“I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.”
“The Things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done."
― Buckminster Fuller, 1970
In December last year, there were 11 million job openings in the US. Yet, around the same time, 6 million Americans were unemployed.
While the number of open jobs has risen dramatically from 7 to 11 million in the US alone, it seems there is a dearth of talent.
It's shocking to imagine millions of job providers unable to find talent when millions of people are struggling to find work.
Matching the right talent with the right opportunities is an urgent and painful problem that we haven’t been fully able to solve.
Despite the rise of the Internet, professional networks like Linkedin, thousands of job boards and freelancer marketplaces, hundreds of millions of people are unemployed right now across the world.
Simply put, our current systems aren’t designed to solve the problem of work.
The centralized nature of global capitalism and its increasingly opaque, exploitative and extractive tools do not incentivize shared ownership or fair distribution of work.
In other words, work, like money, is a complex problem and its resolution requires a radical disruption and breakthrough as powerful and revolutionary as Bitcoin, its underlying blockchain technology, and its open-source custodians.
Just like Bitcoin separated money from the state and cut out the middlemen, imagine a distributed “work chain” that matches jobs with talent autonomously — at a scale that was previously unimaginable, unattainable.
Workchain Protocol
So, what does the minimum viable protocol for the Work 3.0 network look like?
Can this future-of-work protocol yield enough value to pay a universal basic income and free healthcare to all the eight billion citizens of the world?
To answer these questions, we have to first examine the problems that we need to solve:
💼 Problems with work:
Millions can't find the right job.
Millions waste time between jobs.
Millions are stuck in unsatisfying jobs.
Millions are in toxic and exploitative workplaces.
Millions don't get paid their worth, with middlemen, banks, and governments taking their cut.
Millions don’t have the right/current skills in demand.
💡 How to fix these problems?
🚫 No More Job Applications! Imagine never having to apply for a job again.
🤖 Personal AI Talent Manager: A personal AI bot to find the perfect job for you and apply automatically.
🎓 Personal AI Coach: Get paid to take courses/training and become job-ready.
💼 Job Security: No need to worry about the future or downtime, with a queue of jobs waiting for you.
💻 Flexible and Fluid Work: With Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)
🏠 Remote and Asynchronous Work: Work from anywhere, anytime.
💰 Fair Pay: Equal pay for your time and work, no matter where you live.
💸 Zero Fees, No Middlemen: Keep all the money you earn without paying exploitative fees to middlemen.
💳 Secure Payments: Your earnings are safe in a smart contract, with real-time payment and zero fees.
🤝 Build Relationships: Work with people you could become lifelong friends with.
💪 Nourishing Work: Work on global projects to solve problems that matter to you and change the world.
The challenge for us is to build an integrated solution that magically works out of the box.
We have to simplify Web3 onboarding while preserving privacy for the individuals and ensuring transparency for big, institutional and state-level players.
Work 2.0
The problem of Work 2.0 is a complex one — it’s not a single problem, but a set of interrelated problems that require a mix of social, political and technical solutions.
Gender pay gap, systematic discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, or citizenship, the gig economy and its precarious work arrangements, gatekeepers and barriers to both education and formal employment — technology alone can’t solve these problems.
A corrupt system, that legitimizes rent-seeking, gatekeeping and denial of essential services to the majority of world citizens, can’t be the champion of democracy, equal representation, fairness, and justice.
The concentration of wealth, talent, and power in the hands of a few individuals, corporations, or governments is feeding upon and destroying our dreams and hopes for a truly utopian Star Trek-like star-faring civilization.
We can only hope to break this cycle of inequality and poverty when we can create a more equitable and inclusive future of work on a truly democratic and equitable platform.
Work 3.0
First, let’s be clear about what we don’t want work to be in the future: we don’t want Work 3.0 to be toxic, exploitative, dehumanizing, or discriminating.
A truly digital economy, workplace and organization will be open to everyone.
We want to put tamper-proof systems in place where the fruits of your labor go first and foremost to you, your team, your family, your customers and your community.
