'Play-to-Earn' and Bullshit Jobs (paulbutler.org) 175
Speaking of "play-to-earn" games, Paul Butler, writing in a blog post: In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, 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. The book cites ample anecdotal evidence that people perceive their own jobs as completely disconnected from any sort of value creation, and makes the case that the ruling class stands to lose from the proletariat having extra free time on their hands. It's a thoughtfully presented case, 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.
I've recently been exploring the themes around web3 to see if there's a "there" there, and Graeber's book has been on my mind again. One of the most apparently successful examples of web3 that people point to, aside from art NFTs, is so-called play-to-earn games. The most successful of these is Axie Infinity, a trade-and-battle game reminiscent of Pokemon. 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.
[...] In contrast to other games in which in-game economies have developed, Axie Infinity puts players' opportunity to make an income and transfer it to the real world at the forefront. As they put it in their FAQ, what sets Axie Infinity apart is an ethos: "We believe in a future where work and play become one. We believe in empowering our players and giving them economic opportunities." These "economic opportunities" are essentially a wealth transfer from new players to established ones. Gameplay requires the purchase of three Axies, which currently cost in the hundreds of US dollars each. [...] 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? The same could be said about online poker or sports betting, to be sure, but we would rightfully recoil if those were positioned as a way to lift people out of poverty.
I've recently been exploring the themes around web3 to see if there's a "there" there, and Graeber's book has been on my mind again. One of the most apparently successful examples of web3 that people point to, aside from art NFTs, is so-called play-to-earn games. The most successful of these is Axie Infinity, a trade-and-battle game reminiscent of Pokemon. 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.
[...] In contrast to other games in which in-game economies have developed, Axie Infinity puts players' opportunity to make an income and transfer it to the real world at the forefront. As they put it in their FAQ, what sets Axie Infinity apart is an ethos: "We believe in a future where work and play become one. We believe in empowering our players and giving them economic opportunities." These "economic opportunities" are essentially a wealth transfer from new players to established ones. Gameplay requires the purchase of three Axies, which currently cost in the hundreds of US dollars each. [...] 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? The same could be said about online poker or sports betting, to be sure, but we would rightfully recoil if those were positioned as a way to lift people out of poverty.
No shit (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to automate as much as possible and provide universal basic income. How else can life become multi-planetary. Right now we only have capital to allow people over 65 to stop working. Why not switch to a system where robots are taxed to provide income? A robot can produce the same as many humans, so itâ(TM)ll be like we are taking the earned paycheck off the robot and giving it to someone to review Netflix and Fortnite for us. UBI can be funded by taxation, and if you want more money and are unskilled then try to save up your UBI money and invest it in companies. Thatâ(TM)s how retirement is supposed to be funded today, right? From dividends received by investing in companies productivity.
start with Medicare for all! (Score:5, Insightful)
start with Medicare for all!
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe not M4A, but certainly some kind of universal health care. FWIW, I favor a free market (full price transparency) combined with maximum out-of-pocket based on income from the previous year. It would, IMHO, be the simplest, most effective, efficient, and fair way to do it; but it will never happen because the last time I looked there's several hundred $billion market cap tied up in "insurance" companies that are really jsut buyers clubs that tie you in to provider networks and co-pay administration.
Re: (Score:2)
Medicare for All would result in the loss of at least 6 million jobs. All the insurance company employees, all the paper-shufflers at the doctor's office, all the bureaucrats, bean-counters, coders and admins at the hospital, the debt collectors, the GoodRX guys - all gone.
Think about all your friends and family. How many of them are part of the medical industry, but not providing front-line care? Good riddance them, bullshit jobs, adding no value.
Re:No shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Both GOP and DEMS are lock step in their fealty to the donor class. As an example, we could end homelessness in America for (c) $30B / year. The military industrial complex gets more than that in unrequested budget increases - while losing a 20 year war to one of the worlds poorest countries.
Re:No shit (Score:5, Informative)
Great commentary from your link:
"Stevens argued that the unique qualities of corporations and other artificial legal entities made them dangerous to democratic elections. These legal entities, he argued, have perpetual life, the ability to amass large sums of money, limited liability, no ability to vote, no morality, no purpose outside profit-making, and no loyalty. Therefore, he argued, the courts should permit legislatures to regulate corporate participation in the political process.
+
"Legal entities, Stevens wrote, are not "We the People" for whom our Constitution was established. Therefore, he argued, they should not be given speech protections under the First Amendment. The First Amendment, he argued, protects individual self-expression, self-realization and the communication of ideas. Corporate spending is the "furthest from the core of political expression" protected by the Constitution, he argued, citing Federal Election Commission v. Beaumont, and corporate spending on politics should be viewed as a business transaction designed by the officers or the boards of directors for no purpose other than profit-making."
Re: (Score:2)
Initially I liked the idea of UBI, however so far the small scale tests on UBI have been showing that it doesn't work as well as we kinda hoped, and the current Social Security Safety nets (Social Security, Disability, Welfare) tend to offer better benefit for the buck than UBI.
