NFTs (thread now extremely NSFW)

figured it's time for a thread outside the standard crypto one to post about NFTs. I see a lot of people making money off of them, but I don't like 'em (I've never been good at making money).

Currently they remind me of the "buy a star" type businesses, but idk

Eat your heart out, Walter Benjamin.

I remember when I worked in crypto, encountering enthusiasts at meetups, the general perception among devotees was that it was going to be a force for economic equality. Turns out it's just another great way for the rich and well-connected to get richer! Who could have seen this coming???

One for the human nature thread.

enh, I didn't take it as a matter of human nature so much as (once again, as we learn time and time again) there being no purely technological solutions to political problems

I agree with that, obv., I'm just consistently impressed with how innovative we are at squandering our potential for justice.

out of all of the recent articles and lectures about NFTs that I've looked at, I've yet to see anything about them that makes them have any value other than people seem to be paying a lot of money for certain ones. So idk, is the fact that purchasers are seeing this worthless/pointless thing as being valuable enough for it to have a future?

Reminds me of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich

The only NFT’s I care about are Nice Fucken Titties

— Stavros Halkias (@stavvybaby) March 8, 2021

yawn, pungent tokin'

it's a nice way for grimes to have her own mad money... so she doesn't have to keep asking what's-his-name

I didn't mean to approach this in a purely negative manner, and I wanted this new (to me) promising way to sell/own art to actually be new/different, but I can't see it. Everything that tries to be convincing reads as gibberish to me

this sucks bcuz it has absolutely nothing with art and everything to do with goobers that have bad taste and (like bitcoin) it will be a succeess and make goobers rich

I think they are mostly dumb & bad. Sure, artists could use them to make a lot of money if 1) they're already successful and have a dedicated fanbase, or 2) they have a lot of rich friends/connections.

Sure, streaming to the whole world for micropennies didn't work, but that doesn't mean that going back to the patronage system is the answer.

Maybe free market artificial scarcity is just a bad idea.

If I had a time machine I would use it to go back to the moment when I googled “NFT” and “crypto art.”

I would approach my past self and place my present hand on my past hand, taking it off the mouse.

“Don’t. Don’t ever. Knowing about these things will make you feel stupid that they exist. Forget these things. Look at porn or something. Live your life.”

Beeple auction ends Thurs I think

This is stupid nobody should post about this including me

NFT porn though - surely that's already a thing?

simon h., kurt schwitterz, and silby otm. i will never be able to muster any reaction to things like this or bitcoin other than uncomprehending horror and disgust tbrrwu.

All this really is is a way to create a digital certificate of authenticity. I guess that's ok but doesn't strike me as game-changing. I don't see it as a revolution for the art world, more like the creation of a somewhat pointless digital memorabilia market. I don't think there will be any significant market for non-celebrity-driven NFTs. I think there are enough silicon valley assholes, marks, bitcoiners etc. with unreasonably stupid amounts of money to keep sales of the more famous of these going for a while. Upper middle class people buy (non-famous) paintings and middle class people buy prints and posters because they make your home look nice. NFTs don't have any real world value along those lines, they're solely digital collectibles. And I get a bit of a Second Life vibe from the energy around them, which makes me wonder how long they'll really last as a phenomenon.

I probably would’ve expected bitcoin to fizzle out by 2016 or so and here we are, fuck the earth

xpost azaelea banks just did one of these for an "audio sex tape"

smh

I would just add to my previous comment: it actually makes me sort of sad to think about all the scams and grifts that have come to define the space, not because they weren't predictable (at least 50% of the major players to come down the pike since Satoshi, by my estimation, are/were full-on grifters or con men), but because I met a lot of people who really were hoping for a more ethical alternative to the financial system that had just screwed so many, and didn't (just) see crypto as a get-rich-quick scheme

Yeah but it’s just a bad database

There’s only one financial system

you're preaching to the converted!

I don't feel that sorry for people for credulously buying into the Esperanto of currencies.

it's just that it's also causing global warming

I hate them because they are based on this underlying idea that the blockchain is this eternal unerasable record instead of a disgusting waste of resources which needs to be declared illegal and dismantled asap

All this really is is a way to create a digital certificate of authenticity. I guess that's ok but doesn't strike me as game-changing. I don't see it as a revolution for the art world, more like the creation of a somewhat pointless digital memorabilia market. I don't think there will be any significant market for non-celebrity-driven NFTs. I think there are enough silicon valley assholes, marks, bitcoiners etc. with unreasonably stupid amounts of money to keep sales of the more famous of these going for a while. Upper middle class people buy (non-famous) paintings and middle class people buy prints and posters because they make your home look nice. NFTs don't have any real world value along those lines, they're solely digital collectibles. And I get a bit of a Second Life vibe from the energy around them, which makes me wonder how long they'll really last as a phenomenon.

A lot of it is very likely to be money laundering (like pretty much every cryptocurrency thing), or just financial speculation shenanigans - it's worth it for people to spend big to bolster the hype, as long as they can manage to sell what they bought for even more before the market crashes. I would be a little surprised if most of the hype doesn't die out before the end of the year, it doesn't seem to have the sort of longer term speculation potential as bitcoin does but idk

i cannot believe i had to write this. but.https://t.co/ZO3wQyQh1K pic.twitter.com/cau0kixLYB

— everest (@everestpipkin) March 3, 2021

i had one digital acquaintance who appears to have gotten (even more?) rich off of this. she made the same gif over and over, a shot of a CRT TV screen, panning left and right, 500 different times over. lately she got really into the NFT scene and was early and made a bunch of money.