The tax money you pay to the state as a responsible citizen should be traceable for all to see just like the open ledger of bitcoin transactions.
The state-owned national banks are a black box today — they act very much like a currency mixer for the rich and the powerful.
In the Web3 economy, you will demand the right to see where tax “dollars” actually go.
In the current regime, you cannot know for sure whether your hard-earned money goes into the private fund of a politician, their patron or party, or the people who actually need it, infrastructure building, or a cause that you actually care about.
Yes, that’s what you’re fighting for.
Unicorn Slaves
We are all unicorn slaves today.
The top 1% of the world's population holds more wealth than the bottom 50% combined.
Why? You already know the answer.
The billion-dollar companies, that we love and value so much, actively maintain and profit from the belief that not everyone is created equal.
Honestly, it’s rather painful, embarrassing and cold-heartening to watch the world’s fastest-growing companies stuck in the old ways of doing things like former slave masters, pharaohs and kings.
The existing mainstream Web2 networks, technologies and narratives are designed to make the rich richer; they empower the already powerful, effectively perpetuating the modern-day form of economic slavery at a global scale.
The current startup ecosystem is more or less unipolar led by the dollar regime, which thinks it’s okay for most people to not be self-sovereign or free.
Many global startups can’t survive today if we were to stop the supply of cheap labor from the developing world, physically and virtually, and effectively ended their unjust geo arbitrage of human capital across virtual borders.
If only we could liberate our talent from the current economic system and make talent accessible to everyone, everywhere, we could start working on every problem that’s keeping humanity backward, on the ground, on Earth.
FearOS
If you bought your first bitcoin on the street, when it was practically worthless, you know the power of hope and the discontent that follows.
You thought this time we have a real shot at developing a better world.
“The Internet will change the world.”
“Bitcoin will change the world.”
“Crypto will change the world.”
“AI will change the world.”
When you look around now, you don’t see much of that change, do you?
Hope is a powerful story with viral network effects, and so is fear, all our nightmares.
The only problem with running your life, company or country on FearOS is that it kills all your dreams and shuts down all paths to progress.
FearOS treats the free flow of ideas and people as a bug, not a feature of human society. Fear separates, segregates, and sees people as others, as colors, as vermin and parasites, as the scum of the earth.
Life is so short; I don’t want to live in a world running on FearOS. It’s a terrible way to live.
Technology is only as good, altruistic and effective as its end users. In the hands of tyrannical governments and authoritarian leaders, every tool can become a weapon of mass incarceration and destruction.
Hope is my echo chamber, my mind palace, my prison, for all who choose to believe wealth, talent and technology should be forces of good, not evil.
There’s no Shawshank redemption for us — until we ALL make it. WAGMI, remember?
That’s why you must surround yourself with positive thinkers, believers and builders. It makes a world of difference, trust me.
Working Democracy
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
― Buckminster Fuller, 1970
I don’t know if human society will ever be post-work, post-money, or post-scarcity, if you will be ever truly free, but I know for sure we won’t get anywhere close without a working democracy.
Democracy is beautiful when it works for the greatest good of the greatest number of people.
Democracy is hope in action when everyone has equal opportunities to grow and prosper.
The right to work and earn a fair wage is a basic necessity, and any country where millions are unemployed can’t be called the cradle of democracy.
A new paradigm of work, democracy, and a truly digital economy require a new kind of mindset, currency, and design.
"Societies and platforms flourish when there is a path for everyone to have upward mobility, achieve financial security, and learn and grow." — Li Jin, 2020
Postscript
At Dirgha, a newly minted pre-seed startup, I am actively working to develop a Web3 protocol to solve the problem of work.
Interested to mentor, collaborate or invest? Happy to talk!
Linkedin: SalikShah | Twitter: @Salik | Telegram: @SalikShah
Post-Postscript
You can collect the two artworks that I prompt-engineered for this article with Stable Diffusion here at OpenSea. My first NFTs ever just for the record.
