Internet of Jobs
The Internet of Jobs (IoJ) is what happens when web3 collides with the timeless exchange of labor for money in the digital realm. It creates a new and improved labor marketplace that integrates value transfer as a native feature, allowing our relationship with labor to be peer-to-peer and less reliant on central intermediaries with unilateral control.
The IoJ is going to happen
My argument here is one of first principles:
The properties of blockchains networks imbue tokens with “moneyness”
One of the primary uses of money is the purchase of labor or skills, more commonly known as “jobs.”
Ergo, one of the use cases for blockchains will be “the internet of jobs”
The IoJ is going to happen soon
ICOs, NFTs, and DeFi are all major use cases for blockchains that have already been proven. They have created a multi-billion dollar marketplace for their products, and the emergent industry around these 3 use cases has created a class of knowledge workers who are crypto-native and paid in crypto.
Many crypto projects have elected to organize themselves as DAOs – internet native organizations. Because these new digital organizations employ many crypto-natives, DAOs are the catalyst for the internet of jobs.
The TAM (total addressable market) for the internet of jobs is massive. There are over 7 billion people in the world, and many of them would like to earn an income.
The IoJ is how blockchains go mainstream
The median internet citizen thinks about their job, not their investments when they think about their financial life & financial sovereignty. NFTs, yield farming, and meme coins may offer a great way to vibe with the crypto community, but it’s not enough for them to integrate crypto into their daily lives.
For 99% of the world, their financial lives are their jobs - not their investments. For this reason, I predict that Web3 won’t go mainstream until the internet of jobs is mainstream.
What are the Values?
Blockchains offer the ability to create smart contracts. In these smart contracts, we can literally program our values into our money. So what are our values?
This deserves its own post. What’s the relationship of capital to labor? How do supply and demand fit in together? How do we measure success? How to balance short-term incentives with long-term incentives? Where do social safety nets fit in? Where can we further align incentives? There are complicated political theories and economic histories to analyze, we have first principles arguments to make, and the surface area is extremely large.
I think that one important design criteria are that persons should be able to:
Mutually benefit
Proportionally benefit to the value they each provided
Have the option to walk away from any of these relationships.
Will the IoJ create human thriving?
I’d like to believe we are designing a regenerative internet of value for the thriving of a global citizenry, an aggregation of 3-dimensional humans, each with differing values, ambitions, backgrounds, geographies, psychological orientations, financial endowments, privilege levels, abilities, and physical archetypes. We celebrate our diversity but also recognize our common human needs to live in healthy ecosystems, attain economic empowerment and maintain individual sovereignty.
I’d like to believe this. Maybe if other people would too, we can achieve a consensus on that north star and build it together.