The Story of PIDG
How a $5 gig, an algorithm, and a crypto rabbit hole turned into a board game about a rigged economy.
“Money isn’t just a game. It’s a meme backed by nothing but attention.”
The Hustle
One time I bought a book about how to make money online.
The book told me to set up a Fiverr gig.
So I did.
And friends,
I sold a lot of $5 gigs.
I made videos about everything.
Dropshipping.
Land flipping.
Blockchain.
You name it.
Fiverr isn’t a very good hustle.
But it did give me my first glimpse of the game.
The Algorithm
And this was a game I wanted to play.
But how?
Business Ownership!
I needed to stop getting hired, and start doing the hiring.
Be the boss.
So I went to YouTube for advice.
A book from Amazon about making money.
A YouTube search about business ownership.
The algorithm now had my number.
It tagged me as hungry and fed me videos about everything:
dropshipping. land flipping. blockchain.
You name it.
Sometimes I even saw my own face coming back at me.
And that’s when I realized—
I was already playing.
The Rabbit Hole
But I was doing it wrong.
I needed to learn the rules.
Which is how I ended up day trading crypto.
Now, that might seem like a leap. And while I know day trading is risky, and I didn’t actually think I could win, I was trying to learn the rules to the game.
And by this time, I’d gone so far down the rabbit hole,
I needed to know
how someone could lose half a million dollars on a live stream, shrug it off, and go to dinner.
So I followed a few traders on Twitter.
Joined Discord.
Signed up for Telegram.
I watched people win and lose fortunes in minutes.
These traders had managed to completely detach money from anything real. It was pure abstraction and hype.
So of course I got on that hype train.
And I rode it all the way to the end of the line.
The Joke
And once you see it,
you can’t unsee it.
Money isn’t just a game. It’s a meme.
Not a meme backed by gold, or land, or labor like I thought.
Just a bare symbol,
backed by nothing but attention.
At first I thought it was funny.
If someone wants to burn their gig money on a meme coin, who am I to stop them?
But then I watched
the President of the United States drop a coin.
And then his wife.
And I saw Doge became the Department of Government Efficiency.
And then the Governor of California launched a “Trump Corruption Coin”— a hilarious joke on a joke —
that you can actually buy. With dollars.
It appears that the joke is running the system.
The Game
And I don’t think that’s a good idea.
So I built PIDG.
Because if money is just a meme,
and the system is a game,
then maybe the first step is learning to see it that way.
Or at least learning
that other people see it that way.
If enough of us see how value has been corrupted, maybe we can rebuild a shared sense of meaning.
PIDG is how I learned to see it.
Now it’s your turn.