Week 50: What is an NFT?
I'm only saying this once: a waste of time
I can’t say, “I can’t believe it’s come to this,” because I knew it was going to. I read the tea leaves, saw the birds circling, felt the darkness closing in, etc. It was only a matter of time before it happened: the Crypto Bros Bought a Rare Book, officially making this NFT nonsense directly relevant to the content of this newsletter. Begrudgingly, I now stake my claim in this conversation.
There are a few places to begin this story. We could start by looking at a book that was purchased for 100 times (one hundred times) its expected price at auction. We could start by watching my favorite video of Keanu Reeves. We could even start by talking about Fran Lebowitz. We’ll get to it all.
But the easiest way to begin is with a definition: what is an NFT?
NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. Anil Dash’s original idea of an NFT in 2014 was to be able to indicate the original (i.e. earliest) instance of a [thing] on the internet by creating a token (i.e. a little code) that says, “This [thing] was [made/created] by [this person].” It’s a little digital plaque, ideally used to allow digital artists to protect the versions of their art they make available online by leaving a trail of crumbs back to the original (earliest) instance. That way, if someone nabs their work and reposts it elsewhere, the artist can submit a request to whatever site the work is sitting on and say, “My friends, I have brought the receipts. Please, take it down.”
One problem with the Internet, however, is ideals crunch easily under opportunistic feet. Instead of respecting the bronze plaques stamped on the art, The Worst Dudes on the Internet stole rolls of stickers that say “Mine!” and started slapping them onto every last thing they could find, claiming that each one is totally, one hundred percent one-of-a-kind and worth your life savings.
Flash forward, and now, an NFT is essentially a deed to a house sold to you by someone who neither owns the house nor has been licensed to sell the house as a realtor. People who hawk NFTs are the Internet equivalent of some dude on the street holding out a sheet of paper with a house drawn in crayon and claiming that you’ll own Buckingham Palace (“Here, the paper says so!”) as long as you pay him in the ashes of the Amazon rainforest, aka cryptocurrency. But you won’t. You will simply own the piece of paper and have killed a lot of frogs.
Put another way, this time using the Mona Lisa:
Anyway you slice it, purchasing an NFT is often theft and possibly arson.
NFTs attempt to establish ownership and scarcity in a fundamentally infinite space: the digital world.1 They are an affront to the original ideals of the Internet, which was created with the notion that information desires to be free.
They are also an affront to emerging collecting attitudes. Much of what I’ve written in this newsletter has pointed towards the idea that not everything has to be owned or possessed, but that collection must emphasize community and reparation over individual ego and self-aggrandizement.
I have heard people (Twitter bots?) claim that NFTs still support artists as they intended. I suppose the extended logic here is that NFTs allow artists to sell digital versions of their art but…artists already do that without the Crypto Bros. You can access PDFs and wallpapers and JPGs and whatever else from artists on their Patreons or Ko-Fis or other online artist-to-fan interfaces by paying a fee to them directly using a credit card (which exists without the blockchain, thanks!) and then receiving a downloadable copy, the same way you might purchase sheet music or any other copyrighted materials online. Ta-da! Supporting artists without mowing down endangered habitat. It’s not that profound.
So I concede, if NFTs were still artist-driven, and professional artists wanted to in some way develop tokens of a digital instantiation of their art, maybe I would feel slightly differently about this.
But the function of NFTs has been usurped by people who are not artists, who right-click-save JPGs of other people’s art, reupload them and stamp them with a token, sell that token on the crypto market, then exasperatingly and myopically claim that any future right-click-saves of the same JPG are fraudulent. That is not community. That is exploitation.
We’ve seen this grift before: e-books. The reason libraries loan a limited number of e-books at a given time is not because there are a limited number of digital instantiations of books floating out there on the ~cloud~. Rather, publishers rent to libraries a limited number of access links to a digital version of a book.
This is artificial scarcity used to martial profit for publishers. Even if you purchase an e-book from, say, Amazon, you are purchasing access to a digital instantiation of a book that Amazon is renting access to from a publisher. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, Amazon has not purchased the digital licensing copyright to create original e-books to sell to you. The e-book on your Kindle is downloadable as the product of two tenuous leases, one contract expiration away from disappearing off your device.