In terms of taxation, I have been leaning further towards the flat tax where if the money is transferred from one person/organization to an other the receiver will need to pay a percentage over in taxes. As their are so many loopho
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I read an excerpt of the book on Amazon. An early observation was John Maynard Keynes saying, in 1930, that he expected the average working week to be 15 hours by the end of the 20th century. This very obviously did not happen. What went wrong? We still have people working harder than is good for them, to make enough money to survive. Somebody is gaining from this, and it is not the average Joe or Jane. Kids are being brought up without a normal home life, because both parents have to work, just to make end
Nonsense. (Score:3)
Nonsense. If there's money to pay people to do a job then there's money to pay someone who has been replaced through automation. It's just a matter of directing the money.
Re: (Score:2)
If there's not enough money for UBI, then there isn't enough money for everyone to be employed at a livable wage, at which point there's already a serious economic issue that should be addressed instead of saying that something is too expensive.
Also, if there's not enough money for UBI, there also isn't enough money to constantly pay out damages caused Joe Arpaio's [latimes.com] (which I consider to be low-quality embezzlement, because it's funds misappropriated from intended u
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. You are just wrong. I also bet you did zero investigation to come to that "conclusion".
Re: (Score:3)
Impossible to provide UBI, not enough money.
There is obviously enough money for UBI. Let's say UBI is set at the current poverty level, which on average would be $9169 per person in 2021 (US figures, accounting for the distribution of household sizes). That is $3 trillion per year, for a country with a GDP of $21 trillion. So about 15% of the country's economic activity could provide UBI. Today we spend about $1.7 billion on non-Medicaid welfare programs (I assume health insurance would be separate from UBI). Obviously not all welfare would be remove
Re: No shit (Score:2)
$ 3,000,000,000,000 / $1,700,000,000 = 1764
That looks like several orders of magnitude to me?
Re: (Score:2)
My bad, I meant to say $1.7 trillion is spent on welfare programs. Obviously we spend far more than $1.7 billion on welfare.
Re: (Score:3)
I should also point out that we are spending far more on welfare in the 2020 and 2021 because of Covid, so it isn't like that is a normal amount. But it does go to show it isn't hard for our government to spend that amount of money if it needs to. It just comes down to the mechanism of how it is funded, which is a very hard problem. But there is obviously more than enough money to enact UBI if we want to.
Re:No shit (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you mean by "not enough money"? There is clearly more than enough money, because companies are paying people to sit in an office and look at Facebook all day.
Large companies are sometimes inefficient at weeding out bad employees but that doesn't mean that even those bad employees aren't providing value for the company. If the bad employee wasn't providing some value, their job will eventually be removed or some other company will come along and be more efficient.
The average per capita income worldwide is $10,298, according to the World Bank .
My guess is that if you are reading slashdot, you are making considerably more than $10k a year.
This idea of a bullshit job is bogus. Even in the case of people being paid to play video games, they are being paid by other players who find the value of their goods worth it. Jobs are about someone paying you for something they want done but don't want to do themselves. I can pay someone to organize my photos, play video games for me, walk my dog, sort thru trash, or go to the mall and flip people off. It doesn't matter whether other people find value in it. It only matters that the person paying finds value in it and the person doing the work is willing to do it. There are plenty of jobs out there like financial advisors, house sitters, dog spas, etc... that many people might see no value in but other people do find value in so are willing to pay for it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I assure you, there are definitely BS jobs. At least 20% of all retail employees truly provide no value to the companies that have them on the books. The only value that I can think of is maybe that by having them in uniform in the store, we are perceived as attempting to service the customer.
I mean, when you have a bagger at the grocery store that ask you if you need help to your car and your first thought is if you would have to help them to the nearest chair...I could provide countless other examples but
Re: (Score:2)
Large companies are sometimes inefficient at weeding out bad employees but that doesn't mean that even those bad employees aren't providing value for the company. If the bad employee wasn't providing some value, their job will eventually be removed or some other company will come along and be more efficient.
This is kind of the same fallacy as expecting evolution to produce an optimal result when in reality it's just producing some local maxima that's better than the competition. While what you say does tend to happen, it tends to happen very slowly, and winners aren't picked based on efficiency alone. Competition is often squashed by the bigger players leveraging their size. Tactics like regulatory capture, selling at a loss to drive out a competitor knowing that you can take the hit for a couple of months but
Re: (Score:2)
The other thing is that no system of work is perfectly efficient.
Even if you literally have SOME employees sitting around playing all day, the company overall is still getting things done. It's work to monitor employees. It's demoralizing to monitor employees. You need redundancy in the system as well. If one of those 'working' employees leaves, you have some the 'slack' people to at least provide some utility.
You can even extend this to countries as a whole. A lot of people like to say we are close to a p
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, instead of robots, i think that outsourcing to India is the preferred option.
2 person team replaced and management of a system outsourced. New managed team is 11 ... no wait ... 12. There was a problem and it now needs a trained idiot to press F5 and refresh a screen, all day. Never occurred to them to fix the actual problem.
