I’ve been on deep rest for the past couple of months, meaning I’m not in the states, I’m not paying much attention to email, I deleted four-fifths of my phone book, I’m doing maybe two hours of work a week to keep the biz in maintenance mode, etc etc etc. I know about blockchain stuff, natch, but very little about NFTs, and I have not bothered to read about it, because it will probably just make me mad and sad, due to bad. Instead I have spent a lot of time looking at plants, cooking meals, reading books in dive bars near the equator, and way less time writing about design than pretty much any of you want me to. I think this thread is over double the amount of email that I’ve received in 2022.
I know this will shock you, but I have not read much about the tech industry lately. And that is how I found myself when I sat down next to a pair of humans in a third-wave coffee shop in Lisbon a couple of weeks ago, who talked about NFTs in perfect southern California accents at a Mach 4 clip for two straight hours. This was supposed to be a productive time for me. Instead, I wrote nothing, edited nothing, journaled about nothing, and all of my thoughts left the building, replaced only with their many very bad ideas about NFTs, until I stumbled home and journaled about what has come of us all as the sun set.
One of their bad ideas was that they were going to use NFTs to buy real estate. I thought back to the time when I bought my own house in Chicago, and then refinanced the house, and then someone had to quitclaim the house due to reasons. And then I got to thinking about all of the interlocking, highly problematic structures of power that underlie the deed & title industries, to say nothing of the manufactured product that regulated mortgages have become over the past hundred-odd years. It seems to me like these people want to make lots of money to solve their problem, which I guess is one potential solution. You can do an awful lot of things with enough money. But I don’t think the title industry will do much with blockchain in our lifetimes. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m often wrong.
Another bad idea of theirs, which ran through maybe three-fourths of their conversation, was how they were going to use NFTs to finally be paid appropriately as artists. Which is noble, I guess, because people need to make a living, and it’s hard to make a living as an artist. I have a lot of compassion for them on this. They are probably deeply afraid, unactualized, wondering if the world has a place for their voice, and time is running out for them. But it also feels like a bit of an art-world end-run, and not terribly punk, to do the NFT thing to it, so I don’t think I feel okay about that. If it helps some artists get paid, sure, great, but it’s going to be just like every other platform where artists get paid, where there will be a few outsize benefactors at the beginning, a panicked gold rush in the middle, and a broad-scale reduction of quality in the end. I had an early-days project on Kickstarter and watched this dynamic play out in real time. Kickstarte had comparatively little environmental impact – but it existed in the same space of hope, of untapped possibility, of real desire.
It seems to me that NFTs are a clean manifestation of the intellectual and spiritual impoverishment that has afflicted the human experiment during societal collapse. The only rebuttal I’ve heard to this is “yeah but I can make money from it.” Which, okay. I try to make money honestly, which is impossible and conceptually bankrupt, but at least I don’t have to strip-mine quite as much of the planet to do it. Heck, I’m guessing even my pond hops are killing the planet less. I don’t feel good about those, either.
I invest everything in boring index funds at Vanguard.
Take care,