i guess at one stage in my life i might have tried. at this point, i shake my fist at it and say YOU DUMB FUCKS

then again, i'm literally litsening to a simple twist of fate right now, so maybe it is i who is the dumb fuck

my initial thoughts on NFT were that that some aspects of it were worthwhile goals: mainly, some sort of "ownership" over a digital file (and now, i realize, not just digital), some sort of means of tracking who made something. when i made more things, i would get really frustrated about seeing people use my things wholesale - boingboing does it like every 9 months and i always publicly whine about them. even though i'm sure they're wearing dirty jeans like i am.

but everest (see that tweet/medium essay) makes good points that acknowledge that but also make clear that this particular implementation of it fucking blows. i think i'm more optimistic about it than they are. but yeah, i follow some gif dude who has had a handful of his gifs already "minted" by someone else - i mean, what? is this just the first gold rush where you're a dumbass if you don't mint everything you made that might be valuable? ...or is everyone just a giant fucking asshole?

you can browse through all the shit that's being minted. it's so bad. everything is bad. but i may be missing the forest for the trees. there are so many things being "minted" every minute, now. wtf does this mean? what if everything became minted? what if everything was auto-minted and part of a market, whether we wanted that or not? is there anything preventing someone from minting ILX as token? wtf am i even talking about? what a fucking asshole? what the fuck? see what i mean

then imagine you visit this thread in 4 months and some jerk has made $45K off of it on NFT and you don't even know how

anyway, maybe this will be the rare crypto thing that gets regulated, because now Giphy (I think owned by facebook?) is mad about NFTs using Giphy images (which are actually made by real people, not them) so they're issuing a very official Twitter "hey-quit-it" notification to all

NFT's value is built upon an escalating equation that becomes more difficult to solve. as everest says:

...in a digital context scarcity must be constructed- there is nothing that demands the next block in the blockchain be harder to make than the last. If anything, the opposite should be true- computers grow ever more efficient and p"owerful. This means any scarcity is artificial, a process that demands ever more energy, ever more resources lost to continue to operate and return, for no other reason than to insure that tomorrow it will be even more expensive- which makes the wastefulness of today a good investment.

This is why cryptocurrency is valuable. There is nothing high-tech about it. There is no miracle. It is simply futures speculation without the speculation- no guessing required, because we know it will be more wasteful tomorrow; it is baked into the tech.
All that cryptocurrency does is abstract resources into a market by making those resources unavailable to the future.

right?

I had an idea to make some gifs of giant warehouses of bitcoin computers turning into desolate post-apocalyptic wastelands and sell them as NFTs

Ethereum “has been moving” to proof of stake for almost as long as it has existed. It has been so long that “Eth 2.0 PoS Coming Soon!” is something of a running joke.

this really was a tremendous irritant when I was working "in the space"

NFT's the only explainer you will need pic.twitter.com/2yM1LVh1Wk

— SPAC Lindzon (@howardlindzon) March 11, 2021

The digital art community is basically imploding right now as it has polarized into for and against jumping onto this train. People that knew nothing about this two weeks ago, are now cool with creating dox lists of other artists they think are on the wrong side. It’s pretty distressing.

There was a company several years ago (a buddy briefly worked there) selling authenticated, digital sports trading cards... this is nothing newish.

the difference is that the blockchain stuff makes it extraordinarily inefficient & is solely responsible for all the hype & ridiculous money being thrown around

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nba-top-shot-nft-crypto-digital-collectibles-11615266042?mod=e2tws

Bros with $200k to set on fire passing this shit around hoping to not be the last one holding

Hot potato shit

The digital art community is basically imploding right now as it has polarized into for and against jumping onto this train. People that knew nothing about this two weeks ago, are now cool with creating dox lists of other artists they think are on the wrong side. It’s pretty distressing.

are people actually making dox lists?

honestly i am unfollowing #NFT evangelists, though. the shit is gross. don't know what else to say, it's just sad. i do understand why some people disregard the whole "cosmically unnecessary electricity usage at a time when ...god am i writing this again? fuck" thing - no one's making money off of digital art, or if you did you had to sell your soul in order to get compensated. and now this is finally a chance for some people to buy a couple lottery tickets, mint their cool shit, and hope it takes off and makes them some money. i guess i can understand that. i think it's wrong to do, when you're aware of what the actual costs are, or if you imagine a world where NFTs were successful and transactions continued to exponentially grow. that's why the evangelists bother me, because they should know better

beeple sold a NFT at christie's for $70M today (it was actually a bit lower than but fuck)

Had beeple been doxxed before the auction as “mike winkelman “ or whatever ?

i don't want to google this, but the thought occurred to me -- how much of this market is centered on anime fan art and furry porn?

I work for an art technology company, was worried what my bosses might think of all this but one of them just said (re: the christies sale) that it was 'gross' and 'depressing' so, er, phew I guess. Maybe the Germans have a word for when you're relieved at your boss's moral stance on an issue.

Karl Malone, I suppose the word “dox” might be slightly hyperbolic, but there were apparently up to six lists angrily circulating of artists who were “engaging” with NFTs. One of the large platforms, Artstation, put out a formal statement/apology after the backlash. https://magazine.artstation.com/2021/03/a-statement-from-artstation/

Scarcity has never been more abundant.

— fed_speak (@fed_speak) March 10, 2021

honestly, i'm registering my discontent and total disapproval right now because i think it's going to become permanent. may as well be people around from the beginning that argued that it was completely wrong

The sad thing about NFTs is that all logic says they are dumb and will go away and are unsustainable, but ultimately they’re going to make a lot of people rich and I’m just too lazy/shook/broke to buy in

this is a problem created by people who thought "the problem is that i'm not rich. the solution is to try to get rich and outsource the costs to people who don't know what i'm even talking about and don't realize they're bearing the costs. again. in 2021. on purpose, by people who think of themselves as good people"

let me know if you want to know what else they thought

There are collectors who pay millions of dollars for conceptual art pieces. Some of them are no more than a set of instructions. At the same time, I would guess that's a pretty small part of the art market. Most collectors want paintings/sculptures/drawings/prints they can show off at their miami beach villas.

