"But there is no natural scarcity in the digital world.
All the scarcity in this metaverse economy has to be imposed,
against the nature of the medium, at great effort and energy cost.
In the physical world, competition exists by necessity.
In the metaverse, it exists for its own sake—or maybe for the sake of investors."
From Palladium, January 21:
It was day three of NFT.NYC, and I had a headache. I had spent the night before in a series of Ubers from Brooklyn to Times Square and back again, fielding texts about which VC-sponsored rave was happening when. As I queued for this morning’s event, a “Digital Fashion Breakfast” on 6th Avenue, I was still trying to convince myself that all those parties counted as networking.
NFT.NYC was a 5,000 person extravaganza described by The New York Times as a coming-out party for the emerging NFT subculture. The event itself consisted of a $600-per-ticket conference held in Times Square, as well as over a hundred satellite events spread across New York. Early adopters and speculators came to New York to revel in their newfound cachet and meet their internet friends in real life.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are a notation in a blockchain that indicates a certain account owns the material hosted at a particular URL. The term “NFT” has become synonymous with digital art, but the object of an NFT can technically point to anything: an animation, a sound file, or even virtual real estate. Most of the time, NFTs are used to indicate ownership of easily copyable digital assets like JPEG images.
The fashion breakfast was hosted by a startup called DressX, an LA-based project that makes virtual clothing you can project on your body like a Snapchat filter. Attendance required spotting the invitation in an invite-only Telegram group for NFT.NYC attendees, then emailing one of the hosts to plead your case.
Despite the attempts at secrecy, the DressX venue was overflowing. DressX had booked the entire café, a moderately chic spot called L’Adresse, and people poured in from the street long after the 9:30 am start time. The crowd was young, female, and impeccably dressed, a far cry from the grungy twenty-eight-year-old traders who populated most of the conference. I was seated across from a bleach-blond lawyer wearing a tweed dress and a nose ring. She recently left her corporate job to focus on “web3 law” full-time.
She asked me what I was doing in New York. I told her that I am a student trying to learn more about NFTs.
The lawyer worked for the startup founder seated next to me. His company made virtual helmets for the metaverse. He showed me a mockup of the helmet design on his phone. The helmets had a blank rectangle in the front where users can display their personal NFT collection.
The helmets are just a proof of concept, he told me. Long term, he wants to make digital suits with lots of surface area for brand sponsorships.
“Like NASCAR?” I joked, imagining an army of avatars running around in flight suits covered in Burger King logos.
“Exactly,” he said. “Like NASCAR.”
* * *
After another half-hour of small talk, the DressX founders got up to the front of the café, and the room quieted down. They were both young women from Ukraine, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. Someone pulled up a Powerpoint, and the two founders started walking us through the logic of DressX.
Fashion, one of the founders began, is one of the most wasteful industries in the world. Hundreds of millions of pounds of clothes go into landfills every year, and for what? So that you can wear an outfit once for an Instagram photo and then discard it. In contrast to wasteful, impractical physical fashion, digital fashion is instant, perfectly sustainable, and accessible to anyone. Just buy the NFT for some digital earrings or a digital sweater and voila. No wait, no waste. (And don’t look too closely at the energy burned to secure digital scarcity.) She flicked to a selection of photos showing a mix of real-life Instagram models and virtual avatars mugging in stylish virtual dresses.
The crowd was nodding along. At this point, the second founder piped up. “Plus, we will need clothes for the metaverse!”
The metaverse comment struck a nerve. People started clapping, louder and louder until the café was ringing. The DressX girls giggled and took their seats as the applause continued.
Later, when everyone returned to small talk, there was a buzz in the air I can only describe as hope.
We will need clothes for the metaverse....
....MUCH MORE
