Work Is Not a Job – Play the Planet

Status note: this post describes how Play the Planet’s quest economy is designed and why. Some of it is settled design; some of it is reasoning we are publishing so that people can check it. The section on taxes is general information, not advice, and it says so again where it appears.

Later this morning, one of us is going to scoop ten litter boxes.

That is work. Nobody would argue otherwise. It takes time, it is unpleasant, it has to be done on a schedule, and if it does not get done there are consequences. It is also, unquestionably, not a job.

It would still not be a job if we built a quest for it — clean the ten boxes, 1 Gc — and paid it out on completion. Who would the boss be? The cats?

That gap, between work and a job, is where Play the Planet’s whole economy lives. This post is about why we think the distinction holds, and what we built to make it hold.

What actually makes a job a job

Not the fact that it is hard. Not the fact that it is scheduled. Not the fact that you get paid.

A job is a relationship in which somebody captures the difference between what your work is worth and what you are paid for it. That difference is the point of the arrangement. It is where the profit comes from. Everything else about conventional employment — the hours, the supervision, the schedule, the review — exists to protect and enlarge that gap.

Play the Planet pays the living wage rate for all of the work done on behalf of the Network. There is no gap, because there is nobody positioned to take one. No surplus extractor, therefore no employer. You will never, in the course of performing an Act of Service in the Network, be paid LESS than the current living wage, and we spell out explicitly how we make that calculation. (You will even be paid something for your time when you volunteer at a Non Profit that has joined our Network).

This is not a technicality we went looking for. It is the reason the thing was built. Compensating people at what we consider the minimum necessary level for work that conventional economics declines to pay for at all (or radically underpays) is not a side effect of the design; it is the design.

A market in the gap, not a market taken from anyone

Here is the part that gets misread first, so we will be plain about it.

Ghost Net Credits are a companion to the dollar economy, not a competitor to it. We are not trying to compete dollar businesses out of existence, and we would consider it a failure if we did.

What we are trying to do is make up the shortfall those businesses create for the people who work in them. When a job pays less than a life costs — which is the ordinary condition of a great many jobs in a great many counties — the difference does not disappear. It shows up as something not bought, not fixed, not eaten, not repaired. That shortfall is a gap in a market that nobody is serving, because the people standing in it have no money.

Gc is money for that gap. It is earned by doing work the dollar economy leaves on the floor, and it buys things the dollar economy was never going to sell to that person anyway, because they could not pay.

Any business can accept Gc. You do not have to play the game. You do not have to complete a quest or hold an account level or care about any of this. You create a free account so there is a wallet for the credits to land in, and that is the whole requirement. If you want to take Gc for half a tank of gas or a sack of potatoes, you can, today.

We are not after anyone’s market. We are after the customers that market already decided it could not have.

Paying for what the Network needs is not rent

The economist Mariana Mazzucato has spent a career on a question that sits right underneath this post: which income is earned, by creating value, and which is collected, by capturing value somebody else created? In The Value of Everything she argues that modern economics has lost the ability to tell the two apart, because it measures value by price, so anything that gets paid is assumed to be productive. The old name for income you collect without producing anything is rent.

We pay for two things that can look like rent from a distance. Neither one is, and we want to say why.

Hosting a repeater. Our community radio network needs repeaters, and repeaters need hilltops. Most hilltops belong to somebody. When the Network pays a landowner a recurring fee to keep a repeater on their land, it can look like the classic case: income for owning a scarce spot. It is not, and the difference is what the money buys. Classical rent is a payment for something that would exist whether or not you paid. The hill was there before us, and we are not paying for the hill. We are paying for a working repeater site, month after month: the access, the permission, and the landowner’s continuing choice to keep our equipment there, a choice nobody can force them to make. Stop paying, and the network loses that link. The fee buys the ongoing existence of the network, which makes it payment for something produced. It is recalculated as the network grows, so a site that new coverage makes redundant stops being paid. A payment that ends when it stops being needed is not a toll.

Who sets the price is what makes something rent. In dollars, the only number on the table would be what the landowner could charge, and the scarcer good hilltops are, the more they could charge. What the repeater does for everyone else would not even come into it. We do it the other way round. What a site does for the holon decides whether we pay for it at all: we count the communities it connects. How much we pay is a floor, the same as for work: a flat monthly amount for each piece of Network equipment on the land, the same for every landowner. We don’t claim to know what a hilltop is “worth,” and we don’t try. And because neighbours’ own radio nodes can route around any one site, no landowner can hold the network hostage. They can say yes or no; they can’t name the number.