And that's pretty much how I think the NFT market is gonna shake out long term - there will be people who will pay a lot for the famous ones, but it will not be a source of income for ordinary artists, and it's going to be a small market compared to physical show off art.

I look at it like dogecoin (which is huge) - it’s a bunch of speculators who don’t care about the product, just the value. Great fit for art!!!!!

I think the difference is that all dogecoins are the same, each NFT is different. So an NFT created by Grimes will have speculators chasing it, while an NFT created by man alive probably won't.

I would invest in Evil Guide Dog NFT tbrr

the climate part of this editorial can take a hike, but most of it is good, and it's way more sanguine about NFTs than i am.

https://rhizome.org/editorial/2021/mar/03/another-new-world/

honestly, i just want to go away. fuck all of this

I mean I think the best way to think about it is that it's just a tool for selling digital art and memorabilia. It's not a type of art or a type of memorabilia or an "asset class," it's just a way of "authenticating" a digital object and creating scarcity (as you do with, say, a certified limited edition print that you could easily make more of). And I guess that's more convenient and easier to verify than, like, having a digital artist just mail you a certificate or something. But I don't think that means that there will be all that much additional interest in buying digital art once the initial hype dies down.

nah, i don't agree that. not the art part of it or the interest in art, but the first two sentences. it is much more than that, much more complicated than that

it is a way of authenticating an object (not just digital - the token can and has been many things) that also negates progress that has been made on climate change. and the more popular it gets, the worst that problem gets. and that problem is ALSO a human-caused problem, one that we imposed on ourselves.

...i know everyone likes to relegate this to an afterthought, probably because people don't like that objecting on grounds of climate change sometimes feels an unfair UNO 4-color wild card that beats all. but why are we creating additional systematically growing self-inflicted wounds, knowingly?

rhetorical of course, because who wants to deal with that.

better just to assume that later this year they'll switch to proof of stake. in the meantime, we can trust that regulators have got their eyes on this and _totally_ understand what's going on

oh it's stupid as shit, don't get me wrong. I also doubt that its climate change impact is even 1/10000 of cryptocurrency in general.

Also, I kind of feel like part of what makes digital art fun and interesting is that it's *not* a unique object and is infinitely copiable. Like KM, part of the enjoyment of your art for me (which, again, is awesome) is very much in the fact that we can all enjoy it together through hotlinks on an ILX thread or an accessible website. So it feels extremely artificial to create a "the one" version of an evil guide dog gif or whatever just so someone can have the bragging rights. Not that I would knock you for it if you did it, bc not being able to monetize is an understandable problem for a digital artist who has to live in a capitalist society. But it feels more like creating a piece of memorabilia of the art than the art itself in a way.

thanks man alive, and yeah i agree that it tends to go against the unique property that made digital art unique in the first place.

overall, though, digital art is just a small part of what this will become, like everyone is saying. it's bringing attention to it now, because it's interesting that beeple made $69M at an auction (a week after setting a record for selling a NFT for $6M somewhere else). but later? it sounds dumb, but you could mint something like Celebrity A's first kiss with Celebrity B, and that's a really odd thing to memorialize and trade and spend money on, but so are fortnite outfits.

i guess i'm saying, please unite together to destroy this thing now while it's relatively small, rather than letting it grow until the point when another previously non-carbon intensive classification of "objects" decides to industrialize

but really - and here's where i realize i just have to walk away (from the world?!?) - i could make the same argument on a cryptocurrent subreddit or something, and it would be just as futile

The only way I would be into NFTs if they released nanites that ate the flesh off the buyer and simultaneously uploaded the video to twitter.

Also, I kind of feel like part of what makes digital art fun and interesting is that it's *not* a unique object and is infinitely copiable

it isn't inherently though? It depends on what the art _is_ like, does it only exist on Netscape Navigator 3.0 or Mac OS9.2 ... that was a bit of the Rhizome.org / digital art "issue" ... and while it has way more variables than fixed media art (i.e. video), there are definite similarities. ... I remember one piece by the Vasulkas that had to be shown on a particular brand of CRT monitor, for example. A lot of this stuff is the province of museum preservation staff and archivists.

until now

*mints the province of museum preservation staff and archivists*

Gonna mint my dick lol

Wait there seem to be bandwith issues

my bandwidth is fine

*mints yr dick*

actually, might as well mint a dick! if people participate in the whole thing they should do stuff like that

omg -- actually, gonna suggest this to a friend to do for realz

went to look up whether anyone had NFTed boobs yet, revealing... SpankChain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVyFp8OxbDY

Wild guess that this disruptive technology flopped, but maybe the time is now

many benifits of boobs poll

Karl Malone, I suppose the word “dox” might be slightly hyperbolic, but there were apparently up to six lists angrily circulating of artists who were “engaging” with NFTs.
― Kim, Friday, March 12, 2021 7:41 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

who made those lists? honestly, i want to follow them on twitter.

reflexively separating myself from anyone who is promoting this right now, it's like everyone half the people in an apartment complex starting an Ayn Rand bookclub. fine, do it, but I will also hang a xerox of alan greenspan farting as his toes get tickled on my the door to my apartment, make fun of all of them, and make sure that everyone knows Not Me

Seeing a lot of techno utopian ppl pushing hard online for this with music atm. I totally understand embracing a pyramid scheme to make a buck because there's less money in music these days, but positioning doing this as a revolutionary act is pretty depressing (which I'm seeing online from some "community-based" music spaces/people/thinkers/charlatans)

i'm hoping that the crypto / NFT people will soon realize that they're actually more interested in the crypto part than the art part, and then they will never talk about art ever again and just go make money and move to their island with thiel

please RT into my butthole

congratulations new #NFT artists: you've speculated yourself into an evolving, exciting new butthole!!

