NFTs Are the Future

Mar 21, 2022

Are you tryna sell me something sketchy?

Yes, my collection of MS Paint drawings of Twilight erotica that I just minted on the blockchain. No, I'm kidding. I'm just going to talk about that revolutionary new way for artists to poke holes in the ozone layer: NFTs.

Aren't NFTs a 1-star shit parade right now?

Apart from being the miracle that a word like "fungible" needed to enter the mainstream vocabulary, yes. I'm not saying it's a scam, but if I'm gonna buy a fake rock, I'd rather give my money to the Nigerian prince pitching me diamonds over at my spam inbox.

Hard to argue with this: 80% of the items created in the OpenSea marketplace were "plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam." The upside is that, unlike AliExpress, the crap you get looks exactly like in the picture.

So your point is...

That if you tolerate knowing that John Lennon's son has the taste of an edgy 13-year-old and that someone managed to make Magna Doodles offensive by selling botched up portraits of George Floyd, well—it ain't that bad.

Unsolicited advice: check this on your morning doomscrolling.

You have mildly raised my eyebrow.

Here's the thing: it only takes one guy selling a JPEG for $69 million to make everyone moist about crypto art. And by everyone, I mean the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Snoop Dogg, and an illustrious pornstar, who I doubt will ever be brought into having something in common ever again unless the three of them decide to shoot an interracial. But for that to happen, Quentin would have to settle for a script, and I find that unlikely.

Jump to this conclusion: hype has 5 levels, and NFTs are well past the fifth, which I like to call "cooperative schizophrenia." Thankfully, the author of this essay opted for the professional route and chose the term "Othering."

It ain't for me though—I'm more of a "fungible" kind of person.

And that's fine; this hype ain't for you. It's targeted toward a special kind of human breed, the kind that inks the deal even after the likes of Mark Cuban go "And for that reason, I'm out." I'm talking about the demographic that's been populating closed betas, focus groups, experimental drug tests right after lab rats and every season of Fear Factor, all for a chance to be cool: the early adopter.

Unsolicited advice: here's a guide to getting "filthy rich" on NFTs by Lindsey Lohan. Feel free to give up in Step 6.

Early bird does get the worm, I guess.

We gotta give some credit where it's due. Many an art critic would rather pivot their LinkedIn profile in search for a restaurant reviewer gig on Yelp before they have to take a Bored Ape seriously—but not early adopters. They frolic around emerging trends and effervescent markets like flies around a steamy cow turd.

In the know:

Early adopters are drawn towards novelty, information, and status, which is why the NFT scene feels like a bunch of frat boys' elaborate plan to be able to hang out with Paris Hilton and not like a genuine service to digital art.
It's also the reason why this video of a Money Heist stunt double flaming a bunch of drawings of dicks ejaculating Hitler exists. I wonder what these people’s mums are doing with all the attention they didn’t give.

I feel there's a point coming.

Here's the point: every new innovation will have its own period of maturity, carried forward by the early adopters that play with it. Without it, the internet would still be a military project and Viagra would be used to treat hypertension. We would have to get drafted in order to check our email and pray to Aphrodite to get a hard-on—hey, maybe they should give NFTs a try against erectile dysfunction. If a blue pill can't get you hard, maybe selling a JPEG file for $23.7 million will.

Hard to argue with this: the blockchain was originally created to timestamp digital documents, and to me, that sounds more like a pro feature in Microsoft's Office suite than a "revolutionary new technology." Everything has to start somewhere.

Just tell me where to put my beer money so it turns into yacht money.

If someone claims they know the answer to that, you better check that they have satellites looking at it from space—or something better still, cause we have that for weather forecasts and we get them wrong all the time anyway. My sense of aesthetics tells me, however, that I would fart a rainbow before NFTs become mainstream art. But again, no one knows. Especially not me.