NFTs don’t solve any problem nor do they create anything new and worthwhile. Their exploitation by opportunistic tech-heads simply introduces another means to infringe on intellectual property and profit off of theft.
Take Keanu Reeves’s word for it:
That “heh-heh-HEe-he-he-he” of a laugh restores years to my life every time I hear it.
Notably, at the very end of the video, after Keanu pokes fun at how these digital entities are easily reproducible, you hear Mr. Reporter protest, “But they’re not the same!” My guy is deeply confused.
To explain, I’ll draw from another resource, graciously provided to me by Jeremy, who you met last issue as my National Treasure: Into The TreasureVerse co-withstander. Jeremy is a computer engineer and avowed crypto-hater who sacrificed precious brainspace to create this handy PowerPoint presentation for our friends: “IT’S A F***ING SCAM: Why Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and the Metaverse are Hot Trash.”
In the PowerPoint, Jeremy asks, “Where is this Powerpoint?”:
It is on my computer
It is also backed up to OneDrive, and that server is god knows where
It will soon be in Google Drive for all you lovely people (both our buddies and now you, my readers)
Jeremy then asks, “Is the ‘original’ on my computer more valuable?”
The primary grift of digital scarcity blurs the fine distinctions between original and copy, between creator and owner and deed-holder, skewing the meaning of ownership for those who buy into the concept of (and literally purchase) NFTs. All this brings me back to the rare book example that justifies this exhausting wind up.
Two weeks ago, a bunch of Crypto Bros purchased a pitchbook for a film adaptation of Dune. Their plan was to then:
Make the book public (to the extent permitted by law)
Produce an original animated limited series inspired by the book and sell it to a streaming service
Support derivative projects from the community2
Until two weeks ago, anyone who had ever purchased a book knew that when you purchase a book, you own that one copy of the book. I, for example, own a lot of copies of books. I can burn them, cover them in mud, run over them with my car. I can dog-ear their corners, scribble in their margins, gently love their dustjackets. I can do all this because I own a physical instantiation of these books. I cannot, however, make these books public (by scanning all the pages or retyping them and putting them online for free) or turn these books into original animated limited series and sell them to a streaming service. I also cannot sell those scans or retypes for profit, nor can I write new stories using those original characters and sell those for profit. I cannot do any of those things because I do not own the intellectual rights to the contents of these books.
I feel a little dizzy even explaining this. These people thought that owning a copy of a text meant they could turn that text into whatever they wanted for profit.3 This fundamental misunderstanding of copyright is breathtaking, and it generated a lot of tweets from rare book world colleagues that made me giggle. I must emphasize, however, that this gobsmacking plan metastasized from the scam of NFTs—the peddling of artificial scarcity to inflate the value of an entity, then deliberately blurring the line between owning a work and purchasing a receipt that tells you that you own the work.
Transfer that thinking to rare books, where, admittedly, some items are priced high because they are demonstrably scarce, and suddenly a group of click-happy crypto kids think that if they pay gads of money for a single copy of a pitchbook, they can now make a movie.
This mistake is instructive. As I've written previously, the value of a rare book is a function of cultural & historical value plus scarcity plus condition plus description plus previous ownership. Some of those features seemingly overlap with NFTs (scarce? early? owned by someone cool?). Argue what you will about the cultural and historical value of the Bored Ape meme (I’m not linking it, I refuse), but again, NFTs are not scarce. At best, they establish a little link that shouts “I owned this first! Me!!!!,” a cry drowned out by the roar of the Internet and that is ultimately untrue, given that these digital plaques are typically sold without the artist’s permission.
To the point of previous ownership: a lot of celebrities are buying NFTs, and if you would like to pay upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars so that your name is listed directly after Justin Bieber’s in a tiny, all-but-invisible corner of code that amounts to a guest book of bad decisions, that’s your business. Keep in mind, however, that every single one of these purchases is mediated through a form of currency backed by increasingly complex math problems that consume quantities of energy nearly beyond comprehension. These ego-driven exchanges are costing us our environment. So it’s also my business, and my business asks you to please shutter yours.