Every outsourced and offshored job should simply be taxed as if the job was being still being performed locally. Also, the "being made redundant" but the exact same job is bei
Re: (Score:2)
Stalin mostly killed his own people [ibtimes.com], and only interred a relatively small percentage of those he did kill.
Re:No shit (Score:5, Insightful)
One trillion dollar company is the equivalent of 20M people earning $50k/yr.
Yes, but only for one year. And that's ignoring the fact that stock valuation isn't real money. If everyone liquidated their stock to try to get that trillion dollars, the valuation would plummet to zero.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but only for one year. And that's ignoring the fact that stock valuation isn't real money.
This is the big problem with any concept of a wealth tax. The super-rich have enormous wealth, in terms of assets, but that is not the same as enormous income, which would be taxeable. I am not sure you can legitimately tax an asset, based on what some experts think it might be worth. You can only have a clear basis for taxing an actual trade.
One of the problems is that the super-rich can finance personal expenditure from loans, rather than salary. If you own zillions of dollars of valuable stock as collate
Re: (Score:3)
@WierdUncle, I believe you're saying you can't tax an asset because you can't truly assess the value of an asset.
But in your very next breath, you say banks give loans based on the assessed value of someone's stock as collateral.
So the government has a privately determined assessment of someone's wealth. They can tax that.
This is the future (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I guess the future is all "bullshit jobs." Automation, machine learning, etc. means eventually all the physical goods will be mass produced by machines and all the human to human exchange will be things like games, entertainment, and probably a whole bunch of stuff we haven't created yet.
Just to be clear, this is a good thing. I'd much rather have machines do the grunt work of mining ore, bending metal, and flipping burgers. That's hard, dangerous, and unfulfilling work. Well, maybe not unfulfilling: I get a thrill when I assemble a project but I imagine that will wear off after a decade or so.
Here's a way to think about it. 200 years ago, virtually every living human was a dirt-poor farmer. That's what your grandparents did, that's your parents did, and you had every reason to believe your
Re: (Score:2)
...However they disagreed as they considered themselves better than computers and kept doing thins the slow human way.
A competitor heard what I had done and a month later I was now at this new company, implemented my software and the new company made millions of dollars...
And this is why I (and Butler) would consider the BS job theory to be BS. For sure there are companies where headcount and lines of code are seen as good things. There are definitely managers who like building empires and compare org charts to see who's is bigger. But that's transient and unsustainable. At some point if your organization isn't working efficiently, someone else will show up, do your job better than you, and eat your lunch.
That's been the story of my entire working career. Every organization
in-game currency can = tax issues and other legal (Score:5, Interesting)
in-game currency can = tax issues and other legal things like who the real owner of it is under the law.
"A system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"A system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism (Score:5, Funny)
That's not how that works. You can't pass on someone's genes after you eat them... ... Oh, sorry. That's not what you meant. Yeah, English pronouns really need a top-to-bottom revision.
Re: (Score:3)
He didn't say "pass on", he said "pass" (i.e. "excrete")
That has been tried, literally. (Score:5, Insightful)
> If it were, the poor would eat the rich and get to pass their genes.
Cambodia tried that, literally, missing only the side of fava beans. Of course, they hardly even had rice, because they were selling that to China to buy guns instead of actually feeding their people, who were frog marched at gunpoint from Phnom Penh into the countryside to learn rice farming. You can see how it worked out for them if you read up on the Khmer Rouge. Or heck, just compare North & South Korea. Which would you rather live in? There are a lot more BS jobs in South Korea than up north, where they're still trying to manage their own food production.
The problem with the concept of "BS" jobs is that sometimes people want things you don't agree with, capitalism lets people trade in such circumstances and have both parties come out ahead from their own perspective.
This is just advocating for more control over what people are allowed to want. Should you be allowed to want to play games? Should you be allowed to want stuff in a game? Should people be allowed to work grinding gold in an MMO instead of having to ship off to some factory or whatever? The article considers this all waste because they don't think anyone should be allowed to do or want to do any of these things, which is pretty authoritarian. Half the people here are working "BS" jobs moving bits around and we're doing pretty well for ourselves because of this.
Besides, we already know what happens to a country once it starts maximizing such authoritarian trends. It has happened several times now and it's not a life of leisure and luxury, nor is it the poor being lifted up to better lives.
Re: (Score:3)
Or heck, just compare North & South Korea. Which would you rather live in? There are a lot more BS jobs in South Korea than up north, where they're still trying to manage their own food production.
There is no lese-majesty against capitalism. If somebody questions some aspect of it, it doesn't mean that he'd rather live under a dictatorship. If you asked me whether I'd rather live in Germany or in Chile, putting in comparison two different styles of capitalism, then it would have been a more interesting question, I think.
The problem with the concept of "BS" jobs is that sometimes people want things you don't agree with, [...] This is just advocating for more control over what people are allowed to want. [...] The article considers this all waste because they don't think anyone should be allowed to do or want to do any of these things, which is pretty authoritarian.
