How the STEEM Blockchain Will Free Labor

There is a common analysis in economics about freeing labor. Depending on the background and agenda of the economist speaking, this analysis can be referred to as good or bad. Economists who think it's bad, refer to it as "jobs being lost."

But the ones who think it's good or indifferent, often refer to it as freed labor.

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Freeing Labor Is Good But Disruptive

Of course, I take the position that freed labor is a good thing. When a new invention, innovation, or improved process comes along, often it also makes certain professions outmoded, which is typically disruptive. There are many people in the workforce who refuse to adapt. Some people are just too set in their ways. Others are incapable of learning a new profession.

Even people who can adapt will likely find the transition uncomfortable. And some professions seem immune to these kinds of labor shifts, so if it ever takes place, the workforce is caught off guard.

The people who manage to adapt will find better opportunities. Because the process of freeing labor is disruptive, it's easy to use it for political polarization.

Whether you view the freeing labor as good, bad, or neutral, it is a fact of thriving economies to depend on innovation and the result of freeing labor.

Most of the time, when labor is freed, it doesn't happen all at once. Instead, the demand starts to drop over long periods.

STEEM's Eventual Impact

STEEM can someday impact labor directly and indirectly. If someone can replace their income by providing content, why not do it full time, if they have the skills? If whole accounting departments are no longer needed to support these workforces, that will have an indirect labor freeing impact.

YouTube Hypothetical

Imagine that YouTube starts cracking down on certain categories. Instead of blocking videos, they just restrict monetization. YouTube would continue to run ads, but they wouldn't give anything to the content producers. Content producers would have to either shift away from those video categories to produce content that could be monetized, or look elsewhere for funding, like Patreon.

In this scenario, now there's another option. They can allow YouTube to keep their monetization completely disabled and rely solely on STEEM to provide incentive.

Ultimately, this causes less work for YouTube. They need slightly less labor to support their platform. Not that they ever used much labor for this in the first place. But what little they did allocate, now they can allocate less and less.

The first wave of STEEM content providers who were brave enough to try this type of monetization prove to the industry that it's workable.

As more content providers move away from YouTube's red tape, eventually YouTube shuts down monetization, opting to use unpaid ads alone.

So except for the very large YouTube channels that have special deals, YouTube would no longer need to maintain an entire department, all thanks indirectly to blockchain technology.

Burger Flipper Hypothetical

STEEM will not eliminate burger flippers. Not all burger flippers are frustrated writers with no outlet. But STEEM might cause a slight shortage, which could in turn slightly raise wages for the rest of the burger flippers.

How does this work? Well, in the burger flipping workforce, like in any low skill workforce, there will be a certain subset of good writers with poor credentials.

If your writing is good, most nobody really cares about your credentials on steemit.com.

And even if they cannot support themselves by publishing on STEEM, they might eventually need fewer hours from burger joints.

The Principle

Otherwise talented individuals in unskilled industry or content providers on a bad platform can leverage a new platform to exit those dead ends. In doing so, these dead ends will experience disruption. But it will take time to ramp up.