— Z_tbd (@weinventyou) March 13, 2021

i haven't heard back yet from my friend -- i fear she has minted "a dick" without me, and screwed me out of my share of dick sales

https://io9.gizmodo.com/dc-comics-tells-artists-to-stay-out-of-nft-business-or-1846466427

I’m on @withFND 🌐

0x2B867e8B4EfDB9a792a5A9C5524B7f61CF143b4Ahttps://t.co/m8iEeChAzw

— Aphex Twin (@AphexTwin) March 14, 2021

ready for the funny part? this is his pinned tweet

We will spend a portion of the money on planting trees and either donating to permaculture projects or setting them up ourselves, depending on how much we get .

— Aphex Twin (@AphexTwin) March 14, 2021

looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

I feel like the world has come full Nathan Barley

What is the point of releasing music this way?

$$$

I'd like to discuss how 99% of NFT art is terrible art per se, also.

None of it is good.

I mean like what’s the point of an NFT music release. Is it just mp3s with an extra unique tag on it or something?

Basically when we are all in the meta-verse and you want to play that Feelies mp3 in your digital bar you will be sued by the rightful owner of the track, dogelol_elon44.

the whole concept of NFTs is the most boring thing ever

most boring thing ever

I agree. The fact that it has attracted $$$ makes it fascinating to those who find money an all-consuming obsession. afaics, it is a digital + blockchain version of a lithograph signed by the artist and hand-marked as "x of 100".

nah it's a contemporary giclee

This is useful background on the Beeple sale:

https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-2103/msg00041.html

Short version is it is a scam where Business A, controlled by Vignesh sund4resan, sold the work to Business B, controlled by Vignesh sund4resan, to artificially inflate the value of share tokens in Business A.

lol zero surprise there

Update: looks like I can’t get my NFTs back. Even though fraud has been confirmed and I know exactly where my NFTs are sitting at this very moment.

Hacker wins. Secondary market purchaser wins. I lose.

Going to explore other options if I can. Doesn’t sit right with me.

— Michael J. Miraflor (@michaelmiraflor) March 14, 2021

Unsurprisingly, already being hit by hacks.

Does Bitcoin suffer from much hackerage?

(I am totally out the loop with these things as you might have guessed)

One of the longtime criticisms of bitcoin is that you have basically no fraud protection, which is in turn one of a number of its touted features that are actually bugs.

Like the various mechanisms that make credit card transactions more complex also enable you to stop/reverse/challenge them.

@tokenizedtweets 0xe128c547520aa0ad6409ba0a0f30dbcd07098024

— Bean (@Franq_the_Tanq) March 15, 2021

sorry, context is that was someone tokenizing this screenshot of an interaction i had with the #crypto #community last night

Unintentional cryptoart pic.twitter.com/oVFUrhLNkf

— the most touchiest person, right now (@weinventyou) March 14, 2021

After arguing with musician friends (irl!) about NFTs, I listened to this podcast to get some more context and hear what the pro arguments are (it's Mat Dryhurst, who has been the lone defender on techno twitter): https://open.spotify.com/episode/2trxojvIclKsl7IVcynbuG?si=s_2S9ykkQIipnengPyG-9A

I'm not convinced at all but it was an interesting listen. Obviously I have sympathy for my friends in bands that were previously eking out a living through touring, and I'm sure they can make some money from this given that they have existing hardcore fans. But even if we put the environmental issues aside entirely, normalizing blockchain usage and turning all artists into speculative commodities seems very bleak.

A speculative NFT asset has no potential to generate income for anyone but a very well-known artist. Much as with streaming, this is a technology being promoted by people who don't understand anything about the music/art business as great for musicians/artists.

My friend isn't talking about millions, more like hundreds for a touring indie act with a relatively small (in global pop terms) but dedicated fanbase.

But yeah I agree that the NFT evangelists are interested in money and tech/protocols, not art.

fuck around

my brother and I collaborated on our first NFT, check it out https://t.co/YQFstF6VVL

— of Montreal~she/he/they/them (@xxofMontrealxx) March 15, 2021

find out

oooooo fuck we didn't realize NFT's were so bad for the environment!!! this will be a one and done then, thanks for the heads up!

— of Montreal~she/he/they/them (@xxofMontrealxx) March 15, 2021

<3 kevin obv lol

My next release will be on an amazing physical, analogue NFT - a flat, circular polyvinyl chloride disc* with the audio literally engraved into it. Limited in number, each unique object exists even if the platform goes down.

*disc will require some specialist equipment to listen

— Posthuman (@posthuman) March 9, 2021

i am going to burn down the rainforest and mint it as as a NFT

My friend isn't talking about millions, more like hundreds for a touring indie act with a relatively small (in global pop terms) but dedicated fanbase.

But yeah I agree that the NFT evangelists are interested in money and tech/protocols, not art.

― change display name (Jordan), Monday, March 15, 2021 12:48 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Back in the day, we managed to sell about 1000 copies of our self-released album, 90% of that at shows. I calculated that to earn the same profit we'd probably need between 6-10 million streams. I guess the difference is that an NFT doesn't replace anything, so it's arguably just additive income. But yeah, it's gonna be very small if anything for most bands. Unlike, e.g., a print by a non-famous artist, an NFT has literally zero value except as a metaphysical ownership right.

My friend is saying it could replace the revenue lost from streaming (and now touring). And yeah of course it's a meaningless symbol, especially when associated with a non-digital product. But his optimistic argument is that fans will support their favorite artists in return for that sense of ownership, which would be depressing since it's almost indistinguishable from just donating to a musician if you're only listening on Spotify, and any increasing value of the NFT will likely be symbolic too.

