering that system, that sounds more like a pyramid scheme than anything.
    • gitfan86 5y ago
      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.
• netcan 5y ago
  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 construct. Power. Politics. Macroeconomics. Etc. That's what's going on here.
  • Osmose 5y ago
    What's the cultural value provided by sitting on Axie and grinding for hours?
    • netcan 5y ago
      I'm not sure "value" is the correct question. Value depends on... values, I guess. In any case, I suspect Graeber would have advised asking them. The grinders in manilla. The currency buyers, traders, etc. Cultural reasons are hard to extract from their cultural context without resorting to essentialism. There are differences between a game where money comes from grinding, even if 3rd party and outsourced, and a pay-to-play currency. I suspect the people participating in that economy have a narrative, and that it makes some sort of internal sense. That's culture.
      • me_again 5y ago
        There are some comments from participants here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AxieInfinity/comments/qfe7fo/would_you_play_axie_infinity_if_there_was_no/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AxieInfinity/comments/qfe7fo/would_...
    • DarylZero 5y ago
      It's the same cultural value provided by a slot machine. A way to hack someone else's brain and turn them into a slave zombie. But I guess a lot of "real" culture is basically trying to do something similar: religions, corporate cults, schools, etc. Those are maybe only superficially less grotesque.
• dvt 5y ago
  Play-to-earn will die a painful death, but the takeaway here (which this article dodges) is that players should own their in-game assets. This is really where blockchain comes into play. Diablo 3 tried to do this, but they were too early and too greedy. If done correctly, owning your digital items is certainly more preferable than not. Again, this is touched in half a paragraph, but this is the real revolutionary aspect of NFTs. And, paradoxically, it's nothing new: Steam store "items" are basically NFTs. Fortnite skins are basically NFTs. It's just that without a decentralized marketplace, you can't sell them.
  • blueboo 5y ago
    The article “dodges” the notion players should “own” their in-game items to the same extent you underplay the implications. consider what the article emphasises: the contradiction implied in a live game being rebalanced in real time, affecting “owned” assets. Do you really own it if the item’s form, function, and even in-game existence persists only at the whims of a centralised authority—the game’s administrators?
    • dvt 5y ago
      > Do you really own it if the item’s form, function, and even in-game existence persists only at the whims of a centralised authority—the game’s administrators? This happens literally all the time with Magic cards, lol.
  • duskwuff 5y ago
    > This is really where blockchain comes into play. Diablo 3 tried to do this, but they were too early and too greedy. Diablo 3's in-game real-money market wasn't based on a blockchain, and was doomed to failure for game design reasons alone. > And, paradoxically, it's nothing new: Steam store "items" are basically NFTs. Fortnite skins are basically NFTs. It's just that without a decentralized marketplace, you can't sell them. You can sell Steam in-game items just fine on the community market (https://steamcommunity.com/market/ https://steamcommunity.com/market/). You just can't cash that out to real money because Valve, quite sensibly, doesn't want to be classified as a money transmitter.
• armchairhacker 5y ago
  We should create a game like Axie infinity, but instead of making money from useless Axies you make it from writing code. And then since crypto is bad we just pay people with regular money instead. Also maybe have them sign a contract for working fixed hours and/or completing a project in X time. So you know, the project actually gets done.
  • 58x14 5y ago
    That sounds great. I'll create a DAO to collect funds so we can create this game. What should we call it? How about Recursion?
    • chii 5y ago
      Since the name Second Life is taken, how about Third Life?
      • jerryoftheyear 5y ago
        Try the other direction, call it "First Life".
        • noselfpromote 5y ago
          Please don't just be sarcastic and do it. I can help you for free
        • DonHopkins 5y ago
          Isn't the other direction "Second Death"?
  • mizzao 5y ago
    There was a great game in this vein (coding) that shut down due to lack of monetization but I feel would be perfect to relaunch as a crypto version, especially since playing at the top levels required coding: https://bot.land/ https://bot.land/
  • 5y ago
• stickfigure 5y ago
  After seeing the word "Ponzi" haphazardly misapplied to so many different things in the tech space[1], it's incredibly gratifying to see it used here properly! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698967
  • paulgb 5y ago
    Thanks! I share your frustration :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26808561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26808561
• laserlight 5y ago
  According to Graeber, a job is bullshit when the one who does it thinks that the job is bullshit. By this definition, chores, menial tasks don’t count as bullshit. I don’t see any quote from players who call what they are doing bullshit.
  • graphpapa 5y ago
    I can’t remember exactly but this seems like a mischaracterisation. I think it was termed more like “it is a bullshit job if the world would run just as well (or even better) if the job didn’t exist”. Still relies on self-assessment but isn’t quite what you said. More based on some idea of “usefulness”. Play to earn doesn’t seem very useful.
    • quadrangle 5y ago
      You're right mainly. Self-assessment was a filter he used, it wasn't the definition in itself.
    • laserlight 5y ago
      It has been a few years since I read the book. But I recall very clearly that he states that the definition is very narrow and strict in order not to get into subjective arguments on whether a job is necessary or shouldn't exist. For instance, one could argue that the world would be better off without telemarketing, yet the argument doesn't make telemarketing a bullshit job. IIRC, military was another example from the book of such a case.
      • laserlight 5y ago
        To follow up with my own comment, here is the definition from the book: > Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  >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.
• xg15 5y ago
  > We believe in a future where work and play become one. I'd like to nominate this statement as one of the most cynical sentences of the year.
  • neop1x 5y ago
    Play to make a hamburger to satisfy hunger. :) Maybe print the hamburger via a 3D printer?
  • bspammer 5y ago
    Imagined meaning: work, but fun! Actual meaning: play, but boring!
  • JohnWhigham 5y ago
    People can now no longer say those who wish for the games of decades past are wearing rose-tinted glasses when there's this dog shit that's actively being peddled as the future of games.
• brudgers 5y ago
  For context, Graeber talking about Bullshit Jobs on BookTV: https://youtu.be/6eyaDHj5I5g https://youtu.be/6eyaDHj5I5g
• shadowgovt 5y ago
  > Web Two was don’t be evil. Web Three is can’t be evil. You bake it into the code that you can’t be evil. Yikes. That's a philosophy that really misses the nature of evil. In fact, I think we're doing ourselves up for colossal failure if we assume we can create an unexploitable algorithm that we then cannot modify that can be crafted to be evil-proof.
