The Virtual Economy is an opportunity to short-circuit that system failure. This is evidence that as economies mature and growth slows, social mobility becomes increasingly difficult. According to the OECD, it now takes at least five generations for a child born into a low-income French, German, Korean, British or American family to reach average income. But since the early 1990s, social mobility has slowed considerably. This system of fair exchange drove extraordinary improvements in global equality, poverty and innovation over decades. This idea was propagandised colloquially as “The American Dream,” but the core tenets were similarly present across much of northern Europe, Australasia, Canada, and South Korea as a social philosophy of abide and prosper. Workers in the post-WW2 world understood that to obey these principles almost guaranteed that their children would be better off than they were. People were promised that hard work, education and adherence to social convention would be rewarded with prosperity, comfort, and financial stability. These systems imbued a sense of fairness and opportunity that generally placated and incentivised the masses. Over the last century, the developed world has built economies based on principles of rationality, efficient markets, and crucially, a merit-based system of social mobility. System Reloaded: Social Mobility's New Frontier An emerging habitat exhibiting the capacity of emerging technologies like distributed ledgers, virtual reality (VR), computer vision, real-time ray tracing, cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It is a place where people go to socialise, to play, to create, to work, to fantasise, to deceive, and to prosper.
It is an environment native to the tech savvy, a dual citizenship of sorts for the technically fluent. It is a place frequented, with varying degrees of immersion, by some 2.5 billion people through phones, consoles, laptops, desktops, and headsets. A new economic frontier that may just be the answer to the generational wealth gap. Within it, there is a galaxy of activity and opportunity. It sits just out of reach, behind a digital curtain, invisible to most of us. An agglomeration of sophisticated platforms, fledgling and often dubious marketplaces, skilled nixers, volatile assets, and ambitious pioneers that exist or operate uniquely in virtual environments.
A 21-year-old earned $125 for controlling someone’s identity for an hour, and a 16-year-old just won $3 million in prize money for eliminating everyone on a virtual island in front of millions of people. Elsewhere, a 17-year-old just earned $500 for designing a gun that can’t shoot anyone.
0 kommentar(er)
