Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
(taken from my newsletter, hence any difference in tone)
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
-Karl Marx, The German Ideology
I’m too young to have experienced the era of work whenin a multiple decade career at a single business was par for the course.
Recently it seems the status quo has been inching away from that, and toward having a series of occupations under different employers, gigs that may last months to years, as opposed to jobs that last decades. The gig economy, it has been called.
But it seems the equilibrium may not be found solely between jobs and gigs. Just this week was my first experience working for a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. This new type of organization is a novel business model in that its governance is algorithmically determined by token holders. Token holders may propose actions, such as making a withdrawal from the DAO treasury to issue a grant, for the other token holders to vote on.
My work, in this case, consisted of some basic graphic design, making a couple infographics for the DAO, called PubDAO, to display to newcomers. It was all facilitated on Discord.
For anyone unacquainted with Discord, it is a social media platform largely built around gaming, building communities around video games by way of “channels” that users can freely join. In my opinion, it is also the social media platform best poised to leverage blockchain technologies, as in DAOs.
To really break down what I did: I joined this discord channel, with a pseudonymous account - a username, volunteered for the graphic design task, took feedback from the more established members of the DAO, and qualified for a payout at the end of their payout cycle. This DAO is new and does not yet have their own governance token (i.e. crypto asset), so for the time being, I am being compensated with points that can eventually be redeemed for tokens, which will allow me to vote, to become more established in the DAO.
So business is conducted in the form of privately issued assets, without any of us knowing each others’ names, without any of us having met in person. This task, or microgig if you will, took but a few hours, and I just as easily could have volunteered for a writing task, an editorial task, or a programming task. If I have the skills, I can do any or all of the above. Having a generalist education program is helpful here.
From this experience, one may intimate a future economic status quo where a non-trivial portion of our population makes a living by way of these tasks. You can be a member in as many DAOs as you like, but your compensation levels depend on your contributions.
You may not be fully engaged in the activities of all of these DAOs, but instead take a back seat until a task arises that you feel particularly suited for.
So it may be that “post-fordism” has another phase shift yet, from the gig economy to the microgig economy. Instead of a multi-decade job, instead of series of year-long jobs and month-long gigs, we may have a hyperseries of day-long or hour-long tasks, spread across a number of specialties and skills.
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
-Karl Marx, The German Ideology
I’m too young to have experienced the era of work whenin a multiple decade career at a single business was par for the course.
Recently it seems the status quo has been inching away from that, and toward having a series of occupations under different employers, gigs that may last months to years, as opposed to jobs that last decades. The gig economy, it has been called.
But it seems the equilibrium may not be found solely between jobs and gigs. Just this week was my first experience working for a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. This new type of organization is a novel business model in that its governance is algorithmically determined by token holders. Token holders may propose actions, such as making a withdrawal from the DAO treasury to issue a grant, for the other token holders to vote on.
My work, in this case, consisted of some basic graphic design, making a couple infographics for the DAO, called PubDAO, to display to newcomers. It was all facilitated on Discord.
For anyone unacquainted with Discord, it is a social media platform largely built around gaming, building communities around video games by way of “channels” that users can freely join. In my opinion, it is also the social media platform best poised to leverage blockchain technologies, as in DAOs.
To really break down what I did: I joined this discord channel, with a pseudonymous account - a username, volunteered for the graphic design task, took feedback from the more established members of the DAO, and qualified for a payout at the end of their payout cycle. This DAO is new and does not yet have their own governance token (i.e. crypto asset), so for the time being, I am being compensated with points that can eventually be redeemed for tokens, which will allow me to vote, to become more established in the DAO.
So business is conducted in the form of privately issued assets, without any of us knowing each others’ names, without any of us having met in person. This task, or microgig if you will, took but a few hours, and I just as easily could have volunteered for a writing task, an editorial task, or a programming task. If I have the skills, I can do any or all of the above. Having a generalist education program is helpful here.
From this experience, one may intimate a future economic status quo where a non-trivial portion of our population makes a living by way of these tasks. You can be a member in as many DAOs as you like, but your compensation levels depend on your contributions.
You may not be fully engaged in the activities of all of these DAOs, but instead take a back seat until a task arises that you feel particularly suited for.
So it may be that “post-fordism” has another phase shift yet, from the gig economy to the microgig economy. Instead of a multi-decade job, instead of series of year-long jobs and month-long gigs, we may have a hyperseries of day-long or hour-long tasks, spread across a number of specialties and skills.