RememberNFTs? I sure do. In fact, the deeper we get into the 2020s, the more I find myself surprisingly nostalgic for the decade’s first big tech fad.
Why is that surprising? Well, I hated NFTs at the time. I thought they were a garish intersection, the corner of contributing to climate change and conspicuous consumption. And, you know what? I still think I was right about that. So, what gives? Well, I didn’t change. And NFTs didn’t get better. But the tech world’s next big fixation turned out to be much, much worse as these pointless JPEGs began to fade into obscurity.
A Brave New World
Nearly three years intogenerative AIsoftware being commercially available, it’s clear that the tech industry has found something far more dangerous for workers and consumers worldwide. ChatGPT can string words together and assemble images, Midjourney can make moving pictures, and Suno can create music. None of these tools are breaking new ground creatively. They’re not the next Virginia Woolf or Quentin Tarantino or Kendrick Lamar. But they can do their jobs well enough to pose a risk to human jobs.
It’salready happening at Microsoft, and many more workplaces are integrating AI tools into their employees’ everyday routines. Is the goal to ultimately replace those workers with the AI they helped train? I can’t speak for every company, but everything I’ve learned about capitalism has taught me to expect a company to use something if it spent a bunch of money on it. Preferably, to make more money even if it means throwing good people under the bus.
In the wake of these developments, NFTs look downright cute and cuddly. Oh you own a picture of a monkey in a hat? That’s sweet. Now let me take a picture of it with my phone, you loser.
NFT stands for non-fungible token, and the fad was an attempt to create scarcity in digital art by tying a unique image (or video, GIF, webpage, piece of music, etc) to a data file stored on the blockchain. It was attempting to solve the “problem” that it was impossible to own digital art in the same way you might own a painting. You couldn’t truly own a JPEG in the same way a fine art collector owned, say, an early van Gogh. So NFTs tied a unique art asset to a unique bit of data.
They sucked for some of the same reasons that generative AI sucked. Like generative AI, they were bad for the environment, requiring an ungodly amount of computing power to mint and maintain. Also like AI, they represented an attempt by the tech world to disrupt art without actually understanding what the art world wanted or needed to survive and thrive.
Like generative AI, NFTs created suspicion toward artists, too. If you found an artist you liked on social media, you needed to double check to make sure they weren’t actually an NFT shill. And, like generative AI, some of the most popular NFT art sets were generated from a set of existing images — though in the case of NFTs, it was done through more classical procedural generation.
I Will Right Click Whatever I Please
The problem for NFT boosters though is that it was Who’s Line is it Anyway? rules. Everything is made up and the points don’t matter. Sure, you could spend $100,000 to buy your way into the Bored Ape Yacht Club. But your monkey JPEG only had value as long as fellow members of the club agreed to continue to see value in it. This is true of any good or service — gasoline is only a valuable thing to supply because cars demand it — but NFTs laid it bare. It was a ‘the Emperor has no clothes’ moment for capitalism.
In the face of generative AI, NFTs seem quaint and almost harmless. Everyone except for their boosters hated them. There was no world in which they posed a real threat to artists. They were never a viable way to monetize video games. And, unlike generative AI, they couldn’t create art assets or author books or write code. So video game companies rushing to get in on them seems silly in retrospect, a hubristic attempt at a new revenue stream that ended up shooting them in the foot.
AI is far more promising than NFTs, and far more dangerous. I doubt I’ll be looking back on this time with nostalgia in five years. In fact, I hope I won’t. If I am, it means something worse has taken its place.