Your selfie and your phone number. Some quests ask for personal information, like a photo or a phone number. We need it: it is how quest completions get verified, and how the dashboard finds the people near you. When we ask for it, we pay for it, through the quest that asks. That is not rent either, and it is the opposite of what the biggest companies on the internet do. They collect your photos, your contacts and your location for free, make their money from them, and keep all of it. In Mazzucato’s terms, that is value extraction: value you created, captured by somebody else. We think your information has value of its own, that the Network needs it, and that the person it belongs to should be paid for it.

The nope button

Every quest in Play the Planet is refusable. There is a button. You can decline a quest you have been offered, and you can cancel a quest you have already taken, at any point, up to the moment it is done.

Try that with a job.

The obvious objection arrives immediately, and it is a good one: if everybody can say no at any time, how does anything that needs doing actually get done? If the FabLab is supposed to open at nine on Tuesday and the person who runs it does not feel like it, the lab does not open, and a refusable system starts to look like a system that cannot promise anything to anyone.

Redundancy instead of obligation

The answer is older than Play the Planet. Buckminster Fuller, writing about a world where work had been radically redefined, described people competing to join work teams to accomplish specific tasks — not applying for positions, but volunteering onto efforts. His problem was ours: how does the work still get done once doing it is optional?

His answer, and ours, is redundancy rather than compulsion.

Bob holds the quest to open the lab Tuesday. Larry has signed on as Bob’s understudy — a contingent quest, which is a declaration of willingness and nothing more. Larry has an understudy. That person has one too. Four deep.

Tuesday morning, Bob cancels. Larry is notified — not assigned. Larry can accept, or decline, and if Larry declines, the next person is notified, and so on down the chain. If every one of the four says no, the lab is simply broadcast as closed for the day, and anyone who was going to come knows before they leave the house.

Nobody is on call. Nobody is paid to be available, because quests pay only on completion, so declining never generates a payment and standing by never earns anything. Being fourth on a ladder costs you precisely nothing, which is the only reason anyone would agree to be fourth on a ladder.

Here is the part worth sitting with. Conventional employment buys reliability by purchasing one person’s obligation. We buy the same reliability by stacking four people’s optionality. Same lab, same hour, same open door — and underneath, the opposite mechanism.

That is why the nope button is not a loophole. On its own it would be one: a feature that collapses the first time anybody uses it. The ladder is the thing that survives everybody using it. The refusal is cheap because four people stand behind it, and four people will stand behind it because the refusal is cheap.

And when all four do decline, the honest outcome is the right one: the lab is closed Tuesday, and we say so. A system that is actually voluntary has to be willing to occasionally produce nothing. If it cannot, it was never voluntary.

Refusing is free. Not showing up is not.

There is one distinction here we care about a great deal, because the difference between them is the difference between a community and a shambles.

Refusing a quest costs you nothing. Decline it, or cancel it, and that is the end of the matter. There is no penalty, no counter, no mark. Our ratings are generated by interactions — and a quest you formally cancelled produced no interaction, so there is nothing there to rate. The invisibility is not a rule we wrote. It falls out of how the system already works.

Not showing up costs you plenty. If you took the quest, said yes, let the clock run out and never appeared — somebody was relying on that, and your rating will reflect it. It should.

You are completely free to refuse. You just have to actually refuse. Silence is not refusal; it is a default, and we treat it as one.

(The understudy chain works the other way round, because an understudy has not agreed to anything yet. If Larry is notified and simply does not answer, nothing happens to Larry — he never accepted. After a short window we assume he is a no and ping the next person, so the lab still opens on time.)

Where the game comparison stops

If you play an MMO, you take a quest, raid the lair, and get five hundred gold. You spend the gold on armour. You did a quest, you got paid, and nobody thinks you had a job, because the gold never left the game.

Gc leaves the game. That is the entire point of Play the Planet — the action crosses out into reality — and it means the comparison, which is a good one right up to that line, stops exactly there. WoW gold buys pretend armour. Gc buys actual potatoes. We are not going to pretend that is a small difference, because it is the difference we built the thing for.

We went and checked, and here is what we found

We could have left the argument where it stood, and we did not, because “we are confident this is not employment” is the sort of sentence that ought to be tested rather than asserted.

So we read the law directly — the Fair Labor Standards Act, the relevant federal regulations, the Virginia Code, and the controlling Supreme Court case — rather than reasoning from what we assumed it said.

The case that matters most is Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor (1985). A nonprofit’s workers received no cash at all, only food, clothing and shelter. They testified — passionately — that they were volunteers. One said the thought of being paid was “vexing to my soul.” Nobody was holding them there. The Supreme Court held unanimously that they were employees anyway, because the test is economic reality rather than anyone’s sincere description of it.

