From Real Life Magazine, March 31:
Toward the end of last year, Brooklyn art collective MSCHF programmed a robotic arm to make 999 copies of an original Andy Warhol print called Fairies. They mixed in the real one (valued around $20,000) with the forgeries, “obliterat[ing] the trail of provenance,” and sold each print for $250. “In some way,” Kevin Wiesner, the collective’s “co-chief creative officer,” told CNN, “we’re democratizing it by letting everyone have what could be a Warhol.” One buyer really did walk off with the original Fairies, but any value or meaning that might be ascribed to its genuineness has been buried. What has been “democratized” is not ownership of an actual, auratic object, but the fantasy of possibly owning one. One might similarly say that Powerball lotteries democratize wealth.
This stunt was widely read as a commentary on the non-fungible token (NFT) market, which insists on the blockchain-certified distinction of an “original” amid a sea of perfect fakes. While NFTs are often pitched as tools for imposing scarcity on replicable digital content, the act of referencing a digital artifact in a blockchain entry does virtually nothing to enforce a seal of authenticity. Unless gatekeepers decide to confer significance to this validation, NFTs are little more than semi-standardized entries on public spreadsheets that happen to waste enormous amounts of energy — not to mention the time of those who try to explain their operations in precise detail. As with documentation of artistic provenance, the value of an NFT is entirely contingent on the social-psychological enforcement of communities of shared belief.
Web3 provides an optimistic future to believe in, a financialized vision of salvation
Evangelists claim that NFTs will change the world, heralding everything from blockchain-validated girlfriends and edible NFTs to tokenized identity and metaverse “citizenship.” But thus far, the “functionality” delivered by NFTs is a new way to pay for old features. Today’s NFT market is largely dominated by character collections: Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks are the best known, but there are also Lazy Lions, Magic Mushrooms, Cool Kangaroos, and on and on. These and other collectible NFT series are little more than virtual streetwear lines, minting capped batches of thematic avatars for holders to project their crypto affiliations across social platforms. In January, Twitter became the first such service to embrace the practice, offering a unique hexagonal frame for those with blockchain-validated profile pictures. Facebook is allegedly soon to follow.
The NFT hype is obviously not about present-day utility or novelty. It thrives on something more mystical: an experience of collective faith in an age of taxing isolation. Web3 provides an optimistic story about a future to believe in, a financialized vision of salvation, and designates a cast of naysaying cynics to blame if (when) the plan falls through. NFTs act as perceptible frames for these emotions, serving as sacred spaces that draw the dynamics of this community of believers into sharp relief. Behind the technical veneer, the NFT market operates as a kind of doomsday cult, peddling fear and translating prosperity-gospel logics into a utopian narrative of the coming metaverse....
....MUCH MORE
Well that certainly sheds a different light on things.
I'm not sure you could write four more subversive paragraphs if you tried for one hundred years. It's like saying Facebook is now the platform for grandmothers, and watching the cool kids run away.