I will also note, as delicately as I can, because I don’t know who is reading this and I do know that anyone could be reading this, that it is embarrassing to watch heritage institutions adopt NFTs as a new frontier without acknowledging how this enterprise undercuts our work. It’s hard to inspire confidence in the legitimacy of provenance in an area notorious for stealing artists’ work. That is a tough look for a field that needs to undertake serious rehabilitative labor to return all of the objects and art we have already stolen.
Ultimately, what gets my goat about this is the utter lack of imagination. These attempts to make everything available—and thus confined—to profit deadens us. Can we not fathom a world beyond possession?
Some things simply are! They need not be divvied up and crunched into numbers. Art tends to simply be more than a lot of things. Yet, when you pay for art—which, again, I think is a good thing!—you’re compensating an artist for their materials, labor, time, attention, vision, and exercise of imagination. Maybe, sometimes, if you’re stinking rich, you’re also paying for gallons of notoriety. If the Mona Lisa ever legitimately went on sale, whoever buys it is definitely paying the price of notoriety, because da Vinci sure as hell isn’t getting a cut.
This brings me to my last point. These Crypto Bros purchased this book—with high yet entirely misguided aspirations—for 100 times the asking price. They paid €2.66 million to buy a book that they now own and with which they can do nothing they wish. And, while cool, it definitely was not worth that much. They could have purchased any rare book and all of these points would stand. As long-time readers may recall with the Dr. Seuss debacle last March, pricing something high does not determine its inherent value.
NFTs basically encapsulate that Fran Lebowitz quote from Pretend It’s A City:
“You go to an auction & out comes the Picasso, dead silence. Once the hammer comes down on the price, applause. We live in a world where they applaud the price but not the Picasso.”
People who purchase NFTs are applauding themselves for the fake inflated numbers they scam and get scammed into. It doesn’t matter to what the tag is attached. They’re just clapping for the price.4
In conclusion:
Housekeeping and birdseeking
house
Subscribe for no future posts about NFTs.
And share this issue with your friends only, no foes. I’m not interested in engaging with Crypto Bros.
What I read this week: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid. I loved it. 5/5 stars.
I received excellent responses to the last issue about National Treasure.
First, my father wanted to let everyone know that he actually enjoyed Face/Off.
Second, my friend Islay texted me and said, “I wanted you to know it bought up the repressed memory of the time my sister and I spent an evening outlining plots for a potential third and fourth film. I found my old notes and it included hyperinflation, the re-annexation of Texas back to Mexico, the missing Roanoke settlers and the coast guard. I’m so glad your dispatch reminded me of that lunacy 😅” This genuinely sounds far superior to the second film and I’m now petitioning Disney to hire Islay & co. to write any future sequels in the franchise!
bird
More later.
To quote Jeremy’s PowerPoint, “Obviously we are bounded by how much material there is to make computers but that’s not important.”
Also, which community? The Dune fandom? Or NFT hawkers?
Because again, as a fan studies scholar, you can actually turn characters from any media into pretty much whatever you want under the fair use clause of US copyright law, which is why fanworks can proliferate. But they wanted to do this for money.
This reminds me of a scam that one of my tías once fell prey to: in the 50s sometime, someone in our far-reaching extended family received an atrociously ugly ceramic plate (bowl?) as a wedding present from Pablo Picasso, who is a third cousin of a third cousin to our family, yadda yadda. He probably wasn’t a blood relation at all, and this story is half-apocryphal because we’re Spanish, but anyways, a decade or so later someone has this hideous plate-bowl on a mantel in their house and an art dealer comes by and offers this tía diddly shit for the plate. She said yes, sure, of course, this is Spain in the 60s, everyone is scraping by, and anyways get this awful thing out of here. Now the bowl-plate is in some museum and worth like hundreds of thousands of dollars, because: Picasso. But to this family member, in that moment, Picasso was just the weird, terrible cousin who gifted an awful plate as a wedding present. The point here isn’t relativism, but information. And the cost of notoriety.
Thank you for making me laugh and think at the same time --- a unique and precious gift. I will use "a guest book of bad decisions" as soon as humanly possible. And yes, the dish was in Tia Fuente's house (I think it was her parents). No one liked Picasso.
Will you carry me on your back like that bird carried her friend? also, I think I don't understand how NFTs lead to the Amazon being destroyed, but I followed all of your other excellent points.