On games, dabloons, and the creator economy
Exploring the TikTok trend that gave birth to an imaginary economy.
I'm sorry for those familiar with The Game. You’ve just lost. For the rest of you, you’re now playing alongside all of us who are aware of The Game. And thanks to this quick demonstration of ironic processing, you’ve just lost, too.
The rules are simple:
1) Everybody who knows about The Game is playing The Game
2) Whenever one thinks about The Game, one loses
For ages, the words we use have allowed us to play, escape, augment, and even be critical of the reality we live in; to process, question, and evoke imaginary situations. British philosopher and linguist, John Langshaw Austin, wrote about the power of language to not only assert things but to do things, too. In his book How to Do Things with Words, he introduces performative utterances and characterizes these as being neither true nor false, and of a power to perform a certain kind of action, when said under the appropriate circumstances. Statements such as “I take this man as my lawfully wedded husband”, “I promise”, or even “I apologize”, are understood as statements that, through performance, can have a direct effect on the reality we live in. A type of situation where words speak louder than actions.
For almost forty years, the internet has served as a medium for us to connect, communicate, create, own, and now more evidently, perform. With the evolution of our online footprint going from usernames to full names to usernames, from Instas to “finstas”, to perhaps (eventually) a blockchain address – the way we interact on social media platforms constantly changes to reflect our collective understanding of the internet, the power of its communities, and its limitations. Now, we’re seeing social media trend away from being a tool to interact with your first and second-degree connections and move towards something that is less tied to your carefully-curated-online-persona and more to discovering new content. “Going viral” has become easier, and because of this, more and more people become famous every minute, leading to a new, counter-intuitive form of anonymity which, at the risk of sounding cliché, was foreseen by a wave of American pop artists. This anonymity sparks creativity as the limits of being yourself become irrelevant and role-playing starts to play an important part in the language of online interactions. In parallel to Instagram influencers inviting us into intimate moments inside their perfect, film-set-like life, or BeReal’s claim for the crown of Truth (making mainstream commercial authenticity credible), we have also seen a rise in increasingly perfect TikToks – viral moments that oftentimes leave the viewer wondering if the creator did in fact experience what they claim or if they’ve simply understood the levers behind making a viral form of content, i.e., become really good at posting. At an earlier age of social media, pointing your finger at the plastics felt like a righteous fight for Truth. Now, doing so reminds me of the urban legend of the first screening of L’Arrivée d’un train en la gare de La Ciotat, where a silent, black-and-white, moving image of a locomotive (allegedly) sent an audience of Parisian spectators running towards the back of the theatre, thinking it was going to drive right into them. The question was not whether the train was real or not. Neither true nor false. It was entertainment. It was performance.
Five days ago, I stumbled onto a Twitter thread about a new online currency form named after the Spanish Doblón: TikTok’s dabloon. In a nutshell, the dabloon economy is a user-generated, role-playing, decentralized game where people buy and sell items using an imaginary currency. The trend can be traced back to an image of a cat’s paw with a caption saying “four dabloons”. Naturally, this example of abstract humour became a meme, in which people added up and collected cat’s paws, a.k.a dabloons, and in some cases reproached questionable online behaviour with phrases such as “this will cost you four dabloons”. In other words, user @catz.jpeg started an entire internet economy.
Now, your average TikTok user’s feed is occasionally, interrupted with a dabloon video – usually a poorly animated black cat greeting you – the traveller – and either giving you dabloons for free, stealing them, or exchanging dabloons for goods and services. Users usually keep track of their dabloon cash-flows inside their Notes app, where they record every transaction, gain, or theft. Soon after the craze exploded on TikTok, you were able to find/ lose dabloons on Twitter and Instagram too – resulting in a type of cross-platform MMORPG with thousands of real-life actors invested in the game. Like a giant, online Dungeons and Dragons game but with thousands of Dungeon Masters that are able to wield the game at their command. Or as one Twitter user put it, “a full-scale research experiment on new economic models”. Because there are no rules or enforced regulations in this economy, users rely on an honour system to track their bank account and assets correctly. Every user can add more dabloons into the market and has complete freedom to spawn any conceivable item by simply posting a new video, or, in other words, generating new content. Of course, this makes the ecosystem ever more complex; it took less than a couple of days for people to start complaining about inflation. In an economy where you can mint currency by simply thinking about it, the only way to fight inflation is to (of course) create institutions such as the dabloon IRS and the dabloon FBI, both of which according to my sources, attempted to cap the maximum dabloons distributed per video at 100 dabloons. TikTok users have been quoted saying this is the most fun they’ve ever had on the platform, or that “the reason [they] love this is [they] secretly miss being five and playing with [their] friends”. Of course, there is no external website or admin that tracks activity or the game’s lore, and there’s nobody that can prevent you from saying you’re holding a rare, infinite dabloon wallet, but doing so would be the equivalent of breaking the rules in a childhood game of hide-and-seek; spoiling both the game and your own fun.
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It’s impossible to talk about the specific effects that these games will have on the development of our tech ecosystem, or what the start-ups involved in this spaces will look like in five years, but we can take it as another piece of evidence that the creator economy, alongside with the way content is consumed, will continue transforming itself.
Like with The Game (sorry), performative statements, or collective world-building, keeping up is sometimes as simple as playing along.
Feel free to take the 24 dabloons I found while writing this post.
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My name is Arturo. I’m an Analyst at OneRagtime: a Parisian VC fund investing in early-stage tech startups across the globe.
If you’re a founder and you’re building in the creator economy (or elsewhere), shoot me an email at:
arturo@oneragtime.com
:-)
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