  • 8note 5y ago
    Sounds reminiscent of when ML scientists were surprised that they built racist systems, assuming that their race-free math meant that the resulting system would also be race-free
• danShumway 5y ago
  Everything old is new again. You could go back and look over the game design discourse about pay-to-win games and microtransactions and see the same discussions about how these systems would influence players and designers. You could go back and look at the discussions around Facebook social games back when they were a big thing. And all of those arguments still hold up today. Play-to-earn games are the same system, just with a bit of a pyramid scheme glued on top so that players will think they're part of the grift. What players of these play-to-earn games are hoping is that the grind in the game is so heckin awful and unpleasant that other players will pay someone else in order to skip that. But I don't think I'm unique in saying that I personally like my games to be fun, and I think that maybe something is going wrong with a game design process when a game is so much of a chore that people are paying to skip the game. Imagine making a movie where people didn't give you money to see it, but to stop seeing it :). That's the play-to-earn model, making something so artificially unpleasant and badly designed that players believe there's value in making the game shorter and will literally hire someone else to play it for them. And this is not a new thing, you can go back to the grinding process in Runescape, to Cow Clickers on Facebook, it's the same grift over and over just in different decorative hats and with different little sparkly jpegs. It's always the same proposition: do something that's been made artificially boring and hopefully you or someone else will think there's value in paying someone real money to skip it. ---- Which I guess live your truth if that's what you want out of games, but I personally like games that make me excited to play them or at least give me some kind of meaningful emotion, where I play them because I like feeling that emotion and because the gameplay is fun. Incredibly, it turns out there are designers who are somehow through some strange magic able to design games that are so fun that they don't even need to bribe players into playing them. Their games are so fun that people actually (get this) pay the designers money to be able to play them more, not less. It's the complete inverse of the play-to-earn model where actually all of the players in the game enjoy what they're doing, and the game isn't just a platform for the company or for a subset of players to make a job out of extracting profit from another part of the playerbase's boredom, because in these games nobody in the playerbase is bored. If you've never tried one of these games in the "fun" genre before, you've got to check them out, they're really something else.
  • 8note 5y ago
• Animats 5y ago
  Axie Infinity spokesperson: "It is a little bit dependent on capital inflows." Er, yes. All those players are paying about $1000 to get into the game and then grinding away to get Smooth Love Potion tokens. This is the SLP price graph.[1] Down 92% since the peak. A lot of suckers lost big. Many of them poor people in the Philippines, where Axie is big. Axie is frantically trying to obfuscate this with a second token, PR, claims of new revenue sources, etc. It's not working. In the end, it's a classic Ponzi scheme, and it collapsed after only a few months. [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/
  • lalaland1125 5y ago
    This is a key thing that a lot of people are missing: most (if not all) of the top PlayToEarn games are literally just disguised ponzi schemes. The only reason why their tokens have value is that you need those tokens to earn more tokens.
  • stingrae 5y ago
    This. Axie Infinity only had traction, because the earned coin had speculative value. The traction was from people "playing-to-earn" as a job. I doubt that there are that many people playing for the fun of it. When the token loses value, there isn't a reason to continue playing.
  • JCharante 5y ago
    I can't believe the buy in is $1000, it would have to be a AAAA game to demand that price tag, but it's not so it's just a disguised Ponzi scheme. The way the media have been reporting this as a way for Filipinos to earn income is disgusting, because they're tricking financially challenged people to fall for this Ponzi scheme by making it look legitimate with the media attention.
    • chii 5y ago
      Just like herbalife or many of those MLM schemes, the initial entry fee does sound like scam. I wonder how long it takes to earn back the initial entry fee?
• exogeny 5y ago
  Games that aren't fun are work. Axie, from all accounts, looks like work. On the flipside, there are tons of regulated games that are both fun and allow users to flex their niche knowledge, like FanDuel (sports), BigBrain (trivia), and so on. Just because Axie is a poorly designed game doesn't necessarily invalidated the larger point that jobs and income are changing, and gamification of skills is an interesting trend that is likely here to stay.
• Kiro 5y ago
  > Gamers have a word, grinding, to describe repetitive tasks undertaken to gain some desired in-game goal, but are not fun in themselves. Is this actually true? The linked article doesn't say anything about it being fun or not. I love grinding and think it's fun in itself.
  • jayd16 5y ago
    I agree. It's not a gamer word either. Derived from "the daily grind", it's just about lucrative but repetitive tasks. Sometimes they are fun but I also agree the connotation is that it is most likely boring unless specified otherwise.
  • jonwalch 5y ago
    Most of my gamer friends don't like grinding and usually stay away from "grindy" games.
    • Kiro 5y ago
      Just because most people don't like it doesn't make it intrinsically unfun. If the above definition holds true no-one would like it except masochists. Anyway, as a counter-point RuneScape has a great grind with a huge player base and I know a lot of people who love grinding.
      • jonwalch 5y ago
        I missed the intrinsically unfun part. Grinding is definitely fun for many people.
• soheil 5y ago
  There is something really wrong about doing something that you know is complete garbage and yields no benefit to anyone else in terms of productivity. But after one level of indirection we see all sorts of tasks around us that people do and also benefit no one, for example when someone destroys a pallet of watermelons or fills up a swimming pool with orbeez that end up in garbage hours later. The person who cultivated the watermelons or the worker that toiled in the orbeez factory to make them saw the fruit of their labor yield no benefit to anyone else in terms on productivity. This type of task happens far too often. Only difference is, there is no masquerade in the NFT app a16z funded.
• jayd16 5y ago
  Selling digital goods for real money is pretty well tread. What does web3/crypto add here? Game assets can't be used in another game. You need full support from the game developer. The devs could much more easily and cheaply sell the assets direct or support trading. If the game is distributed or has private servers or something that might warrant defi trades, but wouldn't gamers just hack their own items? If they control the server code, surely it's possible. Seems like a marketing gimmick at best. What am I missing?
  • jonwalch 5y ago
    I don't think you're missing a ton. Getting game developer buy in is definitely the biggest challenge. I think "GameFi" is the most compelling use case. Use your in-game items (NFTs) as collateral for a loan, or lend it to other players to use while you retain ownership. Game devs could build all this functionality themselves, but they get it for free if they don't take the walled garden approach.
    • jayd16 5y ago
      You say free but they'll need to integrate with the chain for all transactions. Simple loot drops will need to be put on the chain. Seems pretty onerous compared to the normal implementation. Odds are they would need to duplicate all the functionality in game as well.
      • jonwalch 5y ago
        My bad, I assumed we were already talking about on chain games. I agree that on chain loot drops are more difficult to implement than the traditional way. We'll have to see how much gamers in the future care about their items being NFTs or not.
  • Calavar 5y ago
    It is a marketing gimmick. Like the article says, the addition of NFTs is just a bunch of techno mumbo jumbo to build a facade of credibility and blind people to the fact that these games are digital Ponzi schemes.