But his optimistic argument is that fans will support their favorite artists in return for that sense of ownership, which would be depressing since it's almost indistinguishable from just donating to a musician if you're only listening on Spotify, and any increasing value of the NFT will likely be symbolic too.

i can very much see why most people would think this is ridiculous, but i can see that too (and not in an optimistic way). not a perfect comparison, but an enormous amount of money is spent every day on purely cosmetic items in free-to-play games. People love to spend money on completely useless, cosmetic/symbolic things to show their friends

of course, the difference is that if you do it around me i'll scream and then move to the woods

Right, I can for sure see it coming to pass, as abstract and ridiculous as it seems.

It's just hard for me to believe people wouldn't have better luck creating a high-priced limited edition of a vinyl album or something.

nobody's ever paid $69 million for a vinyl album

and nobody's going to pay $69 million for a music NFT unless it's a multi-platinum artist or something.

Also, the buyer of the beeple work did so to fuel his own investment scam. And I'd be surprised if some of that money paid to "Beeple" isn't headed back to "MetaKovan"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/india-ban-ownership-cryptocurrencies-110427476.html

sorry wrong link
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22327594/metakovan-beeple-highest-auction-price-69-million-nft

“When you think of high-valued NFTs, this one is going to be pretty hard to beat,” MetaKovan said in a statement published by Christie’s. “And here’s why — it represents 13 years of everyday work. Techniques are replicable and skill is surpassable, but the only thing you can’t hack digitally is time. This is the crown jewel, the most valuable piece of art for this generation. It is worth $1 billion.”

lol

$69M was the third highest ever sale for a living artist, btw

this all gives me flashbacks to how in like 2014 there was a certain kind of annoying person who would pepper any conversation about any aspect of any kind of creative project with "you should totally do a kickstarter!"

wanna hear my latest dystopic vision, which i think black mirror has already done? imagine a world where NFTs - assigning value and commodifying things that previously were not in a "market" - are ubiquitous, and the whole early 2021-era where the discussion was temporarily focused NFTs and digital art seems hilariously old-fashioned and irrelevant. why not tokenize experiences, or people? shouldn't every person have a NFT value that can fluctuate and go up or down depending on the market forces. at least some people will think this is a wonderful idea, because they believe that the "market" would "reward" "good" "people". then it's basically like that one black mirror episode after that, you know the one

commodification and financialization of everyone and everything def not far fetched -- college students can now sell portions of their future income streams iirc.

and that happening in a shared digital space while the natural world burns up around us also seems pretty likely.

another layer to this is that a lot of the hyped NFTs are just, like, bad art. Like the Beeple thing -- it is very skilled and obviously took a lot of work, but it just seems kind of bad to me. Like the images don't work together well at all as a single giant image -- it reminds me of that million dollar page website. Individual images have a digital Banksy vibe.

like very /trench

yeah, it fucking blows

i was making images kind of like that for a while and it actually made me physically ill after a while, just the whole process and the way it came out in the end. on the other hand, maybe i just sucked lol

but yeah, it's just like for THAT to be the digital artwork of our time, blehhhhh

like, maybe ian cheng's Emissaries, that would be a candidate for me

it reminds me of that million dollar page website

or just like a big cloud generator website that stamps a giant FREECLOUD.NET watermark all over it. if you zoom in and look at how the individual images fit together in the mosaic, it's just a fucking turd sandwich

It's easy to dunk on the art, but I get that the current art isn't the point at all, it's just proof of concept shit, right? And unfortunately just the tip of the iceberg most likely.

yep

tip of an iceberg trying to melt itself

Isnt this all just an elaborate, digital version of what Marissa whatserface tried to pull 10 years back?

"My art is worth 10K so Im saying it is, pay up"

"My art is worth 10K so Im saying it is, pay up"

― Stoop Crone (Trayce), Monday, March 15, 2021 10:26 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

hell yeah 😎

https://mintable.app/music/item/GLOTTUSLP1-THEFIRSTGLOTTUSLPSPECIALEDITIONEXCLUSIVEREMASTER/sVa9rL9JkGReJZ4

everyone buy my nft thanks in advance

Shit, forks should put up his video game collection on foundation, they’re probably worth 8 trillion

This is a dumb trend.

(The environmental impact feels specious. The explanations I read about its environmental impact relies on asymptotic models that are completely detached from the realities of “mining--” the basic idea that computation is different (e.g. power consumption and clock-rate trade-offs) on graphics processors or FPGAs than desktop CPUs especially for Etherium's proof of work problem. But you’re all smart so I’m sure there’s something I’m missing!)

Out of curiosity I dug into how NFT's actually reference the media you're "buying" and my eyebrows are now orbiting the moon

— Jonty Wareing (@jonty) March 17, 2021

Honestly, I have been trying to come up to speed a little so that I can not “eat shit publicly” so often, and I’m still having trouble identifying trustworthy/informed sources. I’m like a Facebook grandma now, it’s awful.

On the environment/energy impact, I mean. A lot of the most detailed writing about it comes from blockchain advocates, and a lot of blockchain advocates seem like craven monsters. On the enviro side, there are plenty of well-intentioned people grappling with yet another unforced self-own of humanity, they’re exhausted, and there are a lot of basic errors/misunderstandings.

Arguing with blockchain fanatics is exhausting, yes. A lot of the same kind of life-in-a-vacuum thinking that you get from hardcore libertarians and presumably a ton of overlap.

Deep down it does admittedly make me mad that being (I still think) right about blockchain makes me $0 and being wrong about it has made many of them millionaires.

