FairShare is a new project from Philip Rosedale with a snarky tagline that pretty much encapsulates what he has in mind: Eat the Rich, but slowly.
“I want to give people something like the Linden Dollar but just as an iPhone app that they basically can use to buy and sell anything from each other,” as he put it to me in a call last week.
During the COVID lockdown, Rosedale created complex economic simulations which showed him a frightening thing. As it happens, I wrote about one exactly two years ago:
This new simulation basically models the injection of universal basic income — a solution to the rich/poor divide recently popularized by Presidential candidate Andrew Yang. But as Philip writes, while UBI helps in the short term, his new simulation suggests that the wealth gap quickly starts growing, even with UBI.
"Even with people in a small community trying to look after each other," as Philip puts it to me now, "you will basically end up with a kind of a natural, almost a thermodynamic problem, where some randomly chosen people will basically just end up getting more and more money.”
He sees that in the state of the real world economy: “If you recognize that the economic system we have is so broken, the only safe assumption is we're going to have a violent revolution, as has been had many times throughout history." He even views current political movements through this lens:
"The whole thing with Biden forgiving student loans, that's called 'Jubilee'. It's one of the things that happens on the way to revolution every time. Because one of the things you can do is you can start forgiving debts once the people that are getting screwed get mad enough."
Some metaverse platforms might help with inequality, he believes, but then again, others will not: “Roblox is a lottery you're not going to win,” as he puts it, echoing concerns we discussed here. “You can't go into Roblox and say, I'm gonna make my living in here. Maybe you can go into Second Life and say that.”
FairShare aims to solve this seemingly intractable problem by offering people who sign up a universal basic income modeled after one that’s helped keep Second Life’s economy thriving for twenty years:
