In Praise of Ponzis
drorpoleg.com
drorpoleg.com
What if we stopped trying to monetise every single action from every single person every single day?
People used their free time to see a video, liked it, and shared it. Their contribution had an impact because it was free. If you change the equation so that sharing videos is remunerated, you (or your bots) will share any turd hoping to hit gold. You’ll actively make online culture worse by making the signal (content worth sharing) indistinguishable from the noise.
But it is already monetized, we just don't get the profit.
Conveniently using this speculative investment that I own a lot of and you don't as the payment currency!
Commoditization of labour (and of pretty much everything else TBH) is one of the founding pillars of the capitalism that survived pretty much unchanged from its inception to the modern days, so you proposition is a non-starter. You see, if you prohibit to monetise something that curbs the free entrepreneurial spirit and so inevitably lowers the efficiency and growth of the economy as a whole: if something can be done for profit, it should be done for profit and that will only improve the resource allocation and in the end, the wealth distribution too.
“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20201112030542/https://i.etsysta...
It is not profitable to feed poor children. And we don't. 25% of children are food insecure in the US, one of the wealthiest countries not just in the modern day but the history of this planet.
It is not profitable to vaccinate the poor. And we didn't. COVAX still hasn't hit their original goal of vaccinating 20% of the world's poorest. Unfortunate that poor people get sick too and spread it without regard for class lines.
Capitalism is subsidized by human capital. Whether that human capital are literal chattel slaves or Honduran strawberry pickers coming to California after the US destabilized their countries.
And capitalism requires markets too, obviously. Have to unload that cheap shit. How do you do that? Gunboat diplomacy. Open up Japan, open up China, close the entirety of Latin America to any other industrial power, and profit. Maybe sit on the sidelines of a "great war" and then after the fact you can sell stuff to the survivors.
In the 21st century we reached the end of scarcity. For nation-states. Not for people. They're still disposable, just ask who is willing to sell their grandparents to save "the economy"
The implicit argument these people make is what you might call the financial-postmodernist one: all content is worthless and meaningless, except for its exchange-value.
Would you like to make even less money than you already do by splitting your rewards with every single person who looked at the thing you did?
To the extent that this is true - and quite possibly it is to some extent - it's pretty stark. This is the logic of the paperclip maximiser.
It's also a magnifier for socially destabilizing groupthink, because the important thing becomes not some grounded "fundamentals" but "what will everyone else think about this".
> But today, content is not used to sell anything beyond itself
Ah yes, the problem with Baudrillard is that he didn't monetize the simulacrum. Not ambitious enough.
The fact that we can't distinguish self-trading from legitimate interest is a problem with crypto. There's no possible way to know why and the author's theory that it's "investors believing in the story" is no more or less plausible than my theory that the liquidity is 100% fake and is just a core group of people generating volume between their own wallets.
At the end of the day it was just speculation and it was fun.
> the liquidity of a given token is a function of the number of buy and sell orders on the books
By trading with myself it looks like there's a lot of liquidity, no?
at the end he makes the argument that we no longer sell things but narratives hold value. The issue with his argument is informed consent. Informed is the key here he says that people buying the $PEOPLE token know its worthless except for being part of history. Thats not accurate real money was initially paid so many people will assign a value to it since it cost money despite what its current real value is. They would also be a part of it whether they put in a cent or a $1000 into it. it went so high in value because people speculated that their money would get them more future value in it than other more traditional options. but wait then its just a speculative investment like other crypto. Not really scammers use the narrative to deceive people of the real value. people pay for the equivalent of scams eg escorts, escape rooms, romance novel's if you convince them through a narrative that its real they pay far more.
i wrote too much already but his idea of paying people on completion of an action online is a refining and progression of the already damaging effect of targeted adverting and influencers. How much worse do you think scam advertisements and foreign and domestic manipulation could be if they could dangle a carrot instead of just a picture or video on the side?
I think any content creator dreams of making a simple narrative worth millions of dollars or being able to dangle money in front of their viewers to make them dance but as far as im concerned we have gotten too close to that reality already and doing so will just make things worse.
The author is wrong here, even though it rings true. Early viewers who shared a popular video before it was popular earn the reputation of knowing the next cool thing before everyone else does. They gain “I liked this band before it was cool -tokens”. That’s worth something among peers. If we start to pay out monetary value in addition to that, than we would actually overpay the early viewers. Market forces will eventually rebalance the equation such that early viewers will neglect the reputation part and just start sharing as many videos as possible regardless whether the personally think that those videos are the next cool thing.
From my view, this is all downstream from our monetary environment. If central banks can print trillions, why shouldn't private actors value and issue monopoly money? From there it descends into different preferences, variations and subgeneres of the same theme. Choose a token or NFT you identify with. Maybe you'd prefer something a bit more self ironic? Buy a "Yacht Club" NFT and maybe your lambo dreams will come true?
As a producer I may be able to bribe them with tokens to do something (views, votes, followers, etc.), but I'm not buying authentic engagement.
I mean....maybe. But there has to be a moat to create some sort of limited access to the story.
The New York Yankees are an incredible story, most famous franchise in sports and located in what people refer to as the capital of the world.
Still in order to read the next chapter of the Yankees story you need to have 100$ on the side to go to the Bronx and watch it unfold.
Same thing with NFTs, when you are buying a Yankee hat you are paying royalties to the Yankees organization and every brand would fight tooth and nails to remove from the market chinese knock offs.
NFT people have embraced the concept of knockoffs because they think that the larger the distribution the more popular something would become.
Again...maybe, but human psyche is weird, as a fan I'd become suspicious if the Yankees started allwoing everybody in for free at the Yankee stadium.
If the author doesn't give a damn about protecting their work, then what does it tell you about their own perceived quality of the aforementioned work?
Sorry if there's anybody from Boston reading, the same is true for the Red Sox...kinda.