Maggie Grove

A quick crash course: NFT stands for “non-fungible token.” In plain speak: an NFT is a token that represents pretty much any “thing” – but usually digital art. Similar to how a poker chip holds (represents) a dollar amount, an NFT represents an object. It acts as a receipt that proves you own the “thing.” 

 

So what’s the point of NFTs; what value will they allegedly bring? Advocates claim it will:

 

a. Make art more accessible for everyday people

b. Offer a major investment opportunity for everyday people (more on that shortly)

c. Allow artists to sell their art more broadly and efficiently (more on that shortly)

d. Offer the ability for artists to take off overnight

 

Again, let’s consider the people fronting this. Do we trust them? [Briefly describe the people who started NFTs and how shady they are]

 

And it’s become increasingly obvious that NFTs aren’t set up to deliver on their promises. First and foremost: for everyday people, there’s not much value in owning an NFT.

 

“Owning” an NFT for a digital work of art (as opposed to buying a non-NFT digital or physical reproduction) is only valuable if the artist whose work it is makes it big. Because if the artist gets big, then people will get hype on it and want to buy your NFT and will pay a lot more for it. But if the artist doesn't blow up, no one is going to want to pay you more for it. Why would they? In that case you’re just paying a markup for the NFT, whatever the artist decides, to enjoy the same art. You may “own” it, but that doesn’t do anything real – meaningful – for you.

 

Nor does it deliver on its stated purpose of making art more accessible to everyday people. Again, many working Americans can’t afford or wouldn’t pay for a marked-up piece of art they can already enjoy for free. And even if NFTs did somehow make art more accessible… they aren’t good art! The rise of “computer- generated NFTs” has flooded the market with crap, not art. Tech bros looking to make a buck have trained AI programs to mass-produce NFTs. That sort of soullessness hardly sounds like artistic revolution.

 

Nor will NFTs bring value to everyday artists. It’s clear that they don’t have value to consumers. Once they realize that, demand for them will dry up. Without consumer demand, you aren’t going to sell anything. And even if somehow demand remains steady, NFTs aren’t worth the cost to artists of creating them. 

 

Artists spend $70-100 on average to “register” an artwork as an NFT. That may not sound steep, but it doesn’t offer a great return on value. A study from the University of London analyzing the sales of over 4.7 million NFTs found that most sell for $15 or less. And their analysis didn’t even include the countless more NFTs which haven’t been sold yet and therefore “didn’t enter their analyses” – many of which are worthless. 

 

There’s a concept in psychology called the “availability heuristic.” It’s a mental shortcut we take sometimes when making decisions; instead of processing all relevant information when making the decision, our brain may rely heavily on one big piece of information that makes an impression on and biases us. An example: you hear about your cousin being mugged. It stays with you, and when you walk home at the end of your shift, you take a different route. A slightly longer, but safer one. Your environment and likelihood of being mugged – the actually relevant information – hasn’t changed since you got that phone call earlier in the day. But your perception of the situation has.

 

NFTs rely for their existence on this concept. Because NFTs, like Bitcoin, rely on hype to have value. They rely on the illusion that you’ll be the next artist to make a blockbuster $70 million sale, like up-and-coming artist Beeple. NFT advocates rely on these big stories; hearing about that person, the thought of being that person, leaves an impression on us. Enough to make some of us say what the heck, maybe this could be a good investment against all reason or science. 

 

But it’s not. Look no further than the performance of the most high-profile NFT to date. At the beginning of the NFT craze, crypto giant Sina Estavi made a statement, buying an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet for $2.9 million. Estavi just went to sell it for an opening ask of $48 million… and ended with a top bid of $280. How embarrassing. As Mauro Martino, head of IBM’s Visual AI Lab, puts it: “people just spend money to produce an NFT and that’s it. It would be hard to suggest for an art friend to play [in this space], as very few people can find profit.”

 

So NFTs don’t seem set up to deliver on their promises, much like Bitcoin. But maybe they’re still worth making? Again… just no.

 

NFTs decouple art from what it's supposed to be about: connection and expression – not transaction. In the words of Brain Eno, a leading voice in the art world, “So far nothing has convinced me that there is anything worth making in the NFT arena. ‘Worth making’ for me implies bringing something into existence that adds value to the world, not just to a bank account… NFTs seem to me just a way for artists to become little capitalist assholes as well.”

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Series Conclusion

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The Metaverse is just a giant mall moved online. NFTs are just a way of commodifying (and marking up) previously unlimited digital resources, making them less accessible to people. Bitcoin is just an elaborate pyramid scheme. None of these things are connecting us, fulfilling us, or enriching our lives. And the more we buy into them, the more dangerous they become. Every person who enters the Metaverse is legitimizing it. Every person who buys an NFT or Bitcoin is legitimizing it. If we keep gobbling up the slop our leaders are feeding us, they're just going to continue making more. They're going to continue investing our society's resources in meaningless things that cost us a lot – both financially and as human beings. And that only serve the egos of vain leaders seeking praise and validation (no matter how unwarranted).

 

To borrow from Huxley again, today’s Digital Revolution has been characterized by “the development of a vast communications industry concerned neither with the true or false, but with the unreal, the totally irrelevant… preying on man’s infinite appetite for distractions.” Big Tech is turning us into a society "preoccupied with the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the bumblepuppy, where the truth is drowned in a sea of irrelevance." ​ It's tempting – even exciting – to buy into the narrative that new is better.

 

It's tempting to move our lives online, where the hard realities of real life can be forgotten, if only for a moment. It's tempting to believe that our leaders have our best interests at heart, and that we can trust in the projects they're investing our resources in. But it's critical that we not succumb to these temptations. Because if we come to accept and adopt meaningless things as the foundation of our society, as the innovations of our generation, we're building a house with a very shaky structure. We're just building another Bridge to Nowhere. And I don't think that's a journey we want to go on. Because it'll lead us – as people and a society – straight off a cliff.