• bgilroy26 5y ago
  "Growth-Dependent Economy" is a nice turn of phrase
• pezzana 5y ago
  > In a crypto economy crowded with vapourware and alpha-stage software, Axie Infinity stands out. Not only has it amassed a large base of users, the in-game economy has actually provided a real-world income stream to working-class Filipinos impacted by the pandemic. Some spend hours each day playing the game, and then sell the in-game currency they earn to pay their real-world bills. That’s obviously a good thing for them, but it also appears to be a near-Platonic example of Graeber’s definition of a bullshit job. That part about the pandemic might be the most important thing in the article. Would something like this have taken off had pandemic restrictions not wrecked the Philippine economy? A glance at the exchange rate for the Smooth Love Potion token shows a vertical surge right as lockdowns started to be imposed, followed by a 90% crash that started in around July of this year: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/ The start of the crash coincides with the start of noticeably higher CPI in the US and well-known product demand shock. That shock must have put higher upward pressure on demand for labor in the developing world, making Axie less appealing. I can't help but think of this as a preview into a future world in which automation and economic stagnation renders ever larger parts of the real economy ineffective at supporting a living wage. This kind of bullshit job offers a wealth transfer mechanism from those who have it to those who don't, with financial speculation being the conduit. Universal Basic Income is another path. Revolution is a third option.
• soheil 5y ago
  > 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. This may happen temporarily, but a sufficiently well tested and bullet proof enough game should able to combat that. This is the same argument people made before BTC: it's just a matter of time before any decentralized currency would get hacked therefore we cannot have a decentralized currency.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• acjohnson55 5y ago
  This reminds me of the last time I went to Vegas with my two best buds from college. I was a broke grad student, so I couldn't really do any of the entertainment stuff in the city. I also don't really like gambling, so I had a conundrum of how to spend the daylight hours, before the nightlife started up. We ended up sitting at the nickel slots, playing just enough to stay busy so we could flag down cocktail waitresses for comped drinks. If you were economical enough with your slots play, not selecting multiple lines or multipliers, it was a cheap way to drink. Pretty quickly, it occurred to me that I was doing a bullshit job. Why had I come to Vegas to feed a machine that wasn't even entertaining me? I felt like livestock. Eventually, I cracked to the peer pressure of my buddies and decided to play poker with them. I won about $700 as someone who had played maybe twice before in my life, but that's another story... Interestingly, one of the friends I was with was one of the first people I ever met to make money selling virtual goods. As a high school kid in 2001 or 2002 (well before the Second Life example the author cites in 2005), he made money selling Diablo II accounts he had beefed up in his spare time.
  • post_from_work 5y ago
    >>>As a high school kid in 2001 or 2002 (well before the Second Life example the author cites in 2005), he made money selling Diablo II accounts he had beefed up in his spare time. One of my fraternity brothers paid for a vacation in Europe and a digital camcorder from selling Diablo characters, leveled up via macros, on Ebay. This was also in ~2001-2003.
• Dowwie 5y ago
  The next wave of exploitation in this web3 space will involve lending practices. Kids will pledge their digital assets as collateral to buy other goods on margin. Their assets will lose value in the market and the kids will receive margin calls to restore balances or forfeit everything in the game, including reputation.
  • presentation 5y ago
    I just looked up a youtube video about Axie and it seems this is already happening lol https://youtu.be/xKgV4V0aq7M?t=328 https://youtu.be/xKgV4V0aq7M?t=328
• tduberne 5y ago
  I did not read the book, but my understanding of "bullshit job" is a job that is useless to the entity paying for it: you could remove that person completely, and everything would continue to work. This seems very different from what is at play here: the game studio very carefully designed the game to attract those grinders, and this is how the studio makes money. The article clearly sees this as well, by labeling the game as a ponzi scheme.
  • azemetre 5y ago
    The point is that bullshit jobs don't contribute anything to society (at least my take after reading the book). If the game studio never existed not much in society would change, let's go even further and say all game developers never existed. Society wouldn't change. Now lets get rid of all the elementary school teachers. Would society drastically changed? One of the core points in the book is that the "more prestigious" and "higher pay" a job is, the likelihood of it being bullshit is high. While important jobs like janitor, barber, or a retail worker are very important and pay terribly. I'm a programmer that develops CRM software. If my company cease to existed the world wouldn't even shrug.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• tfang17 5y ago
  Axie is built on Ethereum, meaning in-game assets (NFTs) are technically transferrable off-platform. Vitalik (creator of Ethereum) attributed one of his reasons for creating Ethereum to Blizzard taking away one of his in-game items in World of Warcraft in 2010: "I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit."
  • kranke155 5y ago
    Pretty sure Axie has its own blockchain
    • tfang17 5y ago
      Incorrect
  • robryan 5y ago
    No gameplay balancing by design sounds terrible. Release one bad overpowered item or spell and the game is forever ruined.
    • tfang17 5y ago
      Valid criticism.
  • rideontime 5y ago
    Axie has banned the assets of players who have violated the TOS, so apparently they aren't decentralized enough to prevent Vitalik's origin story from reoccurring. Or is your point that those assets could be used in another game? Why would anybody do that?
    • tfang17 5y ago
      Axie may not be the end all be all, just a start towards a new future of digital ownership.
• anm89 5y ago
  I still totally fail to understand this concept. Is there anything here beyond impotent whining? What are they proposing to do? They subjectively call it bullshit but other people choose to play totally free from compulsion. What should we do? Physically restrain them from playing?
  • SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    We should raise awareness that it's a scam so that reputable people don't fund and promote it. In particular, I hope they can be stopped from raising a series C, limiting their ability to keep the scam going once they exhaust the $150m A16z gave them.
• victorvosk 5y ago
  So many of these conversations can be broken down to the things you find valuable might not be the thing others find valuable and there is no right or wrong. You either get it or you don't. I have zero desire to collect model trains, but I understand some people do and there is probably value there in that community.
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  Meanwhile there are legit decentralized, fun, self hosted games whose hosts barely make any money to sustain their servers. But because they are truly decentralized, VCs won't touch them because they can't control them. I swear this web3 thing will die from lack of market fit
• mrkramer 5y ago
  Bullshit Jobs aka jobs that can be automated.
• yob28 5y ago
• betwixthewires 5y ago
  I'm a bit of a fan of the whole cryptocurrency thing, the early scope of the concept anyway, replace money, programmatic agreement enforcement, creating financial assets that can't be controlled, incentivizing things that need incentivizing and all that. It's interesting stuff. But this whole metaverse and play to earn is obvious nonsense. But then, if you show me a slot machine and explain it to me in plain English, that it pays out less than you put in, that it is designed to addict you, that you sit there sticking quarters in and pulling a handle all day, I'd laugh at you before I stuck a dollar in the thing. But people do. All the time. So I'm not so sure this nonsense is going to crash and burn, but I'm certain it isn't worthwhile in the least.
  • qeternity 5y ago
    > replace money Uh what? > programmatic agreement enforcement If writing logic were this easy, we wouldn't need the court system. > creating financial assets that can't be controlled I'm quite libertarian but again, not sure this is a feature. > incentivizing things that need incentivizing and all that Otherwise broadly known as a "marketplace"
    • betwixthewires 5y ago
      Well the idea behind bitcoin and what not is to use it as money. You might not think it fits the bill but that's the idea, and I think it's a good idea, whether or not execution in it's current state is sufficient. We have a court system primarily because it was the most efficient way before. It is older than computers, it exists because there was no other way, not because writing logic is hard, although it is. But there's a trade off, if we assume you can never write logic to handle laws then you accept that you will always create a position of power from which law can be abused. Why isn't it a feature? Yeah, a marketplace.