Maybe I read the article in a wrong way, but I didn't get anything of that in it. The article suggests that a specific play-to-earn game can be seen as a form of Ponzi scheme where, o
Nobody sensible wants another monarchy (Score:2)
> There is no lese-majesty against capitalism. If somebody questions some aspect of it, it doesn't mean that he'd rather live under a dictatorship.
Of course not, because Capitalism is not a king, it's just a name for people freely exchanging goods and services. But I like the subtle neoreactionary nod by invoking lese-majesty (insulting a king) and how that ties into Cambodian history given that the monarchy there supported the Khmer Rouge and became its figurehead after Lon Nol's short-lived rebellion.
I don't know about Cambodia (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> But North and South Korea isn't exactly a good comparison. In the fifties the United States basically bombed North Korea into the Stone age. Absolutely everything was destroyed by us bombs. It had a profound effect on their economy, politics and just plain old national Id.
So was Japan and a few other places, but we can see who recovered and who didn't.
And it's not like NK has no trading partners at all--they've been a Chinese puppet the whole time who could've made things better for them if it wanted t
Yes, yes, you're "just asking questions" (Score:2)
> It's easy to conflate "jobs you don't agree with" and "jobs that don't add value".
> I haven't read the book but I did read the blogpost and it doesn't seem to mean the former when it talks about bullshit jobs.
The problem lies in the definition of "value." The author points to things they don't want (e.g. MMO gold) and says that grinding it has no value. The fact that they don't make the connection that someone does want that is the troubling part, because they are only looking at their own sense o
Re: (Score:2)
> People losing their shirt (and more, like their home) to financial shenanigans does count as real harm, even if those responsible manage to get government bail-outs. So that picture isn't remotely as simple as you're trying to paint it.
Where did any of this remotely happen with people playing a game? The author is musing more about why people are grinding MMO gold for money, which is a pretty simple question to answer. You may notice that nobody is identified as losing their shirt to this, despite th
Re: (Score:2)
> the poor would eat the rich
Naw, the rich taste rancid and are too high in cholesterol.
Ayn Rand, is that you? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it just me, or is this comment bordering on the dystopian nightmare Ayn Rand and her cult following envision?
I'm all for capitalism and free markets (hence, no business bailouts), but when people use phrases such as this my first thought is, "Who cares?" If people like Musk and Bezos lose a few million dollars every month because people aren't nose-to-grindstone for 8 hours every day, so what? My team doesn't have work every second of the day. There is downtime in between calls or solving problems or paperwork, yet things get done.
If this comment is supposed to be true, let's see how many hours of each day the ruling class is doing work. Not what they claim, but what they really do.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you ever even read any of Ayn Rand's books? Unceasing work is just about the last thing she envisioned for her heroes or her ideal society. She did associate unceasing work with socialist systems. She took that lesson from the Soviet revolution in Russia, which she fled in her youth.
Re:Ayn Rand, is that you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever even read any of Ayn Rand's books? Unceasing work is just about the last thing she envisioned for her heroes or her ideal society. She did associate unceasing work with socialist systems. She took that lesson from the Soviet revolution in Russia, which she fled in her youth.
Can you maybe name some characters from Ayn Rand's books who are just regular workers? Just actual, regular workers, not mentors to the protagonists who dropped out of the system and now work a menial job, or people who are just there to betray the protagonists on purpose or accidentally or some exceptional prodigy, etc. Where's the story of the track worker, or refinery worker or coal miner who follows their Objectivist principles to... contentedly go to work every day for the protagonists?
Ayn Rand's works remind me of a fair amount of Heinlein's work due to the abundance of adolescent power fantasy. There's all this lip service to individuality and the glory of pursuit of one's own interest and happiness, etc. If you actually pay attention though, you realize that it only applies to the heroes. All the background characters who aren't moronic, irrational villains largely just fall all over themselves to serve the protagonists as if they were divinely anointed royalty. Even if we accept the premise that it's just because the protagonists are the best and everyone naturally recognizes them as the best and so it's in their own self-interest to follow them, the logical conclusion is that 99.9999% of people are not the best and therefore they don't get to be objectivist heroes.
Let's not forget that Rand's heroes are people like railroad magnates, coal miners, and oil extractors. One thing that those all have in common is that, in the real world, the resources they're extracting or exploiting are actually public resources. Oil and coal are almost exclusively mined from either public land or through public grants of mineral rights, even on other people's private land. Railroads are pretty much impossible to build without public land grants and government backed takings of private land. They also necessarily sever the countryside into islands separated from each other by railroad land, making public regulation to allow crossing the railroad lines vital. In Rand's books, however, these things aren't recognized and, for example, intentionally lighting massive regions of oil wells on fire is perfectly ok. Acting in one's own self-interest is 100% the perfect ideal, unless you're not a protagonist, in which case it's evil and selfish.
