“But it is my firm conviction that the ‘Hell of England’ will cease to be that of ‘not making money;’ that we shall get a nobler Hell and a nobler Heaven!” — Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present
I.
Lately, I have not been feeling quite myself. I live on the internet, which is to say, I am a NEET [ed. Not in Education, Employment or Training] living in my parents’ basement. In my online persona I pretend that I am ironically pretending to be a NEET living in my parents’ basement, but I am one in actual fact. I believe we are living in the cyberpunk dystopia and it’s way less metal than everyone thought it would be.
We imagined ourselves as samurai sword VR pirate pioneers, but it turns out we’re pointless argument vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that serve us ads. Corporations are organisms, not city-states; they signal to each other via markets; they build interfaces into human social protocols through brand identities; they occupy slots in our Dunbar rings.
The internet is an ocean that we invent as we explore it. The deeper we dive, the more we become cryptozoologists, or crypto-ichthyologists, or even crypto-theologists. In the murky darkness of virtual places, there could be dragons, shoggoths, leviathans; invisible creatures that will prey on us, devour us, or colonize us. Certainly, I have heard voices on the web who say we will discover or build a god when we reach the cyber-ocean floor. That god will save us by authoring an age of post-scarcity economics. It will commodify us, allowing us to be fungible with capital. Amen.
I apologize if this seems fragmented. My brain has been addled by the casino reward schedule of social media. It is both a cliche and a fact that I cannot focus on anything for more than three minutes. That’s half true, I read pdfs of outlandish philosophers, but I do it while frantically checking for notifications. My hobbies include speculating on cryptocurrency and shitposting, which is where you put in minimal effort in creating your online presence so that you aren’t culpable when it’s bland.
By now I think almost everyone has heard of so-called “dayjob” contracts. Most people have probably received one, and many have even fulfilled them. I have personally executed over a thousand. The euphemism “dayjob” refers to the relatively low payout of these types of contracts, as in “don’t quit your day job.” I never intended this to be my career, and the truth is I still think of myself as unemployed. I don’t want to talk numbers but let’s just say if I had to pay rent this wouldn’t work.
Still, there is something addictive about the feedback loop of getting a contract, fulfilling it, and watching my wallet get an anonymous transfer. The immediacy and the tangibility of it are very satisfying. It’s like making money: the video game. A direct feedback loop with a variable payout is all it takes to turn a moment of reward into a habit. You get a little receipt after each fulfillment.
Most of the actual jobs are simple. In one, I was told to go to a certain address and take a photograph of a building at a particular time. In another, I was supposed to go to a vendor in an open air market, find a tourist of middle eastern descent wearing a green military jacket, and tell him the numbers: 75, 53, 168.7, 55, 13, 804. I was unable to find him.
In a third, I was asked to watch a brief video on YouTube and then email a description of its contents to an incomprehensible address, something like ak38eja2pf8hap@fpwyg.af. Just over ten percent of my contracts have been to summarize news articles or passages out of books. Apparently the shadowy digital cabal of crypto microjobs wants us to do our damn homework. I have even completed jobs that felt like problems on standardized tests, in which I had to read a short body of text and then answer questions about it.
Ever since the first one I have wondered how they work and where they come from. Each time I complete one it feels like another clue, like watching a tv serial; each episode they give you two minutes of exposition on the protagonist’s shadowy past. Though if I am honest, I know only slightly more than when I started, and I frequently deny this when I talk to myself in my own head. “This next job will teach me something,” I whisper to myself over and over. When the contract issuer—which I assume is routing through some kind of bot—tells me of a job, I sometimes talk back. I used to confess things, or make up lies, or tell stories. Now I just say “why?”
Tweet this news story, @all of these accounts.
“Why?”
Go to this address, face these coordinates, take a photo at six pm.
“Why?”
“Count the number of people who cross this intersection on foot in three hours”
“Why?”
“Put on a bright red T-shirt and go to this location. To anyone who greets you, say these words”
“Why?”
“Of the faces in this picture, how many are afraid?”
“4”
“What are they afraid of?”*
“Why?”
(*it didn’t pay me for this one. That will teach me, I guess.)
Posters on the the dayjob reddit talk about being asked to make a series of binary choices, or to give their best guess about the probabilities of hypothetical future events. I haven’t had too many like that, and I wonder if the system thinks I am bad at predicting the future. Based on my informal online research, the most common contracts appear to be for verification of other jobs; if one man is asked to visit a certain location at a certain time, there will be two more to visit the same location and upload a photo that shows him to be there. Each of those will in turn be followed by another contractor whose job is to verify the identity of the man in the photo, and perhaps even another to verify the verification.