• orasis 5y ago
  Play-to-Earn with real world earnings will never be sustainable given the state of the art in reinforcement learning. The RL game playing agent essentially becomes a form of NFT mining that no human could ever complete against.
• Pxtl 5y ago
  Pay hundreds of dollars to earn a few per day? This economy sounds more like Cutco more than any modern NFT thing.
• Liron 5y ago
  Here's patio11's thread: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1459682519360491523 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1459682519360491523 I was shocked to see A16z recently investing $150M in Axie Infinity and doubling down on their justification of play-to-earn as a coherent concept, as if it's not fundamentally a pyramid scheme. It's lowered my expectation of what passes for thought leadership in our industry.
  • shp0ngle 5y ago
  • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Thought leadership smeadership. A16z's goal is to make money, lots of it. Shouldn't confuse its purpose by giving it other goals.
    • Liron 5y ago
      Yes but even an amoral organization could be expected to anticipate damage to their reputation when they're seen to be propping up a sufficiently transparent pyramid scheme, and decide not to cross that line. I'm still not sure they made the right move for their long-term interests, considering there's more reputational damage to come when the pyramid implodes. (They probably won't take financial damage though, as they're likely to sell near the peak.)
      • chii 5y ago
        you mistakenly assume that A16z has the requirement to maintain a reputation in the same way you personally would. Their reputation doesn't come from being moral. It comes from being able to make lots of money, and if this allows them to make lots of money, their reputation (as a VC) would only grow.
    • TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
      Indeed, the classic line, "Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison," seems apropos here.
• skybrian 5y ago
  The next step would be for the company to automate those jobs by replacing the workers with npc characters who can grind for you. That would make the game "pay to win," which is presumably easier to implement if you do it that way to begin with.
• hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  The thing I really like about this article is that, at least in my mind, it really helped me clarify what I think of as "Bullshit Jobs". It's not so much "do you consider your job useless", but it's more along the lines of "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks that were, generally, arbitrarily designed by some gatekeeper?" A great example of this is tax departments at large companies that look for tax avoidance strategies. On one hand, these strategies can save companies many millions of dollars, but on the other, they really produce nothing of value and are just a product of the complexities of a (human designed) tax system. Lots of regulatory compliance work also goes into this bucket. I wouldn't say all of it, because there are definitely regulations that do actually make companies safer/more transparent/etc., but anyone who has had to fill out a page after page after page "security questionnaire" knows at least half of it is bullshit that nobody is going to read in the first place. Sometimes I've been tempted to just add "Mickey Mouse" answers just to check if anyone sees it. Writing something that nobody ever reads seems like it's hard to believe that's anything else except bullshit.
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > On one hand, these strategies can save companies many millions of dollars, but on the other, they really produce nothing of value and are just a product of the complexities of a (human designed) tax system Businesses that spend less money on taxes can spend more money on expenses, such as payroll and higher quality materials and land, or it can allow them to sell products/services at a lower price, providing a competitive advantage. But they are a product of a human designed tax system, which may or may not be bullshit. There is no single clear, correct way to implement taxes.
    • shkkmo 5y ago
      Tax avoidance just moves the tax burden around, it doesn't create value. Tax collection and tax compliance does create value, but spending time specifically figuring out how to pay as little taxes as possible creates no value. It see likely that some level of bullshit jobs are an unavoidable side-effects of value producing activities. The interesting part of the idea comes from thinking about how we can structure those value producing activities to minimize the bullshit side-effects and thus increase economic efficiency. Taxes are an area with a lot of low hanging fruit, unfortunately Intuit and other tax prep companies spend a lot of money lobbying to maximizing the bullshit jobs side effects of taxation because it makes them more money.
• scotty79 5y ago
  Such games are online games where other players are part of the game challenge. Some players want to play those game so much that they are willing to spend insane amounts of money on this game. But if the only users of the game were those players the game wouldn't be as fun for them. So the game needs to incentivise players that that don't want to play it that much or at all. Most of the games manage this by offering free version of the game to anyone willing to play. It's not as good as the version paid consumers get but it's something. The game mentioned in the article went the step further, not only does it offer some entertainment for people for free, but pays them out of profits gained from the paying players. So basically gamers that earn money in that game provide meaningful service for paying players by working as opponents for them that enhace their entertainment. It's less bulshity job than many real ones.
• EGreg 5y ago
  Did the SEC give Axie Infinity a no-action letter? How do they get around the securities laws thing?
  • rideontime 5y ago
    By ignoring it until the government catches up, like every other startup does with regulations which should preclude their "disruptive" business model.
• skinnyasianboi 5y ago
  I think we all agree that Axie is not a fun game. There are other games with millions of users that are actually fun and play to earn.
• mvkvvk 5y ago
  NFT Pokémon actually sounds like a cool use of blockchain. However the game seems to focus more on the get rich aspect than the actual gameplay.
• Sebguer 5y ago
  > I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism. This takeaway is odd - especially when the entire point is that these bullshit jobs are a core part of capitalism, because they force people to buy into the system in spite of its obvious problems...
• anigbrowl 5y ago
  In spite of being presented as the future of work by some venture capitalists, the incentives just don’t make sense. Floors don’t have to be swept in the metaverse unless they’re designed to need sweeping. They make perfect sense. You probably can't be a King or Queen in the real world, but for a modest outlay you can play one in the virtual world. The product being sold is not the fun of clicking around doing pointless things in a Monarchy Simulator, but the emotional satisfaction of bossing a small army of other people around. Within the game, you can be the sun around whom others revolve.
• Zaskoda 5y ago
  I have gone down the play-to-earn rabbit hole in an unexpected way. In 2017 I started learning about Ethereum. Once I understood it as a virtual machine, the idea hit me that one could build a game. About that time, CryptoKitties hit and became an example of what could be built. Shortly late, a tutorial called CryptoZombies helped teach "a way" to build crypto collectable style games on distributed virtual machines like Ethereum. Like many people, I went through the tutorial and I started working on my own game. A big difference between myself and many others is that many others only slightly deviated from the CryptoKitties formula. The inspiration for my game, Orbiter 8, came from an old BBS game, so I deviated a lot. I worked on Orbiter 8 for a couple of years and released two demos before I bothered with ERC20/ERC721 interfaces. The game concept has an in-game currency and ownable assets so I created interfaces making those things tradable outside of the game. This was sort of a no-brainer. By using ERC721, I can use open markets like OpenSea to trade my game assets as NFTs. By using ERC20 I can put the in-game currency on SushiSwap and let the public trade the currency as they wish. I didn't intend to, but having done those things now means I am building a Play To Earn game. That is, of course, assuming my game assets and in-game currency actually have value and a value higher than the cost of creation. But for all intents and purposes, the emerging model is a pretty decent Play2Earn model. Most games are about progression. You typically "grind" in any game to acquire better items and stats. The only step to make any of these games P2E is to allow those things to be traded on open markets. So if you build a game natively on one of these networks, P2E is an extremely natural emergence.