At least Heinlein has imaginative worlds and concepts. I actually just re-read "By His Bootstraps" last night, which is a great time travel story. (NOTE: Spoilers ahead, although this is a very old story) Once again though, the main character is pretty much a jerk and also a misogynist and the whole setup with how he becomes ruler of the future is pure adolescent power/sex fantasy. What's interesting is that his interactions with (and contempt for) other versions of himself actually seem to illustrate the absurdities of a philosophy of self-interest quite well.
Re: (Score:2)
I think your question is a bit silly as it seems to try to imply that a life that would not make a good book is not worthwhile (maybe not intended but its how I read it). However, there are some memorable bit parts in Atlas Shrugged about non-heroes (the book all your comments seem to be about).
Jeff Allen - The honest tramp from the Twentieth Century Moters
Cherryl Brooks - Shop girl who wants to build a better life and is working on it. Gets married to one of the antagonists under false pretenses (hero wor
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and his description of Rand's heroes and heroines is also skewed. Howard Roark is an architect, John Galt is an inventor, Hank Rearden owns a steel company. Dagny and Jim Taggart are the only main characters who are railroad executives, coal miners or oil extractors -- and Jim Taggart is one of the bad guys.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, and his description of Rand's heroes and heroines is also skewed. Howard Roark is an architect, John Galt is an inventor, Hank Rearden owns a steel company. Dagny and Jim Taggart are the only main characters who are railroad executives, coal miners or oil extractors -- and Jim Taggart is one of the bad guys.
None of them are remotely normal people. Reardon is an ubermensch, which makes Galt whatever is above an Ubermensch. Roark is yet another Rand Mary Sue character. The Taggarts are heirs. As for oil, there's Ellis Wyatt and I'm pretty sure there's a coal baron in there too. Ken Dannager, apparently. Basically, they're all elites.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you get so butt-hurt that other (literary-)romantic authors wrote about elites? Anna Karenina -- a novel about a princess married to an elder statesman who has an affair with a nobleman. Oh noes, Tolstoy was elitist! That novel can tell us nothing about the human condition!
You claimed Rand's protagonists were exploiters of nature, which is wrong. You had to dig into supporting characters to find them, and you also ignored all the villains who were in the same industries.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you get so butt-hurt that other (literary-)romantic authors wrote about elites? Anna Karenina -- a novel about a princess married to an elder statesman who has an affair with a nobleman. Oh noes, Tolstoy was elitist! That novel can tell us nothing about the human condition!
Plenty of stories are about elites. Of course, a lot of those are either not pulp schlock like Rand's books, or they are pulp schlock, but they cop to it and don't try to push some grand philosophy we're supposed to live by.
You claimed Rand's protagonists were exploiters of nature, which is wrong.
I'm pretty sure that I actually said that they were exploiters of public resources. That's certainly true of anyone who runs a railroad, which includes the Taggerts. I remember Wyatt as being a fairly significant character and he's an oil baron. d'Anconia and Reardon are both metals tyco
Re: (Score:2)
You could have just said from the start that you don't like her books because you identify with the villains and share their mindset.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess all of those characters actually created something so it would use resources. If you are anti-human then I could see how you would hate all of them.
Anti-human? Seriously?
If you are going to go there then the "power fantasy" bit also gave me a chuckle. I have never heard this mentioned outside of a specific trope which is always an underdog suddenly given power (be it emotional power to stand up, monetary power, or raw physical power) which they then use to excess. See https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pm... [tvtropes.org] as a good example. The funny part is that the book (un-mentioned) is literally about the opposite. I mean its a tale of people removing themselves from society because they believe it can't be fixed and that they have no moral obligation to prop it up with their own corpses.
It's one of the classic adolescent power fantasies. The total destruction of one's opponents because of their utter dependence on your greatness. I suppose that one starts earlier than adolescence with "I'll hold my breath and die and you'll be sorry!" or "I'll run away and you'll never see me again and you'll be sorry!". Seen in adults with employees who feel like the entire place would fall apart without them. Rand's stories just provide a fantasy setting where the characters get to
Re: (Score:2)
I think your question is a bit silly as it seems to try to imply that a life that would not make a good book is not worthwhile (maybe not intended but its how I read it).
The point is that Rand's Objectivism is a childish, poorly thought out concept that only works for elites, and even then only for certain, chosen elites. Those chosen elites can cheat on their spouses, break their deals, etc.. and still be the heroes. The actual protagonists of book are largely wealthy heirs and/or Mary Sue superhumans. The lot of any regular workers is either to work for the strawman villains and serve as a sad example, or to work for the self-interested elite protagonists.
So, let's look
Re: (Score:3)
The ruling class seem to think that every time they spew drivel from their head holes it's considered "work." Because, clearly, everything they say is pure unadulterated genius of the highest order so them talking MUST be a positive influence on everyone within earshot. They literally consider every moment from the second they wake up to the second they go back to sleep to be "work." I knew a dude that's bordering on ultra-rich and he was 100% that way himself. Granted, the dude did do some actual work
Re: (Score:2)
It's because they want money to equal power. If the population is nose to the grind trying to feed and cloth themselves, then your dollars have power to coerce people into doing what you want. You can get the old lady to sell her land to you, or the young man to dress up as a clown. The more desperate they are the more power your dollars have.