Oh, for sure. When people chant havefunstayingpoor, it is a sad defense to have to say “You don’t have to be rich to have fun”

I mean, I can also say “I look down from my perch at you being a fucking dick” but it doesn’t seem to be working for some reason

Oh well. I have nothing to do with these people. I cannot affect NFTs. I don’t want to make art that gets mistaken for any of this, and I haven’t been for a while. I guess that’s all I need to do.

the whole thing reminds me of the poker ecosystem, where 85% of them claim they're winning players. but the money's gotta be coming from somewhere!

I don’t want to make art that gets mistaken for any of this

also, i understand, "art", digital or otherwise, has nothing to do with NFTs. art is something NFTs can encompass and financially manipulate, but there's no inherent connection between art and NFTs. it'll go away, or it will dominate the world, or a form of it will dominate the world. it seems like it will dominate the world. i am the canary in the cryptogoldmine.

*CHIRP CHIRP*
*THESE GUYS ARE THE ANTITHESIS OF THE ARTFUL SPIRIT, AVOID THEM! CHIRP CHIRP!*

maybe that's the logical end. i'm living in a bunker, 2064. everyone is rich except for the whiny dissidents. i draw a circle on the prison wall by grinding a dull femur from some bag of bones that was there when i first saw the room. i am art man

the whole thing reminds me of the poker ecosystem, where 85% of them claim they're winning players. but the money's gotta be coming from somewhere!

otm

the whole purpose of NFTs for the crypto weirdos is ultimately to funnel money into cryptocurrencies from credulous artists etc. in order to further inflate the bubbles & make them more money

It’s either that or the petrodollar

https://news.artnet.com/opinion/beeple-everydays-review-1951656

69 million, not nice
http://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2021/03/Beeple-its-fun-to-draw-black-people.jpg

I also heard an interview with him - he seems like a complete idiot. Perhaps even an idiot with no delusion that he's anything other than an idiot.

his audience is as bad as he is

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/03/nfts-are-driving-stunts-and-diving-into-the-culture-wars

The insanity around NFTs, and what is now for sale as an NFT, has whiplashed from obscurity to frenetic hysteria in just a matter of weeks. While Ja Rule and trading cards and Beeple’s “artwork” are often talked about with perplexity, there are countless NFTs hitting the specialized trading markets almost hourly. Some are stunts, some are pitched as real art, and there’s everything in between. A company that specializes in blockchain technology, for example, purchased a real, physical print by the artist Banksy for $95,000, then lit the print on fire until it was destroyed, and then sold a digital version of it as an NFT for almost $400,000. Grimes, the musician, sold about $6 million worth of music-and-video NFTs last month. Jack Dorsey’s first tweet is currently at auction with a high bid of $2.5 million. A poker player is selling his most famous quotes as NFTs. The TV show American Gods is shilling trading cards of the show’s characters as NFTs. The website Quartz is offering a news article about NFTs as an NFT itself. There’s an NFT house for sale, nudes of the actor Katie Cassidy at auction as NFTs, and there are all sorts of digital collectibles ranging from pixelated punks to impish kitty cats with wings. Now an Unnamed Artist has a bridge to sell you.

If it feels to you like culture is collapsing in on itself and nothing makes sense, that’s because the speed with which these changes are taking place is exacerbating. It’s almost like we’re living in a simulation that has sped up and no one knows where the pause button is. But that, sadly, is by design. Bitcoin, which is only a little over a decade old, was first adopted by the video game culture: nerds who thought it was cool to mine on their computers and collect these odd little coins, but who are now Bitcoin billionaires. They are using that money, like Monopoly money that turned real overnight, to dictate what is considered art culturally. In doing so, they are—some believe—destroying the culture. Like all things tech, what we’re talking about when we talk about NFTs is still up for debate. In the same way that no one knew (or still doesn’t know?) if companies like Twitter and Facebook were “media companies” or “tech companies,” and the financial markets can’t decide if Tesla and its electric ilk are car companies or iPhones with wheels, NFTs are proving to be a ubiquitary that can be hijacked for anything that someone is willing to pay for: music, videos, collectibles, articles, and the most contentious of all: art.

a little over the top, but honestly i'm in burn it down mood so it resonates with me

that's good, reminds me of the Bruce Sterling quote "technology is an infinite powderkeg"

i wish i had made something of myself and had a big following, because I am *STARVING* for a big name whatever to say these words:

fuck all of this. fuck the old art world. fuck this new art world. reject both of those, loudly

i would logroll across the united states to lick the boot of someone important to say this

I see a lot of NFTs for sale on Instagram now for every mediocre piece of digital art there is

Deviantart should go NFT

i thought it did

the absolute hideousness of beeple's jpegs is pretty notable i think. this isn't just the art world elevating a charlatan, as usual, but something worse even than kitsch

we're talking sub-adbusters social commentary here

They are purposefully shocking for sure

I sort of enjoyed Beeple when I thought he was just some random guy with a lot of IG followers. It's kitschy for sure, but sometimes it's fun. But I had no idea he had so much art-world cache.

there is a sickening circularity to it.

beeple creates images that reflect the american grotesque, the whirpool of desire, cruelty, and meaninglessness that lies at the heart of our culture.

and then he is elevated by the "blue chip" art world, ultra-rich collectors, the very people who make our society that way.

whenever these people elevate nihilistic artists -- artists who seem to mock the idea that art should aspire to anything more than, like, a winking acknowledgement of its own status as a commodity -- it makes me angry. it just seems like an example of the rich investor class rubbing our noses in the face that they don't care, that they think it is uncool to care.

beeple seems like the worst example of this. i feel a little like this about koons, too.

beeple seems like the worst example of this. i feel a little like this about koons, too.

sorry for the double post

But I had no idea he had so much art-world cache.

honestly seems like he has zero. absolutely zero. but also that it reveals how empty something like koons is too. it's just whatever. it's a ton of money, it has nothing to do with art in either case

if it has something to do with "art", it has something to do with the part of art that i don't recognize.

