Twitch as a Labor Ecosystem for the Future

The Twitch emotes are taking our jobs.

In a post industrial economy, the share of the labor market allocated to manufacturing and producing necessities declines. I even found a couple of graphs that say so. How many of your friends work in agriculture or manufacturing? I'll take odds against it.

There is of course the question of which new jobs will be created. Just as industrial era jobs cannibalized agricultural era jobs, so too have post-industrial era service/tech jobs cannibalized manufacturing jobs. Automation now threatens post-industrial economy service jobs. Customer service reps, lawyers, doctors, etc are anticipated to go the way of the farmer - present and important, but we need fewer of them. If not the agricultural, the industrial, or the service, what then?

One interesting bi-product of the information age is that its software enables infinite production at incredibly low cost (unless you're mining bitcoin). We need to buy bricks to build buildings, but what is the material cost of sharing information? It costs Facebook virtually nothing to host your "You vs. the Guy She Told You Not to Worry About" meme.

The nature of a meme is that it can be shared and remixed back and forth an infinite number of times. Photoshops, new captions, combined memes, memes that respond to other memes, all serve to create an infinite combination of possibilities. These infinite possibilities can be referred to as a combination of virtual ecosystems. Status games, ideologies and jokes are infinitely repackaged. All with incredibly low marginal cost. Given the asymptotic distance between production and utility, is it possible to create systems of exchange on top of virtual ecosystems? We already do.

Twitch is an ideal case study. Structurally, the nodes that make up the system are very transparent, but the implications of this structure have yet to be fully realized. Twitch is not only a streaming service, it is the nexus of an entirely new economic ecosystem.

The nodes of exchange present ample opportunity for monetization. Twitch runs ads, streamers can sell merch, companies can sponsor streamers, streamers hire managers, video editors, and other team members, gaming publishers make money selling games, their employees and agencies profit in turn, esports companies host events, commentators are paid to host events, the physical venues charge admission for large crowds, independent developers build monetized Twitch extensions, viewers can gamble on streams, viewers can buy emoticons, viewers can donate or pay to subscribe to their favorite streamers. Twitch can expand in any of these markets or product lines to create new areas to monetize.

This ecosystem is not only interesting in that it supports a network of people who are willing to pay for seemingly infinite kinds of virtual value. Like its individual nodes of exchange, the platform itself is recursively commoditized. One can imagine a game of football, and there is a level of virtualization in which one watches players live in-person without participating. Moving up a level, one can watch the game on tv or their cellphone. Then one can play a video game simulation of the game. One can watch someone playing a simulation of the game (on twitch). One can even gamble while watching someone play a simulation of a game. Twitch is just one layer in an infinite number of possibilities and abstractions built upon the rules of the game of football.

This example is not exclusive to Twitch. Roblox and Minecraft and many other games are examples of ecosystems in which the developers and others others who participate in the virtual ecosystem economy are earning millions.

Indeed, these types of recursion also do not have to include gaming. Social media personalities, musicians, gaming, message boards, and brands are all examples of different kinds of ecosystems interlocking with each other.

These different ecosystems when combined are not longer hierarchical. The Kardashian makeup business, mobile games, sponsored social media accounts are ways of monetizing their virtual value. The brand value flows rhizomatically between their products and between other ecosystems. With tracking attribution software, it is certainly possible to temporally sequence the actions of a consumer. The user browsed Facebook, then read an article with a Facebook tracking pixel, then downloaded the app.

However, these ecosystems are not necessarily temporally bound. As a consumer you are often partici in multiple ecosystems simultaneously. Your phone is an example. Even as TV commercials monetize your attention, you are receiving notifications for various apps while watching the game. Instagram is pushing you updates as the game commercials sound off in the background. In an extreme case, you may be giving your full attention to multiple virtual ecosystems. Second screen product lines allow for a single ecosystem (a sports game) to exchange value with your attention or money in multiple ways simultaneously.

To sum it up so far:

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1. Virtual ecosystems are not constrained by the complexity of an individual ecosystem, as shown by the ever expanding points of monetization on twitch.
2. An infinite number of ecosystems can be built on top of each other, as shown by the evolution from live sporting event to gambling on gaming simulations.
3. These ecosystems are not restricted to gaming, as shown by ecosystems built around social media personalities and message boards.
4. Virtual ecosystems are not isolated. Just like memes, they can be remixed, combined, and separated as shown by the Kardashian brand interplaying seamlessly between forms of media.
5. These ecosystems are not constrained by time, as shown by the ability to simultaneously use your phone and the television.

Given the lack of constraints, these ecosystems are capable of producing an infinite number of jobs. So long as there is enough utility value produced beneath it.

These jobs that produce only symbolic value are enabled by the widening gap between utility and symbolic value. The labor share of hardware manufacturers that sponsor streamers and the farmers that provide food have steadily decreased. Automation also stands to do the same to service jobs.

Unless social interactions themselves are automated, there will always be room in our economy for labor and a means of spreading capital.