Remove their desperation and you can have all the money in the world, but you cease to have as much power over others as you did before.
This leaves them far poorer tha
Re: (Score:2)
If I have all that money, I too can direct people to do as I want through direct violence. I'll just pay one half the poor to handle the other half. Just like it's always been.
Re: (Score:2)
the ruling class stands to lose from the proletariat having extra free time on their hands.
Is it just me, or is this comment bordering on the dystopian nightmare Ayn Rand and her cult following envision?
Well, it struck me as nonsense because there's no such thing as a ruling class and proletariat class, at least not in how I understand the words.
First off, we don't have rulers, at least not in the 19th century sense of the word. We generally have elected governments and, in theory at least, could throw the bums out. There are few who can issue edicts without any sort of pushback. Even very rich people like Bezos: he can't actually tell me to do anything, he has to convince me.
Second, we don't have classes
Re: (Score:2)
We don't necessarily have a ruling class in the US that can just issue edicts completely unopposed, but that was also not really a thing for much of history either. The people at the top of the food chain have always had to rely on the loyalty of their underlings to get things done and so there have always been limits. What we definitely have though is an upper class that is essentially immune to prosecution and being held responsible except in the most gregarious cases. And usually only if the case gets bl
Value is subjective (Score:5, Insightful)
One man's pointless busywork is another man's artistry or entertainment.
Is making ice sculptures pointless valueless work? What about arranging floral bouqets? Writing formulaic screenplays for cookiecutter Family Channel/Hallmark Channel movies?
If people enjoy having an ice sculpture at their party or flowers or watching a dumb movie to pass the time...who's to say it's worthless or valueless?
This mentality that some jobs create no value is a fallacy of the central planner who thinks his own subjective judgements for what's worth doing are objective measures easily accepted by all.
As my low tech examples point out, there's nothing unique about the present moment that makes so-called bullshit jobs more prevalent.
I don't enjoy videogames myself, bit obviously plenty of people do and who am I to say that their time is better spent toiling in the fields or digging ditches or filling up yesterday's ditches or marching in the street and parroting my slogans?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
One man's pointless busywork is another man's artistry or entertainment.
The bullshit jobs described in Graeber and TFS are no producing any works of art. The Axie summary does acknowledge that there is entertainment value for some of the players, but clearly not for the Filipinos who are doing it as a job to make money.
Re: (Score:2)
Graeber's core thesis was not that he labeled the job that way but that the person doing the job did. The question is, did they survey the workers and conclude that some substantial portion thought it was bullshit? It seems less than clear what the view is, even with the cited examples of complaints. Without that, you're using the Graeber label without Graeber's style of analysis. Graeber did later come up with 5 core themes BS jobs had and using that framework, it doesn't seem this applies there either. Gi
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but this seems to be pretty close to a Ponzi scheme, as observed in the article. It depends. If the main draw of the game is the chance to turn a profit in the real world and all the money comes from new members hoping to turn a profit, then it is pretty much a veiled Ponzi scheme. Anyone remember Make.Money.Fast chain e-mails (add your name to the bottom of the list and mail money to the top five or something like that)? It wasn't a scam, you were compiling mailing lists! Honest! Ah, the good old day
I don't think anyone's talking about art (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
One man's pointless busywork is another man's artistry or entertainment.
I don't think the book in question considers artistry and entertainment bullshit jobs. If you actually bother to read the excerpt on Amazon, a criterion for something being a bullshit job is that the person doing the job thinks it is worthless, but dare not say so. Presumably, artists believe their work is worthwhile, even if nobody else does.
I guess an example of a bullshit job would be a hospital litigation defender, whose job is to fight medical negligence claims. I am just making that up, but I can imag
Sounds like masturbation vs sex vs celebacy (Score:2)
While to an outsider, running on
Re: (Score:2)
I think what you're trying to say is that masturbation is good preparation for the workforce, right?
Re: (Score:2)
While to an outsider, running on a treadmill or climbing fake stairs is silly, it's beneficial and better than not exercising.
I am inclined to agree that trundling on a treadmill like a pet gerbil is not worthwhile, except if really necessary for health. I like to get out for a walk, and that can be much more than mere exercise. For a thinking bloke like me, it is good to get away from books and the internet and the computer, and just ramble and look at stuff. It's good for the soul.
"The book cites ample anecdotal evidence" (Score:5, Funny)
"The book cites ample anecdotal evidence"
Oh, well, if it's AMPLE, that changes everything.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
If I recall, the book cites surveys of what people think about their jobs, which is not just anecdotal. A statistic like "40% of people in Denmark think their job is pointless" is not an anecdote. I think that was one of the stats quoted early on. You can query the validity of such a survey if you like, but not on the grounds of being mere anecdotes.