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > I didn't intend to, but having done those things now means I am building a Play To Earn game. That is, of course, assuming my game assets and in-game currency actually have value and a value higher than the cost of creation. Other than speculators hoping to flip them to someone else, what would give them that value? Like most crypto games, the value would inherently have to come from new players putting more money into the system to cash out old players. It works as long as hype exists and the users curve continues upward, but it crashes immediately as that stops and everyone wants to extract whatever value they can.
    • 5y ago
• galaxyLogic 5y ago
  Do the players who earn money from the game somehow make the game more entertaining for other players? I had a friend who was a tennis teacher. He didn't really teach so much as play with other less skillful players and get paid for doing that. That's kind of a similar situation right? The answer depends on whether the players who get paid are rewarded for a service, something that other players perceive as having value to them. Or is it just a way by the game providers to lure people in to the game?
• devteambravo 5y ago
  Bullshit jobs? Let me tell you what a bullshit job is: Transcription. It's basically poor, often disabled people w/ 0 other options doing it. For slave-wage. That's right, one of the best way for disabled people in America to make $$ is to spend hours transcribing you next Sex & the City remake at breakneck pace. Excuse my french, but F this. Axie sounds like a lot less bullshit
  • mattnewton 5y ago
    After that work is done though, the value of the content being transcribed is increased. They are solving the problem that the actual dialog spoken by the actors and audio cues aren't captured in a non-audio format yet. Axie is creating problems when designing the gameplay and allows people to sell solutions to it; they could easily just provide the "value" at the push of a button.
    • devteambravo 5y ago
      Yeah, that's the basis of my issue with it all. Value created by people who do not benefit from it whatsoever.
      • JCharante 5y ago
        Well it's a very valuable but underpaid job. A lot of college lecture VODs get transcribed and it is great for making it more accessible for people with hearing impairments.
      • AussieWog93 5y ago
        >Value created by people who do not benefit from it whatsoever. That's basically all work? Bakers get paid to make bread for other people's consumption. Mechanics get paid to fix other people's cars. Transcribers get paid to make media accessible for other people.
        • devteambravo 5y ago
          If you look into what is involved in the work, as well as who does it, I doubt you'd lump all those together.
• worldsayshi 5y ago
  > gameplay designed to be dull enough that rich players will pay to outsource it to poor players Do I understand it correctly that the point here, and maybe the central point of Bullshit Jobs, is that we tend to structure our economies with built in inefficiencies so that tedium appears where there is no need for it. And the reason for this is that otherwise the organisation or person solving a given problem would immediately remove their own lifeline, their income or their raison d'etre? So the point of this article is point out how this happens even when there isn't a problem to be solved - which is reason to believe that it happens all around us as well in situations where we're "solving an actual problem". It's like a machine that endlessly inflates all pockets of human interaction with tedium and labels it as efficiency or "fun". A paper clip maximizer of sorts.
• throwawaycities 5y ago
  > Gamers have a word, grinding, to describe repetitive tasks undertaken to gain some desired in-game goal, but are not fun in themselves. Before gamers used “grinding” it was in normal use for hard work. More commonly used as “on the grind.” Looking up the origin it’s “back to the grind” referring to returning to work from break, but also specific to the ancient job of a grinding grain at a mill. All things being equal, the thing about “crypto,” as the article labels it, is that playing games or being a early adopter of technology was not historically a paid or rewarded activity. Maybe web3 is exploiting attention spans the same way as web2, but no matter how web2 spins it, token airdrops to web3 users are often 10’s of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands, and even millions in some instances. Where business has historically been about maximizing shareholder value by exploiting labor, web3 is proving to maximize user value by directly rewarding users. In many cases it is life changing money for young, regular folks who would never have had a shot at that type of financial freedom, in fact likely would have gone in to debt trying to pursue their education for a better financial future.
• mmaunder 5y ago
  Our fiat based economy is play to earn with the government that backs your favorite currency as overseer that can “ban” or penalize you. You’re required to participate to gain access to exchangeable currency. And the platform you’re using (your government and their economy) takes a cut in the form of taxes - and inflation when they’re printing money. You get to choose to team with others in companies or other organizations, or go it alone which is much tougher. Like Axie, if you choose to work for someone you’re using their subplatform, like Axie is a subplatform within crypto. And the organization you’re part of has rules and quite a lot of power over your future as long as you’re participating. In a real world org you can choose to exit and liquidate any equity that you’re allowed to turn into cash. Same with Axie assets that you sell in exchange for something else - maybe a cryptocurrency. As with Axie, there are many bullshit jobs in the real world that exist for silly reasons and can easily be automated away. I think these bullshit jobs are bugs in real world economies and virtual economies. Sometimes they’re intentional bugs that benefit the owners or controllers of a platform or economy. I’d caution one about conflating these anomalies with NFTs or crypto as a whole. Blockchain primitives have the potential to free the proletariat from exploitation by large corporate platforms. Creatives, for example, can own and profit from their art for centuries without an intermediary like Spotify, record companies, film studios or publishers keeping the lions share of the return. It has the potential to disintermediate banks, which is a huge deal, which you’ll know if you’ve ever worked for an investment bank or even walked through any major financial district. Bullshit jobs abound. But these primitives Axie is playing with are not the cause. They have the potential to free us all.
• balaji1 5y ago
  Who else immediately ordered the book on Amazon? Lol Bullshit Jobs: A Theory https://www.amazon.com/dp/0141983477 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0141983477 The first review is lit. Quoting: """ Manifesto for the Professional Class Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2018 This review was written at the desk of a salaried office job, where I am paid $65,000/yr to do virtually nothing important, so I mostly sit in my chair and listen to podcasts and audiobooks all day. I do this until enough executives and managers above me are gone that I can feel comfortable sneaking out. With my income from this sit, I then outsource all my chores to a slew of below living wage 21st Century gig economy employees--Uber drivers, food delivery, meal kits, laundry. Having been one of these low paid wage laborers several years ago, it seems like a cruel joke. The higher paying job I find, the less I actually have to work. The higher ranking the position, the less the job is about doing things and contributing to society. Is this a blessing or immoral sin? Yes. But it turns out, I'm not alone. This is an entertaining book of anecdotes and statistics on what turns out to be a common phenomena. It is one of the most refreshing reads that a college-educated conscious working professional can have in their library. Put down every other garbage business book that supposedly empowers you. You don't need to practice mindfulness, or rules for life, or launch a lean startup. Breathe in and breathe out, your job is unnecessary and so are most of the other jobs! Admitting this is the first step of us all solving the collective problem. """
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• mintplant 5y ago
  > People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005. So I basically grew up on Second Life, back when "the Metaverse" was just a geek thing no one cared about. The comparison doesn't really work here, because the virtual items people sold on SL were (generally) their original creations: 3D modeled, animated, programmed, etc. Not simply doled out by pre-programmed in-game systems. Axie Infinity's economy is more like "real-world trading" on MMOs, but officially endorsed by the developers instead of being considered a game-breaking, bannable offense. In fact, the mention of Axie Infinity providing an income stream to people in developing countries who spend their time grinding also parallels the MMO space: you can find plenty of stories about illicit "gold farming" economies surrounding the major online games, going back decades. > Axie Infinity is novel in two ways, which are worth exploring separately. > - It elevated the ability to earn an income stream through the game to a core feature, coining play-to-earn as a new game genre. > - It uses NFTs to represent in-game items, so the economy is (ostensibly) decentralized. Going back to SL, the virtual economy was always a "core feature". We had a whole digital currency and ecosystem of first- and third-party exchanges and money markets where you could buy and sell Linden dollars for real money, with moving exchange rates and everything. People very much made serious income off of in-world business. The true novelty here is that Axie & friends are built on decentralized technologies, instead of having a company like Linden Lab managing everyone's account balances and virtual item ownership rights.
