Comment by advisedwang
4 years 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.
4 years 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.
Exactly. One could make an argument that the work some users put in, once sold, result in value to the buyer, but that value isn’t generated by the worker. The developers created the scheme and could deliver the value directly at no cost to all players, poor and wealthy, but instead chose to create meaningless work by making grinding opportunities.
One could also argue that if the developers did that, the market value of the digital item in question would drop. The value that the buyer receives is grounded in the large time investment required to acquire the item in the game. Even though it is completely artificial, it makes the item more scarce and therefore more desirable to other players. I totally agree that the fact that this power is in the hands of the developers, though, makes these types of NFTs far from the decentralized digital goods they are claimed to be as pointed out by the author.
This implies that anything that is scarce or requires labour to obtain automatically becomes desirable and rises in value.
3 replies →
I have the feeling that buyers feel they are getting more value if the item was "generated" by grinding than if it was created ab nihilo by the developers. Why, I have no idea.
I guess it depends on the grind involved. Some streamers are paid to play games. They confess they don't always enjoy it or every game that people want to watch, but it seems better than some alternatives. And a few YouTubers I follow have admitted to less than stellar career prospects otherwise.
Now if it's pure, unfun grind that only pushes numbers around in an MMO then I'd agree it's basically just outsourced cheating. And a net negative both because it compromises a social form of entertainment and doesn't produce anything else of tangible value.
They aren't paid to play games, they are paid to interact with the audience and tell stories. Looking at view counts of clips with just stories vs clips with gameplay going on will show it. Also, games have been the background in videos or streams for a long long time, people who were on YouTube circa 2010 will remember the YouTubers like WoodysGamerTag or whiteboy7thst who played Call of Duty, but that's never why people watched them. It was the hook but people watched for their personalities.
Imagine there’s a multi-billion dollar industry where some people record sound waves made with their vocal cords, and other people pay _real money_ monthly to have a chance to replay those waves for entertainment only.
The difference is that a game company could just sell gold directly. If music creation could be automated so easily we'd probably do that too.
Do you not understand that people find it pleasurable to listen to music, or what?
And, inexplicably, people find pleasure (or are merely addicted to) in digital coins in a game too.
3 replies →
>Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done.
Who decides what work, "needs to be done"? I suppose you could argue that activities that create the necessities needed to survive (food, shelter, clothing), "need to be done", but everything else is simply a matter of choice. Economic output is a subjective, contrived metric.
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.
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.
A huge amount of automation goes into cooking a decent hamburger, stocking store shelves, and snaking a toilet, mind you.
I'm not sure id consider those basic, either. A toddler couldn't do any of them
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"
There is no such problem with negative interest rates :)