this is basically the same as the grammies grammys

beeple_crap
Verified

2,568 posts
2m followers
869 following
beeple
art shit for yer facehole. --

filled with the best and worst quotes, like any vanity fair article

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/03/nfts-are-driving-stunts-and-diving-into-the-culture-wars

already quoted last week, like any post i make

trivia: i have sneezed like 20 times in the last 2 minutes

beeple is worse than koons, which is really saying something

i feel like this has to be read in the tradition of 'anti-art,' as like a new version of duchamp putting a urinal in the museum, but the gesture means something like the opposite of what it once did.

like, dada and similar movements were attacking the institution of the museum because it represented the system of philanthropy through which the ruling class justified its position. the bourgeoise, back then, wanted people to believe in culture, then. they were threatened by anarchism in art for the same reason they were scared of anarchists in politics, because it was a challenge to their legitimacy.

today it isn't really like that. the uber-rich investor class is aware that they are parasites. the notion that art should mean something, that anything should mean anything, is a threat to them. cynical self-awareness is the posture they like. they love things like warhol's quote that "making lots of money is the best kind of art." to them, this means that everything is just money. money is the most real thing, the only real thing, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a sucker. they like to patronize artists who seem to be saying this in their work.

that's my reading anyway. for a certain kind of financial sociopath, a beeple causes less anxiety than an abstract expressionist painting. the latter represents some kind of ideal -- or tries to -- whereas the former mocks ideals, revels in the grotesque, and maybe feigns at critiquing it but in a way that is self-disavowing anyway so there is no need to worry about it. "art shit for yer facehole."

i think it depends on the role: artist, buyer, or observer. almost everyone is the latter. the art sucks. that's my take. for the artist, it's an attempt to finally cash in on something that has made almost no one money. the most important thing is the buyer, because it's the most vicious. it has nothing to do with the art, or the observer. treeship is right that it's a rebuke to the idea that art should mean anything. it's more than a rebuke, it's an afterthought. who cares what it means? who cares if it means? what's it worth? what will it be worth? that's what it means. that's what high-end "art world" art has been about for a very long time. this is a translation to the mass market of idiot images

y'all on the money, er... no pun intended

i'm anxious about clicking that vanity fair link

i think it's all a useful way to figure out who is a complete douchebag, whether it comes to artist, speculator, or bystander. anywhere i go, within 45 feet of me, fucking sucks. (that's not true - if it were, i would be the perfect NFT artist)

the vanity fair piece was interesting. apparently beeple's work is related to alt right meme culture and early images included in his 'everydays' were often racist. the piece also claims that the people fueling the nft art craze are bitcoin millionaires who got in early and earned their money as a fluke. culturally, they are alt right/edgelord types, not the manhattan elite i was thinking of in my post.

it's all play money in the truest sense

"the art world" is definitely into beeple now, though. they don't have standards beyond what sells.

What if, in the future, you could buy a Baby Yoda puppy, and it knew to play with kids. But then it got screwed up, and it got confused, and the algorithm got messed up, and it started eating kids, and it got stray, and there were these attacks of stray Baby Yoda robots that used to be toys, but they got so much AI in the future that they got loose, and they’re fricking eating kids.

https://news.artnet.com/opinion/beeple-everydays-review-1951656

this is pretty good. elements of the art press isn't having it. good for them.

yeah, a few others tore it to shreds, too. the very first one i saw, though, was this:

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-56368868

So, best to put money aside and consider Everydays: The First 5000 Days as a work of visual art and not as a tradeable commodity/financial investment.

Is it any good?

Yes, is the short answer.

If you're into the comic book aesthetic, which can be traced back decades, then Beeple is a talented exponent of the genre.

It's not too much of a stretch to make a reference to Hieronymus Bosch's 15th Century densely weird masterpieces, or Andy Warhol's Pop Art, or the macabre nature of Philip Guston's surreal, cartoonish paintings of the late 1960s and 70s.

loooooooooool, that take was so awful on the very first day, aged very poorly

lol jesus

"the comic book aesthetic, which can be traced back decades" lol

it's kind of offensive to compare him to guston

bosch is safely distant, warhol was a great artist but he also flirted with the kind of market nihilism that made beeple possible, but guston's late work is a real attempt to capture the grotesque aspect of vietnam-era america. there is outrage behind it and real sadness. it's nothing like beeple's scattershot collection. there is no coherent point of view with beeple.

also, like, what is "the comic book aesthetic"? there are many artists working in different styles in comics.

Hieronymous dosh amirite

The digital art community is basically imploding right now as it has polarized into for and against jumping onto this train. People that knew nothing about this two weeks ago, are now cool with creating dox lists of other artists they think are on the wrong side. It’s pretty distressing.

― Kim, Thursday, March 11, 2021 6:57 AM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Why is it bad for people to publicly tell other people that their morals suck and that their art does, too? It isn't "doxing" if it's publicly available information, too.

Fuck NFTs. The only thing that's distressing about the situation is that it's just another playground for rich fucks to get more rich, and further evidence that the only art that matters will never actually matter to a market.

http://beeplegenerator.com/

It's not too much of a stretch to make a reference to Hieronymus Bosch's 15th Century densely weird masterpieces,

Actually, it is too much of a stretch ... none of the images used in the article have much "density" to them. If you want to make a reference to a famous painter, Magritte would be closest in terms of "weird" and the lack of density/commercial aesthetic.

or Andy Warhol's Pop Art,

how so? because he is a household name?

or the macabre nature of Philip Guston's surreal, cartoonish paintings of the late 1960s and 70s.

because one of the images selected for this article has a somewhat similar color palette to that period of Guston's?

the warhol comparison has to do with the way he incorporates pop culture symbols. there isn't much similarity in how the two artists use this material though.

it's just a very inept artist. this writer is just itching for the chance to "legitimate" art that the hoi polloi don't "get." they think that is the situation here, elitist gatekeeping. when in actuality what's happened is a total collapse of standards instituted from above, not any kind of democratization.

a lot of those "standards" were kinda problematic tho

Yeah but this isn’t the way to smash them though, that’s my point. The pressure is coming from above here, not below.

is it? where is the pressure coming from? honestly, it's not clear to me. the pressure is coming from crypto people + money. to the degree that you think those two overlap. is that "below", in the sense that they're championing terrible art and don't know what the fuck they're talking about? or is that "above", in the sense that they have money?

and where does christies fall in a scheme like that?