Um (Score:2)
Probably half the jobs we have today would have been considered "bullshit jobs" 50 years ago, in the sense that conditions did not exist then for them to exist. So what?
Big data is eliminating these (Score:5, Insightful)
This job had existed for years, paid Ok (for unskilled labor) and was easy as pie. More or less his dream job. Big data killed it, because a suit could easily run a report, figure out that overall it cost more in wages then it did in money recovered from piracy & PPV, and they fired everyone.
I saw this with video game magazines too. They didn't go away because of the Internet, they were doing just find sales wise post internet. What killed them was Big Data. Game and hardware makers had the data to tie sales directly to advertising in ways that didn't used to exist. They figured out it was a waste of money to advertise, pulled their ads, and the game magazines went under.
Automation is eating a ton of jobs [businessinsider.com], but we also forget about process improvement. Computers made it possible to find waste and eliminate it, but out economy and society was heavily dependent on that waste to keep it going. As we tighten efficiency it turns out companies don't hire because they've got cash, they hire to meet demand. If they only need 4 employees to make everything they sell, that's all their their gonna hire. And even if they expand, it's not going to be a linear let alone an exponential expansion of hiring.
This puts them in a tough spot though. Nobody's hiring because they don't need to, so nobody has good paying work (since supply and demand go both ways, and there's an oversupply of labor). Boomer retiring (and to be blunt, dying of covid because they refuse the vaccine) is having a slight effect, but the trend is still labor oversupply.
This risks putting us into a permanent recession. Normally prices would be dropping as wages did since sales demand would be down, but companies just shifted, ala Apple computer, to luxury goods for nonessentials, and for essentials they're just buying everything up (go look up how blackrock is buying up and renting entire tracts of housing, or the market consolidation in groceries, Walmart entering the grocery market momentarily masked that effect but that's stabilized and prices are skyrocketing).
The result is we've got plummeting real wages and inflation that is going to resist any effort to tamper it down because it's not caused by market forces, it's a policy failure (anti-trust and a lack of affordable housing subsidies like we used to do with loans and infrastructure projects).
Eventually this is all going to boil over, but the folks in charge and the folks who put them their (e.g. the large voting blocks of older, fiscally conservative voters afraid of change) will likely be dead and buried by then. Leaving Gen X/M/Z to either clean up the mess or end up in a blood civil war ending in soviet style dictatorship... fun.
bar are pirating TV with home accounts for ppv eve (Score:2)
bar are pirating TV with home accounts for ppv events and they do have people who check on them with big fines if they find an place cheating the system
Re: (Score:2)
You can actually put as much money in (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
BS jobs are needed (Score:3)
as are starvation wages, to keep the poor distracted from the theft of the wealth and the rape of the environment.
It is not about the ruling class (Score:2)
the ruling class stands to lose from the proletariat having extra free time on their hands
I don't think that's it, in fact, it sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory. If anything the ruling class wants the proletariat to serve them, not do unproductive, useless work.
What I think is that we have to do something, or we get bored. In modern society, we have way more than we need to survive, it it was our only concern, we probably could work less than 10 hours a week, but it is not human nature, at least not the human nature that created civilization. Instead, we created a system with work and platy,
Re: (Score:2)
Yes it is. For much of human history, the work day was about 6 hours. One reason was slavery, another was the small size of cities, constrained by the technology available for infrastructure. The industrial revolution demanded everyone work 10 or 12 hours a day. We became slaves to the factory, then workers' rights reduced that to 8 hours. But in the last 30 years that's crept up to 10/12 hours a day again. When we have computerization/robots and too many workers, we're working more hours. Some of us
WoW had its gold miners (Score:2)
What's old is new again. Since the mid-aughts, World of Warcraft had its gold miners who were grinding out gold and selling it to people who didn't have time to grind it themselves, or similarly playing on other peoples' accounts to level up their characters for them. Only difference now is that it's with cryptocurrencies/blockchain and it's allowed by the game devs (but the fact that external item sales/account sharing was against the WoW Terms of Service never stopped many people).
Rich people are useless, economy is mostly fake. (Score:2)
The stock market and most of the financial industry as well as abstract BS such as insurance companies that prey on people's fears are useless.
Bitcoins and other cryptos are certainly useless. Anything that creates money out of thin air without any real progress to society leads to inflation. All that fake money created by the stock "casino" market and its frivolous betting just sits in the bank. Real estate speculation is bullshit. There's no special reason why a house should be highly expensive when the p
Darwinian Capitalism (Score:2)
When people say things like that, I get the strong impression that they've never worked as an employee in a regular company a single day in their lives.
Most companies are highly inefficient, and employ people who are mostly incompetent at most of the tasks they perform, which works out just fine for them, because they're competing against other companies that are also highly inefficient
Re: (Score:2)
As far as I can tell, anyone who talks is such positive terms about companies had never worked for one.
Under some circumstances, small companies can be very efficient. They make up for it by frequently going out of business, so the high efficiency scaled by the rather small proportion that succeed.