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    come to think of it, i wonder why SL has not converted SLL to a cryptocurrency
• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  Some random thoughts - bullshit jobs is a term for jobs that have not yet been automated. Jeff Bezos pays a Uber driver to turn a steering wheel until the robot can, and he pays a Amazon Project Manager to make graphs until the Perl Script can. - such jobs don't exist because the "elite" are scared of proletariat, they exist because organisations are badly designed hurriedly put together and really hard to dismantle. - it's usually simple to spot the people at work who are solid contributors and those who bullshit. But it's amazingly hard to demonstrate it sufficiently for firing people. - But imposter syndrome means that if there is not a open transparent process to code the under performers, everyone becomes afraid, destroying the organisation anyway. - it's hard to fire unproductive people, in short. In fact it's probably easier to build a new company and not hire them. - this is usually done via Schumpeter- but if a company could be programmed, designed to have fewer people, it can be shutdown more easily and replaced?
  • hooande 5y ago
    Your assumptions about the term "bullshit jobs", as mentioned in the article, are completely wrong. You should read about Graeber's work, it's interesting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
    • lifeisstillgood 5y ago
      I have read parts of his book all the way through ... Let's look at two examples I remember - Dog walkers (washers?) and corporate lawyers. As I understand it Bullshit jobs are those that exist to serve the elite who otherwise "should" do the work themselves (dog washers), or jobs that have no labour-force power and so cannot improve their lot through collective action (which can range from air traffic control to uber drivers and ... dog washers). Finally there is some kind of self-aware bullshit job that is the corporate lawyer. There are two issues at play here - a moral judgement and a power judgement. The moral judgement is aimed at dog walkers (or washers?). This is a job that "should" not exist - people should take care of their own pets. Well maybe. They also have a power issue - who has heard of a dog walker strike? The dog walker fills a space in the ecosystem - mother nature has so many examples of non intuitive niches that we should not leap to claim this one is bad. Corporate lawyer - this is more likely a bullshit job - it exists because humans created the law, so it exists as the very definition of government regulation and interference. But most of the bullshit about it is not legal, but the tournament set up to go from newbie lawyer to partner which drives a lot of the soul destroying ness, simply to clear the field. And yes it is soul destroying to have to justify the unjustifiable- something i suspect corporate lawyers spend a lot of time doing. But that is again a moral judgement- yes it is bad that corporations break the law and people in bullshit jobs have to help them get away with it. But that is a different failure of regulation. I think his view is extremely negative - that these jobs were created / kept around to serve the implied result rather than an underlying failure. The airline baggage example is a good one. Getting millions of pieces of luggage to the right place at the right time is fundamentally hard - and claiming that the solution is to "fix it" then get rid of stewardesses of whatever is disingenuous. It's not impossible to remove bullshit jobs - automation promises to remove many, which is I guess Graber point and mine. My view is that the jobs continue to exist not because the elites deem it nice to have flunkies (I mean they do but they employ those directly) it that fixing the ecosystem that supports these bullshit jobs takes a long time to fix. It is likely that smaller new companies will simply not hire to bullshit poisitions. But given that Amazon has now reached what 1M employees I suspect some bullshit has slipped in there. Plus there seems to be a confluence in your comment between HFT and bullshit jobs. I am sure there are socially net negative or socially net neutral jobs (HFT is arguably positive but whatever), but that's different to bullshit jobs (as I understand it) A job that is net negative has always been a problem - is the guy making Drones in a factory knowing they will be sold to evil regimes a net negative? It may be but I don't think that sits as a bullshit job. So there is a difference between jobs that are "created" simply to give the middle class something to do (Graber view, not mine), jobs that exist because they have not been automated yet (my view, maybe Grabers) and jobs that are socially net negative (this depends on your politics as to what is net negative) In short the psychological harm of bullshit jobs depends much more on the employees perception of its value than some objective measure. Especially as that objective measure is so hard to come by. In short - net negative jobs are not bullshit because choosing the externality is hard / social decision (ie the boss of shell is unlikely to have a bullshit job, even if it is net negative) And bullshit jobs are rarely created just to lord it over people - the truly elite just hire someone to loo after their dogs / horses. The sub-elite get it created as part of the market. Edit: running out of time - this is an interesting area but I have reached th limit for a comment
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• larodi 5y ago
  Bullshit activities… the new drugs. Love them guys who sustain these mind traps. Nothing new under the sun as King Solomon said, but then again - do not dare claim moral superiority, u will go down sooner than not.
• fleddr 5y ago
  A dutch economist once estimated that about 50% of a modern economy is bullshit, basically just keeping each other busy. It's made possible because of the naive belief that markets create supply out of demand, and that this mechanism is ruthlessly efficient. Right now, somebody is "inventing" potato chips flavor #16,333,132. Nobody asked for it, but a whole bunch of people are involved in its creation. Next, the product is pushed, and if not totally disgusting, you might try it. If the push is large and prolonged, you may even make it a regular buy. Even more so when you see lots of other people eating it. Did this product meet your demand? No. Do you believe its a good use of labor to make this product? No. Your "demand" was fabricated out of aggressively pushing supply. Are the top 10 songs in the charts the songs most in demand, the market efficiently selecting the best songs, taking into account all recent music produced? No. The songs are pushed. Supply decides, not demand. Right now, thousands of engineers are working on the next iOS version, adding hundreds of new features. You'll probably use 2 of them. You'll get all 500 features anyway, regardless of demand, as you will definitely buy the next iPhone. That's the 50% I'm referring to: artificially created demand that really is just marketing and manipulation. Another way in which markets aren't efficient is a lack of competition. After all, it's every market player's goal to basically exit the arena, not needing to fight for their continued existence. Several sectors have big industry players that effectively have no competition. The same can be true for businesses where locality is a unique benefit. And it applies to local and federal governments, whom have no competition at all. And there's patents, cartels and other ways to escape market forces. These non-competitors sustain armies of workers with bullshit jobs. Ultimately, our economic system doesn't care. When you have a paid job, nobody asks questions about whether it has meaning. Your government will like you and so will your family. Bullshit or not. We have build a system that celebrates meaningless consumption and meaningless work.
