“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I'd like to nominate this statement as one of the most cynical sentences of the year.

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698967

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

- 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?

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory 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. """

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”.

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.

https://youtu.be/6eyaDHj5I5g

The RL game playing agent essentially becomes a form of NFT mining that no human could ever complete against.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Only difference is, there is no masquerade in the NFT app a16z funded.

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.

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?

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.

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.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18223836/p...

Sounds awfully similar to "completing tasks contrived by a game designer"

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?

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.

But for this newest iteration of cryptocurrency bullshit, I'm gonna go with "crisis of capital accumulation".

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.

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.

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.

Isn't it unavoidable in a world with food surplus and automation?

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.

A lot of the Web3 and game economy is just people massively overpaying for entertainment.

That would make the game "pay to win," which is presumably easier to implement if you do it that way to begin with.

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.

Excuse me, I sold my Shortsword of the Ykesha for real life money in 1999 on EverQuest via eBay.

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.

Other than a general meltdown in cryptocurrencies, I mean.

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.

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."

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.

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.

What should we do? Physically restrain them from playing?

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.

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.

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

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...

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.