When someone tells me something (government or universities) should be more like companies perhaps next time I should feign confusion for a few seconds and then say "oh like Enron/any of the bailed out British ban
the gig economy (Score:3)
How is GIG not pay-to-play?
Burying bottles and digging them back up (Score:2)
John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the most high profile economist in history, recommended filling bottles with money, burying them, and digging them back up [google.com] to increase employment during the Depression.
Jobs are a means to distribute money, while still keeping the value of the money high, by forcing (most) people to struggle to obtain it.
As an aside, modern central bank monetary policy isn't worried about the justice or fairness angle of printing vast sums and providing that to their favored sectors (government w
What This Tells Me... (Score:2)
What this post tells me is that these idiots have never run their own business in a capitalist market.
There is no evil master plan, just the constant hunt for individual profit. Business owners don't give away their money to prevent your enjoyment or from having free time, they need a thing done and pay you to do it. If they don't need that thing don't, they don't pay a single fucking sole to do it because that is moronic.
Apparently the poster and this book's author are also moronic for believing that Snide
Common misunderstanding of Darwin? (Score:2)
A common misunderstanding of Darwin is that survival of the fittest implies the survival of fit individuals. This sometimes comes up in discussions of homosexuality. "Oh yeah? Why gay people then?". Because it's not just about individuals mating and bearing offspring. It's about the *species* surviving. So. Tribes that have a few non-reproducing members are actually more fit than *tribes* that don't. For an extreme example, see bees where almost none of the individuals in the hive reproduce, and th
Web = Bullshit busywork (Score:2)
Developers used to spend about 40% on domain-related logic and the rest on tooling issues. But with most web stacks it's more like 20% on domain and 80% on tool/stack fiddling.
There's just too many layers and parts. Others have seen this also, but believe "that's just the way it is in order to get the benefits of web".
I'm not convinced it's either/or; with better standards I suspect we can approach the best of both. As it is, web stacks are ugly, messy, buggy, etc. in part because GUI/CRUD/statefulness are
Bullshit vs. world changing vs. get something done (Score:3)
I don't know about in-game toil so I can't really comment.
I think what's getting confused is jobs which "change the world" versus jobs which just get something done which helps a few people.
Not a lot of jobs are super inspiring. You're not going to cure cancer or feed the poor (not all cancers and not all poor people). At best, you'll make a tiny dent in a huge problem. Jobs where you can make a big impact are great but they're few and far between. Personally, I don't think I'm capable of doing any of them, that's just not my skillset.
Most jobs are just getting something done which helps a few people a little bit. Maybe a lot. I've written software which was used by maybe a thousand people for maybe ten years. It just made their day to day job a bit easier. But that was enough to pay my salary. Would I write a autobiography about it? Certainly not.
If you have a job which really adds no value to anyone, yeah, you probably ought not to be doing it. But let's take the Axie case for a moment. I don't know the details but I assume the in-game currency being bought and sold has value because it lets you do something fun in the game. And for whatever reason, the game designers didn't want to just give everyone as much of it as they wanted: they wanted to keep it scarce. Presumably that makes the game more enjoyable, at least for some people. So the people toiling away earning that currency are adding value: they're trading their time to let someone else play the fun parts of the game.
Will we care ten years from now? Almost certainly not, just like no one will care if I go skiing tomorrow. Entertainment is, sorta by definition, frivolous and only benefits the person enjoying the entertainment. That's not to say it's a BS job helping people enjoy themselves.
Jobs? (Score:2)
Whose calling this a job? It's gaming. For recreation or to amass winnings. As a form of recreation, it's not much different than playing miniature golf. You pay for a bucket of balls, knock them through the windmill and have fun. Amassing winnings (in game) is just a means of keeping score.
Once those winnings are monetized in the real world, the fun begins. Is it a Ponzi scheme? Is it money laundering? This is why we have gambling commissions. To make sure that the money flows into and out of the game eco
Take our time back (Score:2)
If people getting paid to do valueless work is a thing then we should be taking back our time from our employers by working shorter weeks, not inventing meaningless work for people to do.
When we were hunter gatherers we worked a few hours a day https://rewild.com/in-depth/le... [rewild.com] and had the rest of every day to ourselves. We only went agrarian as populations went up and only so many people can live off the land without actively managing it. This brought us around 3 millennia of much harder toil. We've been s
Bullshit theory (Score:2)
The problem with this theory is that it assumes that the perceived "meaning" of a job has any bearing whatsoever on its role within a capitalist economy. In fact, quite the opposite, capitalism assigns value to production not based on how meaningful it seems to people (e.g. teachers caring for the future of our civilization) but rather on how much people are willing to pay for it in view of the fluctuating factors of supply and demand. Hence capitalism is full of almost nothing but bullshit. If we are think
This is stoopid (Score:2)
The book cites ample anecdotal evidence that
Please remember that the plural of anecdote is NOT data.
Expect more of this (Score:2)
Time is money (Score:2)