• kseifried 5y ago
  You mean like the people paid to wait in line for other people at US gov hearings? https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18223836/paid-line-standing-congress-ocasio-cortez-homelessness https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18223836/p... Sounds awfully similar to "completing tasks contrived by a game designer"
  • chii 5y ago
    Paying for someone to stand in line for you isn't a bullshit job tho - it's generating value because the person paying is obviously otherwise occupied with a better use of their time, and thus can afford to pay someone else to stay in the queue.
• hypervisorxxx 5y ago
  This play to earn title is a particularly annoying dig at the recently blown up phrase where users can play to earn Blockchain tokens in nft based games which has actually enabled young men in the Philippines to quit their jobs as taxi drivers and involved them in an ecosystem which otherwise has exacerbated inequalities and trampled on the rights of humans in their country as historically corrupt government has minimsed the earning potential of the working class not and left the upper class eternally skeptical of their own government. To make a dig like this and then not even acknowledge it in the content is exactly what I would expect from a white American who has no concept of how certain trends impact anyone other than themselves.
  • chii 5y ago
    The article's point was to say that these grind games are not actually adding economic value, because it required existing wealth to come into the system to pay out the grind (and the company sucks out some transaction fees). The game itself may possibly be fun for those that pay (instead of grind), but that's hard to judge.
• firekvz 5y ago
  I didnt read much of the thread but I will assume that most of the people here is aware of how every single NFT game is just a ponzi. But I've lived myself, what the author mentions as a "way to lift people out of poverty.", from the era before NFT or "play to earn" games existed. I come from Venezuela, a full 3rd world country and I was "lucky" to play an MMO (lineage 2) during my young days and somehow I was good at it, i invested so many hours on it and managed to get into top tier guilds and worlds 1st event, and somehow, my character and my items were worth thousands of dollars in the market, and suddenly i went from being a 14 y.o boy sitting in pc, to bringing more money in 1 week to my family, than my entire family together for 1 year. I could understand that, while all other people on the game were playing for fun, it became my job, a job that actually got me and my family out of poverty... At the time (2007) there were a lot of chinese "farmers", and people used to make fun of them, not only fun but the rest of the players were blantantly denigrating towards them, at 1st I didnt understand but once that I became a non-chinese farmer, I realized how It was a really good thing to do. Eventually I started botting, I bought more PCs and had a full army of bots, I kept making more and more money, and it helped me and my family leave the country and pretty much bought a house, a car and paid my family expenses for like 4 years out of lineage 2 adena farming. Also, scripting the bots pretty much got me to learn programming and english, so what I am now it's pretty much the result of some guy from chicago offering me 20$ in paypal for an item i had in my inventory that i got it while killing a monster, it all started there, that litle forbidden transaction in an MMO, changed my life completely So, even tho it was like a job for me, I never saw it like a job, even tho it gave me a lot of money, i never got into the game as a way to get money, i was just a young kid trying to have some fun.. But now, I get really sad everytime I see those ponzi NFT games, that only sell the idea of getting rich, and I get even more sad when I see tons of venezuelan youngsters fall for it, honestly, they are just playing with their desperation.
  • mritchie712 5y ago
    Wild story, thanks for sharing.
  • xuki 5y ago
    That's an awesome story. While I've never lived in poverty, I got my first taste of making money by making bot for a FaceBook game in 2008 (WarBook, if anyone remembers that). I only made around 2,000 USD but that experience really changed my life.
• iantimothy 5y ago
  > Since Filipinos are the largest growth market for Axie Infinity, they must also be a major source of money flowing into the system. Instead of being a net provider of jobs and capital, it appears to just be redistributing the same wealth between Filipinos, and collecting a 4.25% cut for the service. It seems that the source of money flowing into the system are individuals with capital to buy the incoming producing PPE-type assets (i.e., Axies). Guilds pool capital to buy P2E assets and rent it out to scholars for a % of all income earned by the player (known as scholars in the current P2E nomenclature). I think there are currently two acceptable ways to earn income in our society: 1. Take relatively less risk, get paid a wage. Owner of incoming producing assets bear the risk of deploying capital in such a manner. 2. Take high risk. Deploy capital to acquire assets and pay wages to others who utilize those assets to produce (unguaranteed) income for you. P2E introduces a third: deploy capital to acquire assets, loan the assets out, and take a cut of income generated. P2E in its current form has similarities to serfdom. The owners of Axies (and the AXS tokens) are the lords.
• jollybean 5y ago
  'Play To Earn' is obviously in a different category of identifiable BS jobs. If Rich Worlders want to pay Poor Worlders to rank up ahead of time on a game for them, that's weird, but so be it. 'BS Jobs' I think is more a problem with the vast landscape of effete and ineffective White Collar workers.
• talove 5y ago
  Axie Infinity isn't interesting as a game, but as a model it is. The other day I was going through air port security. I had to wait 10 minutes for one of my bags to be screened a second time. I happened to be waiting while some type of manager was doing a huddle for a new shift of employees about to start. The dumb shit the manager was telling the group of 12-15 TSA workers was abhorrent. Just really vile statements about how to interact with people going through the security lines. It dawned on me that the only rationale for this completely useless facade of stress inducing security was simply that these were low-income workers who needed a job, and we're subsidizing it through various types of taxes. I believe Axie Infinity is dumb, but so are much bigger things around us that we talk much less about. However, Axie Infinity is a good model for a way of creating economies to support people who need jobs. What might help society is if, instead of time wasting games, and meaningless security jobs we paid people to learn valuable skills through a gaming like system.
  • bagels 5y ago
    What were the vile statements?
  • pydry 5y ago
    The TSA was created and Afghanistan was invaded because America felt like it needed a proportionate response to 9/11. Locking cabin doors was sufficient to prevent it but didnt "feel" like nearly enough.
    • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Afghanistan was invaded because the people in charge of it were tragically unwilling to turn over their unruly house guests and we were tragically unwilling to demand they do so in a contextually appropriate way. I think it is probably one of the biggest tragedies of foreign diplomacy in recent US history. In hindsight the Taliban probably could have negotiated a "we'd love to get rid of the terrorists but we need your help" deal and then just let us pump them full of military aid on the condition that they add the groups we want to their list of persecuted people. It's not like we hated them out of principal. These were the same guys we armed to kick out the Russians. Taking a page straight out of the South America playbook would not have been that big a stretch.
• jrochkind1 5y ago
  Many historical "bullshit jobs" are basically "reward to the metropole from colonial extraction" (how many of Graeber's "bullshit jobs" exist in colonized vs colonizing nations, hm?) But for this newest iteration of cryptocurrency bullshit, I'm gonna go with "crisis of capital accumulation".