That case ought to worry anyone designing something like this, and it is worth understanding why we read it as pointing the other way for us. The Court’s reasoning turned on the fact that the Foundation ran commercial businesses “in competition with ordinary commercial enterprises,” and that paying its workers below the market rate handed it an advantage over its competitors. The Act’s own stated purpose is preventing exactly that — an unfair method of competition built on undercutting the price of labor.

Which is the thing we are structurally not doing. We do not assess what your work is worth; we would not know how, and we do not try. We pay the minimum necessary — the living wage — for work the dollar economy prices at nothing, or that we know is priced below the living wage floor. You cannot undercut a price that does not exist, and where a price does exist and sits below the living wage, we pay above it rather than below. And where the dollar economy already pays well above a living wage, that is not where our attention lives, so we are not bidding against anyone’s employer. We do not compete with the businesses around us; we serve the customers they already cannot reach. The concern the law is actually built around is the one our design was built to avoid — and we arrived there from economics and ethics, before we had read a word of the statute. Finding out afterwards that the law’s central worry and our central commitment are the same worry was a good day.

Nor can we compete for anyone’s labor, and that is arithmetic rather than good intentions. Gc does not convert to dollars. It cannot pay a tax bill, a power bill or a mortgage, which means a dollar job stays structurally irreplaceable for as long as those obligations are denominated in dollars. Quests can be worked at any hour — nights, weekends, whenever the shift ends — so they supplement an income instead of replacing one. In a fully mature holon a player could in principle work enough of them to live on, and he would still need dollars for the tax man. There are very few circumstances in which anyone gives up paid work to take quests, and none in which we could make that trade attractive even if we wanted to.

One objection deserves a straight answer rather than a footnote. Paying for work that is underpaid, the argument runs, relieves the pressure on whoever is underpaying, so we ought to stand back and let that pressure do its work. We do not accept the premise. We never expected the dollar economy to behave, because history has shown us that it will not, and we exist precisely because it is not. We are not going to model our behavior on the blind hope that it would start doing the right thing if only we were not stepping in. A man who needs to eat when he gets off work is not a lever to be held in reserve.

We also found that the federal wage statute’s business-size threshold sits far above anything Play the Planet does, and that Virginia’s own minimum wage law contains a specific carve-out for nonprofit activity that federal law does not have — which is part of why we expect to hold particular pieces of this, like a FabLab or a building, in nonprofit entities as we grow.

None of the above is legal advice, including to ourselves. It is a design team reading primary sources and showing its work. If you are standing up a holon, get your own advice. We will be getting ours.

One thing you should know before you earn your first credit

Short, and genuinely important.

Gc is not pretend money, and the law may not treat it as pretend money either. Receiving something of value in exchange for services can count as income even when no dollars change hands, and income can affect eligibility for benefits like SNAP, TANF or SSI.

For most people, at the volumes anyone is earning today, this is likely to be nothing. For some people — particularly anyone receiving means-tested benefits — it may not be nothing, and we would much rather you heard that from us, early and in plain language, than discovered it in a letter.

If you receive any benefit that depends on your income, please check before you start earning Gc. We will keep a permanent page up with what we know. We are not able to advise you on your individual situation, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing.

We would rather say this clumsily and early than smoothly and late.

We want to be proven wrong

The argument in this post is load-bearing. If it is wrong, a great deal that we have built on top of it is wrong too, and we would like to know that now.

So: if you think the distinction between work and a job collapses somewhere we have not noticed, tell us. If you run a business and you think a companion currency is going to hurt you rather than bring you customers who previously had nothing, tell us that too, and tell us specifically — the general version of that worry is easy to wave away and the specific version might be right.

And if you have stood up something like this before and watched it fail, we would rather have that conversation than almost any other.

What we have not solved

How the understudy ladder behaves at scale. Four deep covers nearly everything we can imagine. We have not tested it against a holiday, a flu week, or a genuinely unpopular quest nobody wants.
What happens when a merchant accepts a great deal of Gc and has no way to spend it. A currency with willing receivers and no onward market stalls. We have ideas; we do not have a proof.
Whether “evolving living wage rate” stays honest as the network grows. Today it is a small number of people being careful. That is not a mechanism.
The tax and benefits question, properly. The paragraph above is the honest state of our knowledge, which is less than we want it to be.
Whether any of this survives contact with a holon we did not build. Everything here has been reasoned about one place and tested nowhere.