Social classes.

While I am waiting for my dose of Pfizer (which will give me the power of 5G and I can write on the blog just thinking, it seems), I am thinking of the news of the day, the one for which Twitter is thinking of being able to reward a user for what he writes, with a tip, a little as happens on Steem, ( https://steemit.com/ ). In a nutshell, it offers the possibility to monetize your social activity.

This is not at all strange, and the word "monetization" will gradually become more and more important. For example, one thing that few people know is that the most active social network (not the one with the most subscribers: the most active) is not Facebook, but Youtube, followed by TikTok.

And also on Youtube the key word is always the same: “monetization”.

One might wonder why this model, together with the various ko.fi, patreon & co, is depopulating, always in order to allow people to "monetize" what they do online, and the answer is that these phenomena seem here to stay.

We can take a cue from the last industrialization, and note how the industrial revolution created a new social class, called the "working class" or "proletariat". This new social class obviously had new problems, which required new solutions, Marxism, etc etc etc.

Well. Now a new revolution is taking place, the digital one, and we have to ask ourselves what new social class is being born. And a very clear one is emerging: the useless ones.

These are those who are useless to production, because they do not work in the production of goods, nor in the world of services, in the sense that defining "service" something like a tweet is quite extravagant and misleading.

But the trend is now clear: as youth unemployment grows, the possibility for them to "monetize" some online content increases. People who draw on commission and monetize, people who post and monetize, people who write on social media and monetize and we are now at the extremes of people like this:

Who makes money because she dresses sexy, she's beautiful, and she fidgets on a bed. Or this one, which does the same but stays in a bikini in a rubber pool for twelve straight hours:

This part is interesting because it is the modern equivalent of the proletarian: the one who on the internet cannot exchange anything other than the way his body looks.

We are beginning to see the way in which the new social class of useless will be able to maintain itself: entertainment.

If the working class was selling fatigue and risk, today the new lower class of society lives by selling some telematic entertainment. This means that, if the worker lived from the fatigue he did in the factory (and from the consumption of his own body in questionable sanitary conditions), the new peons live on entertainment, always based on their own body.

We might notice how persistent the "body" issue is, even if in the entertainment field we always talk about attractive bodies and therefore we should do breakdowns on body type, but if we go to Youtube or Twitch we discover that there are other activities too ' useless today that are paid, such as recording sessions of some video game, and if we want porn also falls into the same category, in the sense that having sex, like playing some video game, are not activities that we can consider useful

The arrival of a social class of useless will correspond to the creation and maintenance of thousands of useless jobs, which will allow these people to be paid.

Of course, the creation of an entire social class of useless, more educated social class than history has ever seen, has the potential to create a spectrum of "new specialties" of the "uselessness that entertains" , and we are only at the beginning. It is very difficult to foresee all the possible combinations of uselessness that entertains: so far we are used to only porn and Youtube monetized videos, but the real problem is to imagine an economy in which the lowest class is no longer the working class, but an even lower class of people, because there is less need for them, the demand is extremely elastic (you can decide whether or not to enjoy a given video on Youtube), and the offer is gigantic.

The question to ask is: what happens to everyone else, then?

The experience of the past "revolutions" always shows us an elevator effect. Paradoxically, when millions of peasants urbanized around London to become workers, the social classes that had previously struggled to make ends meet "were promoted". The guy who previously knew how to write and wrote letters, despite being the fund of the company before, now became the worker who knew how to write, different from all those who could not. All the various technicians also rose in rank, since the person capable of even the simplest maintenance of a steam boiler was, as a worker himself, a more paid worker than the beast-workers who produced with the machine. stop.

The point is that, if the person who stays 12 hours in a tub in a bikini can earn (and judging by the follow-up and the donations in the chat succeeds) enough to make ends meet, in proportion to what a baker, or even yours, has to ask. cleaning woman?

Because basically the question has a different elasticity: in the end you need (if you have one) a cleaning lady, as well as bread, much more than you need to verify that an organism inside a swimming pool he is really a mammal and can suckle his offspring.

It is true that there are very well paid influencers, but this is a stupid way of seeing the influencer: Ferragni does not earn for the money that google / facebook give her to appear and attract people. Ferragni is mainly an entrepreneur in the field of advertising (complete with a listed company) who appears on social media, and who uses social media as a media. Although Ferragni needs social media, she is not a person who “can't give anything to social media except her body”. We are talking, that is, about the difference between Michelangelo and a house painter: both can be described with “they paint walls”, but they are two different things.

Social's new Lumpenproletariat doesn't get as much as Ferragni does: it gets just what it takes to make ends meet, and often makes it only because it lives in the family home.

As the digital economy unfolds, this new class of "content producers" will see their income drop to the bottom of the barrel, and all other jobs will float up in income. Soon the cleaning lady will be defined as middle class, compared to the working class that lives on webcams. Also because he will have access to bank credit, which the Vlogger will not see happening.

Of course, layering is always complex. There will always be the difference between the Contrapoints of the situation that makes a million views per post and the vlogger that makes a hundred thousand views and the one that makes thirty thousand. That's for sure. In the first case, he earns enough to be called "bourgeois", while the last two are at the worker level and the last will have to have another job, like bringing pizzas, to make ends meet.

But the point I'm making is this:

• the digital revolution has created a new social class, the useless ones.
• for the useless, a suitable type of work arrives automatically, useless work.
• useless work will be paid in terms of audience

This means, for example, that Berbero could open a youtube channel and earn more than the university pays for it, for example, and there is more than one highly educated person who earns well today by talking about topics. specific, like ancient Rome or other things that attract followers.

On the other hand, the monetization of contents will inevitably lead to a mechanism for evaluating the same: even in this, the company still has to adapt to some priorities. Already in the world of cinema it is difficult to understand that entertainment can be worth much more than the "interesting" theme, and therefore the directors who complain about the fact that people watch cinepanettone are in the same conditions as those who say that Berbero is more interesting than a girl who stays eighteen hours in a tub of water riding an inflatable zucchini.

And by this I mean that we should forget the word "marketing", to refer to a higher paid content because it is "lower", and instead use the word "monetization" to describe this phenomenon: in this sense, cinepanettone does not it's more commercial (they use the same channel, after all) but more monetized.

So we have to start thinking about the same contents differently: in the sense that, regardless of the business model of a social network, we have to start thinking in terms of "monetization". And if we think that the abstract concept of “monetization” as Youtube defines it also explains television and cinema phenomena, as well as music, we should have done it a long time ago.

Remember this term: "monetization".

Monetization is the new wage. Soon the question will not be “what work do you do”, but “what do you monetize, and how”, and from this point of view the work will also take on a very different aspect. And when we talk about universal income we will then have to ask ourselves what we are monetizing, whether the vote or social peace, and so on.

Monetization is essentially the economic paradigm of the new emerging social class, which like all emerging social classes is the game-changer of history.

Because saying that Valentina Nappi is monetizing her sexual relations has a very different meaning from saying that she is a porn actress, because the porn actress is paid for something she does and is paid by those who use what they do, while those who monetize express themselves. in terms of channel, followers, engagement and other concepts that have nothing to do with the previous concept.