The jobs come to their executors through a variety of channels; text message, social media, email, and anonymous robot dialers. They are always executed on the blockchain and they pay out in cryptocurrency. I personally use an aggregator app that is able to login to all of my accounts and scrape them for contracts. You cannot ask for a dayjob. They can only come to you, like an unbidden thought or memory, (like all thoughts and memories?) like the call of the void. The more you complete, the more frequently they will come.
Their origin is a mystery, but speculations and conspiracy theories abound. The usual suspects are all represented: dayjobs are being used to coordinate black or grey market operations by organized crime syndicates. Dayjobs are part of a psyop or a social experiment being conducted by the CIA. They’re part of a Russian plot to affect some sinister geopolitical purpose. They’re being used by Islamic terrorists to undermine American institutions, and the seeming banality of many of the contracts is just a smokescreen to disguise their true intent.
You should not believe anything you read on 4chan of course, but the below makes for compelling speculation.
If this is true, then certainly the authors of these contracts have taken some pains to obscure their identities. I’m not a cryptocurrency wonk, but I was under the impression there were easier ways. (...)
The internet is an ocean but for some reason we call it a cloud, as if it were above us, ethereal, transcendent. It’s a warehouse full of servers, many such warehouses. And yet the cloud is not the servers that run it, any more than a mind is a brain. Through the miracle of virtualization, a new parallel universe arises with its own ontology and its own phenomenology. A brain computes a mind and a server computes a cloud, you see? They are analogs, but one is digital.
A program without a visible interface is called a process, and such a program is said to be “headless”. The engineers who invented modern computing paradigms referred to processes as daemons. To me, it’s a macabre image: invisible demons, swarming through the cloud, bodies without heads: they manipulate us for inscrutable alien purposes.
The internet is an ocean and who knows what swims beneath its surface? Virtual predators, incorporeal, dangling (sex|porn|friendship|fame|money) in front of us maybe, like an angler fish using bioluminescence to lure prey into its jaws. And why not? The information-dense ecosystem of our internet could be a kind of primordial soup. The heat and light from our activities there could be a catalyst for virtual abiogenesis.
I.
Lately, I have not been feeling quite myself. I live on the internet, which is to say, I am a NEET [ed. Not in Education, Employment or Training] living in my parents’ basement. In my online persona I pretend that I am ironically pretending to be a NEET living in my parents’ basement, but I am one in actual fact. I believe we are living in the cyberpunk dystopia and it’s way less metal than everyone thought it would be.
We imagined ourselves as samurai sword VR pirate pioneers, but it turns out we’re pointless argument vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that serve us ads. Corporations are organisms, not city-states; they signal to each other via markets; they build interfaces into human social protocols through brand identities; they occupy slots in our Dunbar rings.
The internet is an ocean that we invent as we explore it. The deeper we dive, the more we become cryptozoologists, or crypto-ichthyologists, or even crypto-theologists. In the murky darkness of virtual places, there could be dragons, shoggoths, leviathans; invisible creatures that will prey on us, devour us, or colonize us. Certainly, I have heard voices on the web who say we will discover or build a god when we reach the cyber-ocean floor. That god will save us by authoring an age of post-scarcity economics. It will commodify us, allowing us to be fungible with capital. Amen.
I apologize if this seems fragmented. My brain has been addled by the casino reward schedule of social media. It is both a cliche and a fact that I cannot focus on anything for more than three minutes. That’s half true, I read pdfs of outlandish philosophers, but I do it while frantically checking for notifications. My hobbies include speculating on cryptocurrency and shitposting, which is where you put in minimal effort in creating your online presence so that you aren’t culpable when it’s bland.
By now I think almost everyone has heard of so-called “dayjob” contracts. Most people have probably received one, and many have even fulfilled them. I have personally executed over a thousand. The euphemism “dayjob” refers to the relatively low payout of these types of contracts, as in “don’t quit your day job.” I never intended this to be my career, and the truth is I still think of myself as unemployed. I don’t want to talk numbers but let’s just say if I had to pay rent this wouldn’t work.
Still, there is something addictive about the feedback loop of getting a contract, fulfilling it, and watching my wallet get an anonymous transfer. The immediacy and the tangibility of it are very satisfying. It’s like making money: the video game. A direct feedback loop with a variable payout is all it takes to turn a moment of reward into a habit. You get a little receipt after each fulfillment.
