Working For Peanuts
Wage-slavery is a beautiful thing. It brings all us sheep in line and allows profits to be made hand over fist. People are ants, and a single ant can't really do anything cool on his own. There need to be hundreds if not thousands of ants working on a project for it to be truly significant.
This is where the pyramid hierarchy comes into play. Someone's gotta be in charge making all those hard decisions right? It might not even be the owner. He can afford to pay people who make those decisions professionally.
Worth. Fully-automated human-factory complete.
Citizens have been pushed farther and farther down without even knowing it. Have you talked to a Baby Boomer recently? They don't fucking get it. It's so annoying. They think we all had the same opportunities as them growing up.
No, assholes.
You fucking leveraged everything up in debt and even stole from your own children with social security. Fucking dipshits.
All the new money from all the amazing technology we've invented over the last four decades has gone straight to the top of the pyramid compliments of central banking. These central bankers then delegate that power out to the corporations who then delegate it down the pyramid to the masses. The legacy system is turning out to be very bad about making these trickle-down politics fair. Crypto is another story.
Creating jobs is fucking hard.
That's why centralization happened in the first place.
All of these developments lead to one thing:
More and more desperate poor people looking for work.
These people :
- have been brainwashed from birth to be compulsive consumers.
- live paycheck to paycheck.
- are unwilling or unable to invest.
- are willing to work for peanuts.
How do I know they are willing to work for peanuts? Because they already are! When you look at humanity over the last 40 years and actually step back at what we've accomplished... holy shit we should all be millionaires. Easily.
So Easily.
But instead all wealth gets sucked out of the pipe, and by the time the flow reaches us we scramble to suck it off the floor by trading our time for money. These vampires are sucking our lives away on a part-time basis so we can recharge and do it all over again the next day. Disgusting, but not as disgusting as how absolutely normalized and accepted it is by society. We breed slaves well.
And so there are scarcity slaves everywhere. Next time you're stuck in rush-hour traffic remember that 90% of the people on the road wouldn't be there if they didn't have to be. They can't even afford to live where the work half the time. Fucking comical.
A lot of us here like to say things like,
You should have better financial priorities and smartly invest your money for the future.
The vast majority of the time those words are going to fall on deaf ears. Lack of financial responsibility isn't something we can shun away. This movement has to embrace it and adapt to the current system. This movement has to create jobs.
Jobs.
And that's the main reason to be bullish on Steem in my opinion. Sure, the jobs we provide today are not fit for mass consumption, but we're still trying.
There are an army of people out there looking to work without a boss breathing over their neck and taking them for everything they're worth. That army is going to get a whole lot bigger during this next economic crisis. Steem will have to capitalize on that in a major way if the network wants to scale up.
Plain and simple.
The complex question we have to ask ourselves is,
What other proof-of-brain activities are there?
Well, I guess first we have to look at the big online markets:
- Communication
- Gaming
- Porn
- Miscellaneous entertainment (Videos, music, podcasts, etc)
- Shopping
- Reviews
- Etc.
I even surprised myself here by giving "reviews" its own category. Originally I was thinking it would just be a sub-category of shopping, but you can really review anything and the current system of centralized online reviews are insanely corrupted. I've wrote multiple posts about the value of decentralized reputation. @irate
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decentralized-reputation-explained-odd-point-dynamic-rating-system
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Summary
Decentralized reputation is superior because everyone in the system is a producer and consumer. Therefore if you give a dishonest review it can affect your own score in the eyes of others who might think you sold out.
More proof-of-brain
In the context of gaming I've talked about this a lot. There are lots of games out there that allow enthusiasts to work. League of Legends created the MOBA genre by first building it on the Warcraft 3 map editor (called DOTA). Enthusiasts are often willing to work for free in these scenarios. How much better would the quality of development be if they were actually getting paid for their work?
Any proof-of-brain game on Steem will go instantly viral. Even if it's just a stupid puzzle game and the proof-of-brain is creating custom puzzles for the network to vote on.
Porn
Obviously if someone creates porn others are going to be willing to buy it or upvote it or support it with ads. That's just a freebie business model. Porn has high demand.
However, I'd like to think outside the box on this one. What if someone designs a service that makes it easier for people to operate inside of the current sex industry? Crypto is great for privacy and security, on both sides of the 'transaction'.
What if some rich billionaire creates some crazy reality-tv porn thing using crypto? I expect much weirder shit than this is actually going to go down.
Stranger than fiction.
Communication is a big thing we use the Internet for. Do you know how easy it would be at set up encrypted chat on chain using memo keys? All the building blocks are right here built into consensus.
Shopping
This somewhat implies decentralized production, which would be really complicated. Still, I've already come up with an idea to somewhat bootstrap this idea. The Steem airgap wallet using Raspberry Pi It's not exactly decentralized... you have to buy the Raspberry Pis from a centralized source. However, once it becomes modified with the correct software it theoretically gains value and can be resold to all the non-techie people.
Conclusion
People don't invest. People are slaves. Crypto needs to stop looking for investors and start harnessing this vastly underutilized resource. The fairness and trust that crypto generates will soon become superior to anything the legacy economy has to offer.
Stay bullish on Steem.
First to market; entrenched in the environment.
We will not be uprooted easily.
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You have the dual problem of the system being rigged against the average person and then, what little they are able to garner, is wasted because people learn to run up debt instead of learning how to put compound interest to use.
Ultimately, the system is built to suck people in and milk them dry.
It is one reason why I share your passion for crypto, Steem, and the freedom it can offer. This is early in the game but it is necessary that early adopters lead the way. The masses simply will not follow until it is proven to them.
Success garners attention. The more we can be successful, the easier it will be to pitch the average individual. They really will only follow...it is what the masses do.
All the time.
Actually, we do. We get that we’ve been screwed over by the banksters and their government minions, albeit in a slightly different way than younger folks have. That our parents were able to get by on one income per family, but that we’ve needed two. That the supposed Social Security “trust fund” that we paid into for decades has been raided again and again. Conventional wisdom is that we (or, more accurately, banksters) have borrowed from our children, saddling them with debt. But boomers understand that that debt will never be repaid, it will be monetized. And that all but the very oldest of boomers will likely still be alive when the debt house of cards collapses.
Baby boomers are screwed.
All of my salty experiences are with upper-middle-class boomers :D
The worst cases are full on upper-class.
Damn depressing post. I don’t dispute what you have said. I live it and think wage slavery is real. I am unsure about your point re: the masses. It’s definitely a hard sell to onboard, but some are having success albeit slowly and it’s unclear to me if inflow matches outflow here. But Some of the tribes are gaining members and interest. These are longterm plays but they offer hope some of the ideas in stimulating mass migration to Steem following popular figures with large followings may yet bear fruit. We will see. Your keeping it real and respect to you for that, I hope for the best