Plankton – An Economy Made by Giving Things Away
The starting point was an old project.
A tiny fish, originally living on GUIMP at guimp.com/fish.
The fish is only 18 × 18 pixels, but the idea attached to it had become considerably larger.
The question was whether Plankton still had legs.
Or fins, at least.
The central mechanism was simple.
One fish generates plankton.
But the plankton does not belong to that fish.
It belongs to everyone.
Interaction therefore produces something of value, but the value is distributed into a shared environment rather than accumulated by the individual who created it.
That makes Plankton more than a little digital creature.
It begins to look like an economy.
Not necessarily an economy with pounds, dollars or conventional money.
Perhaps the plankton itself is the currency.
Perhaps it is a resource.
Perhaps it is simply a visible measure of collective activity.
That distinction remains unresolved.
There were other unresolved questions too.
Who owns the plankton?
Does anybody?
Does it exist globally, locally, or around particular creatures?
Does geography matter?
What gives a unit of plankton value?
Can it be spent?
Can it disappear?
Is this actually an economy, or is it a game that behaves like one?
The visual world could expand through scale.
A fish sits inside a larger marine environment, which might itself sit inside another level of the system. The idea suggested something like Powers of Ten: creatures, environments and systems nested inside one another.
That raised another useful distinction.
Some things in Plankton are creatures.
Others are environments.
The relationship between them may be more important than either category on its own.
The interesting part was not really the fish.
It was the proposition underneath it:
What happens if individual action creates collective value?
That question unexpectedly connected Plankton to CHOB.
CHOB was also being conceived as a small economic unit.
A piece of bounded work.
Something that could be investigated, proposed, authorised, completed and paid for without first creating a conventional job.
For a while this suggested a possible fixed unit of payment: £100.
“CHunks jOBS.”
But fixing the price too early risked turning CHOB into another gig-work mechanism.
The more interesting experiment was not the £100.
It was whether a conversation could move from facts to insight and from insight to a recommendation for useful paid work.
Plankton approached value from the opposite direction.
Instead of asking how an individual captures the value they create, it asks what happens when the value they create is deliberately released into a common pool.
Neither idea was resolved.
But putting them next to one another exposed something important.
CHOB is concerned with how useful work might come into existence.
Plankton is concerned with how value might come into existence and circulate.
Both are experiments in economies that do not begin with the familiar structure.
That may be why the little fish still has fins.