• narrator 5y ago
  There is such an enormous amount of slack in the system. 2% of the workforce is involved in agriculture, and it used to be 90%. What did the other 88% do with all that free time? A lot of the Web3 and game economy is just people massively overpaying for entertainment.
• mempko 5y ago
  I highly recommend people read David Graeber's latest book, published after his death called The Dawn of Everything.
• jwmoz 5y ago
  I have been shorting SLP-PERP for a couple of months now and the trade keeps printing.
• zubairq 5y ago
  I think so much of life is already gaming: sports, bowling, football, watching sports on TV/YouTube/cable. Many of these so called time wasters existed outside of the digital world and people have already consumed a lot of time and attention for hundreds of years. In fact empire building and war are probably two of the oldest sports known to humankind
• thephyber 5y ago
  > … I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism. It is always worth reminding everyone that we are far from pure free market capitalism. There is a lot of market distortion due to lack of info transparency, regulatory capture, contracts which create inefficiency, intellectual property law, asymmetric application of regulation and law enforcement, etc
• coldtea 5y ago
  >but when I read the book a few years back, I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism. Well, here's the problem: Darwinian doesn't mean evolution towards something specific (i.e. more efficiency). In fact, regression (in certain skills, etc.) is just as likely (like cockroaches, not humans, being the fittest in a certain environment). So, Darwinian, broadly and metaphorically speaking (like the author) just means more fitness for survival. And this is totally compatible with BS jobs, when it comes to the survival of the overal system. One specific attribute of capitalism today is also that it's always somebody else's money, what with public companies, and golden parachutes, and bailouts, and such - and the rise of pharaonic middle management.
• platistocrates 5y ago
  The author makes the point that bullshit jobs shouldn't exist in capitalist systems, since they are inherently Darwinian. There is a misconception that "Darwinian" is the same as "efficient." Darwinian simply means "what can be sustained will be sustained until they can't be sustained anymore." Which is exactly why layoffs happen in economic downturns -- those bullshit jobs just can't be sustained anymore.
• graphenus 5y ago
  It's saddening that folks say Axie is a play-to-earn pioneer. This genre existed for ages and is called gambling. Poker being a prime example of a truly successful game combining luck, fun, and skill. The best part -- no NFTs required.
• dmichulke 5y ago
  Not sure this is the right place for the question but does anyone have a theory as to when the time has come to short it? Other than a general meltdown in cryptocurrencies, I mean.
• apatters 5y ago
  I don't get how this is a bullshit job. Gamer #1 likes to play the game. There are some parts he likes more than others. Gamer #2 comes along and says, OK I will do the parts you don't like, and I'll sell my output to you for $XXX. Gamer #1 agrees, the transaction takes place, it is entirely voluntary, and both participants find the outcome to be valuable for them. How is this bullshit? This is pretty much the reason we have money. What sounds like bullshit to me is there is some... quasi-socialist I guess? value framework being imposed by some would-be intellectual who's totally uninvolved in the transaction, but thinks he knows better than the ones who are. Fuck that guy, he has no skin in the game.
  • vaylian 5y ago
    I do not know which definition is used here. But I would call this bullshit, because this is artificial scarcity which is controlled by grindy, non-constructive and typically non-fun work. The makers of the game could just sell the NFT directly instead of requiring other people to waste their time.
  • zivkovicp 5y ago
    I'm not familiar with the game in the article, but I think the author is referring to the inclusion of in-game tasks that have no benefit or reason to exist other than to create an artificial "requirement" for work of some sort. Honestly though, who cares? Even if it's a "bullshit job", you can perform it from the relative comfort of your home, mostly on your own schedule; so it's better than most BS jobs in the real world. In my opinion, the more opportunities afforded to people to earn money, the better.
• sidcool 5y ago
  TL;DR anyone? Don't have the time to read this highly voted article :|
• Exendroinient 5y ago
  I don't see more games utilizing that mechanic, besides some the awful mobile gacha's.
• Exendroinient 5y ago
  Jobs which don' create positive value to the world are not bullshit. Our western economy is mostly based on the meaningless consumption of stupid things. These products have to be marketed and pushed into clients by manufactered believe that they need to buy it. Other part of this are the zero-sum games. Trick people into buying it by introducting artifcial scarcity.
• zeristor 5y ago
  I don’t mean to be too meta but this site looks amazing on my phone; I’ve not seen a website that is so clean and clear before.
• bncy 5y ago
  Tibia was very popular in my country, I know people that are still playing it, but back when I was younger, like 10 years ago I knew a few guys that were making regular income out of it by selling gold coins and items. Good times, games like Tibia taught me something about the market and demand/supply distribution.
• anticristi 5y ago
  Fuck! I didn't know about play-to-earn. At this point, I'm starting to think our species had a good run, but it's time to replace it with a more evolved one. And just like dinosaurs were wiped by a global catastrofe and left room for mamels, it's time for homo sapiens to leave room for a new species. The silver lining? We don't really need to do anything, just watch for our self-made catastrophie to unfold. Popcorn anyone?
• echopurity 5y ago
  [dead]
• cryptica 5y ago
  > system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism What we have now is not capitalism. Capitalism requires hard money as a foundation. An inflationary currency whose supply compounds exponentially over time and which people are forced to use is not hard money. Bullshit jobs are made possible by inflationary money printing. The current crony-capitalist system is only 'Darwinian' for those who are far from the money printers. That's why bullshit office jobs exist mostly in big cities; in close proximity to the largest inflows of newly issued 'capital' into the economy. For those who are close to the inflows of new money, it's a rigged, easy game. No talent involved. It's a game of first in, best dressed. They could throw money out the window and it would come flying back in. In the periphery, the story is completely different. Look up Cantillon effect. It's easy to devise a scheme whereby you keep borrowing money from a bank to inflate the value of some intangible asset and then use that asset's growing 'value' as collateral against which you can keep borrowing more money and keep inflating that asset's 'value' ad-infinitum. You just keep taking out new, increasingly large loans to make repayments on the old loans. Just like the government does. At any point in time, this zero-sum scheme will always look profitable; you can keep it going so long as the banks allow. Banks will allow it of course, because the collateral 'value' keeps growing. It's only when people start talking about huge numbers like 'quadrillions', 'quintillions' and 'sextillions' that people will start to think something's not right. The game is all about who can feed the banks' own money back to them with as little resistance as possible. A major reason why Bitcoin is so valuable is that it provides banks with an endless supply of bodies to take out more and increasingly large loans and feed it back to the banks with interest. Bitcoin's growth in value consistently outpaces the growth in interest on loans used to buy that Bitcoin.
• p2p_astroturf 5y ago
• corxi 5y ago
  Just another propaganda spreader… keep reading these kind of books whilst we build a new economy
• low_tech_love 5y ago
  I’m sure there’s something valuable to be done with NFTs, but why is it that it seems that everyone involved in it is only focusing on meaningless applications like pepe frogs and boring games?
• dunemaster 5y ago
  Product owner, scrum master and everything agile is the essence of a bullshit job.