Most of the actual jobs are simple. In one, I was told to go to a certain address and take a photograph of a building at a particular time. In another, I was supposed to go to a vendor in an open air market, find a tourist of middle eastern descent wearing a green military jacket, and tell him the numbers: 75, 53, 168.7, 55, 13, 804. I was unable to find him.
In a third, I was asked to watch a brief video on YouTube and then email a description of its contents to an incomprehensible address, something like ak38eja2pf8hap@fpwyg.af. Just over ten percent of my contracts have been to summarize news articles or passages out of books. Apparently the shadowy digital cabal of crypto microjobs wants us to do our damn homework. I have even completed jobs that felt like problems on standardized tests, in which I had to read a short body of text and then answer questions about it.
Ever since the first one I have wondered how they work and where they come from. Each time I complete one it feels like another clue, like watching a tv serial; each episode they give you two minutes of exposition on the protagonist’s shadowy past. Though if I am honest, I know only slightly more than when I started, and I frequently deny this when I talk to myself in my own head. “This next job will teach me something,” I whisper to myself over and over. When the contract issuer—which I assume is routing through some kind of bot—tells me of a job, I sometimes talk back. I used to confess things, or make up lies, or tell stories. Now I just say “why?”
Tweet this news story, @all of these accounts.
“Why?”
Go to this address, face these coordinates, take a photo at six pm.
“Why?”
“Count the number of people who cross this intersection on foot in three hours”
“Why?”
“Put on a bright red T-shirt and go to this location. To anyone who greets you, say these words”
“Why?”
“Of the faces in this picture, how many are afraid?”
“4”
“What are they afraid of?”*
“Why?”
(*it didn’t pay me for this one. That will teach me, I guess.)
Posters on the the dayjob reddit talk about being asked to make a series of binary choices, or to give their best guess about the probabilities of hypothetical future events. I haven’t had too many like that, and I wonder if the system thinks I am bad at predicting the future. Based on my informal online research, the most common contracts appear to be for verification of other jobs; if one man is asked to visit a certain location at a certain time, there will be two more to visit the same location and upload a photo that shows him to be there. Each of those will in turn be followed by another contractor whose job is to verify the identity of the man in the photo, and perhaps even another to verify the verification.
The jobs come to their executors through a variety of channels; text message, social media, email, and anonymous robot dialers. They are always executed on the blockchain and they pay out in cryptocurrency. I personally use an aggregator app that is able to login to all of my accounts and scrape them for contracts. You cannot ask for a dayjob. They can only come to you, like an unbidden thought or memory, (like all thoughts and memories?) like the call of the void. The more you complete, the more frequently they will come.
Their origin is a mystery, but speculations and conspiracy theories abound. The usual suspects are all represented: dayjobs are being used to coordinate black or grey market operations by organized crime syndicates. Dayjobs are part of a psyop or a social experiment being conducted by the CIA. They’re part of a Russian plot to affect some sinister geopolitical purpose. They’re being used by Islamic terrorists to undermine American institutions, and the seeming banality of many of the contracts is just a smokescreen to disguise their true intent.
You should not believe anything you read on 4chan of course, but the below makes for compelling speculation.
If this is true, then certainly the authors of these contracts have taken some pains to obscure their identities. I’m not a cryptocurrency wonk, but I was under the impression there were easier ways. (...)
The internet is an ocean but for some reason we call it a cloud, as if it were above us, ethereal, transcendent. It’s a warehouse full of servers, many such warehouses. And yet the cloud is not the servers that run it, any more than a mind is a brain. Through the miracle of virtualization, a new parallel universe arises with its own ontology and its own phenomenology. A brain computes a mind and a server computes a cloud, you see? They are analogs, but one is digital.
A program without a visible interface is called a process, and such a program is said to be “headless”. The engineers who invented modern computing paradigms referred to processes as daemons. To me, it’s a macabre image: invisible demons, swarming through the cloud, bodies without heads: they manipulate us for inscrutable alien purposes.
The internet is an ocean and who knows what swims beneath its surface? Virtual predators, incorporeal, dangling (sex|porn|friendship|fame|money) in front of us maybe, like an angler fish using bioluminescence to lure prey into its jaws. And why not? The information-dense ecosystem of our internet could be a kind of primordial soup. The heat and light from our activities there could be a catalyst for virtual abiogenesis.
by Zero HP Lovecraft | Read more:
[ed. Yikes. All I can say is... nice to find sites (and writing) like this still on the internet. Reminds me of the old days (in a good way). See also: God-Shaped Hole.]