Above/below maybe is a bad way to frame it.

This isn’t an insurgency led by artists. There have been many such movements through the centuries, carried out for different ends. This is something else.

Above/below is too simplistic. It’s more like it’s coming from people who don’t care about art, who are neither reformers nor revolutionaries. It’s just trashing the joint to no real end, and defended using this older language of the avant garde redefining what art means, language that is irrelevent to this moment.

what's been disturbing to me is the realization that to the extent that there is an institutional structure around this thing, it's places like rhizome, and they've been championing blockchain shit for years. and maybe for good reason! it may very well be a way to deal with a longstanding issue with provenance and digital art, cool. but what seems to be happening is that it's just getting co-opted by the crypto world, which is even larger and richer, and the art people kind of...don't give a fuck? some of them? it's very telling, I have to say. i don't know who kim is, upthread, and there are a lot of other people online expressing similar views, but YEAH: it' a fucking turd, y'all

it's that eternal question:eating shit and dying is at some point on the spectrum. at what point is the pain of trying to persist in a world like this greater than the pain of eating shit and dying?

on the spectrum of bliss and searing pain i mean

Christies will learn to justify beeple. Their catalog writers will inscribe him seamlessly into the canon. One day he will have a museum retrospective. The whitney.

Karl aw man I wanna give you a hug and play you some Cocteau Twins rarities, someday man. Go to a park if you can, I know it's like 9 PM in Chicago

reminder: none of this shit works if the magnetic fields flip and kill the grid

stephen merritt just woke up from a cat nap, startled

his iPhone has mysteriously died

it is oddly silent

Above/below is too simplistic. It’s more like it’s coming from people who don’t care about art, who are neither reformers nor revolutionaries. It’s just trashing the joint to no real end, and defended using this older language of the avant garde redefining what art means, language that is irrelevent to this moment.

― treeship., Wednesday, March 24, 2021 6:45 PM (four hours ago)

it's just kinda odd to me ... idk, maybe it's rationalizing me getting out of the "art world" even at the provincial level I was at, but I feel like the fact that art is being sold and speculated on in this way isn't inconsistent with the history of art speculation and sales. Like some legitimate art that is sold is similarly arbitrary in its "artness" ... the difference is the artists who made that art were part of the art world and were playing the game.

Honestly, I think the NFT is going to evolve to be about things more lucrative than "art" tbh. It'll be dumber shit like naming rights for some celebrity child.

I feel like the focus on the art sales via NFT is a result of the fact that Covid has given art writers a lot less to write about, and so this is a bigger thing than it could have been if there were festivals, and fairs, and high concept big budget museum blockbusters ... though it is interesting in the sense that there seems to be more coverage and discussion about this beeple thing than the growing organization and activism of lower level art museum workers around cultural and economic equity vis a vis art institutions' programming and the huge pay discrepancy between executive staff and "star" curators vs. lower level workers who were the ones most financially impacted by museums closing due to covid.

One of the Winklevoss boys spent today arguing with people about the superiority of NFTs and my god there has never been a better argument for a 100% estate tax than someone that stupid being worth ten figures.

I'm really starting to understand how a marginally clever nerd stole a multi-billion company right out from under his nose.

— Respectable Lawyer (@RespectableLaw) March 24, 2021

what's been disturbing to me is the realization that to the extent that there is an institutional structure around this thing, it's places like rhizome, and they've been championing blockchain shit for years. and maybe for good reason! it may very well be a way to deal with a longstanding issue with provenance and digital art, cool. but what seems to be happening is that it's just getting co-opted by the crypto world, which is even larger and richer, and the art people kind of...don't give a fuck? some of them? it's very telling, I have to say. i don't know who kim is, upthread, and there are a lot of other people online expressing similar views, but YEAH: it' a fucking turd, y'all

― Zach_TBD (Karl Malone)

the crypto world and people who are into blockchain shit are the same thing

I feel like the fact that art is being sold and speculated on in this way isn't inconsistent with the history of art speculation and sales. Like some legitimate art that is sold is similarly arbitrary in its "artness" ... the difference is the artists who made that art were part of the art world and were playing the game.

this is a good point -- i have to think about why this bothers me so much.

compare beeple to likelike, something like martin creed's "the light goes on and it goes off." this work is also mischievous, especially when you look at the things he says about it, denying that there is any "deeper significance" and urging viewers to simply enjoy the experience of the light going on and off. it's designed to add humor to the gallery, it's an attention-grabbing thing for the artist, but it doesn't really try to damn art, even if it lightly pokes fun at its pretensions. there is a long history of this kind of thing in art -- work that baffles the public and that curators justify on kind of absurd, guffed up academic grounds. the public dislikes it, but in any case the art world chugs along, a space for display, discourse, debate, whatever. there are many earnest people in that world too, even as there are many cynics.

beeple seems like a new chapter, i guess because he reflects this harsh, reactionary kind of meme aesthetics. the spirit of his work just seems really "off" to me, like if the art world embraces it, they're embracing the worst aspects of themselves.

sorry for all the typos

To clarify my “distress” up thread, what I’m referring to isn’t people going after opportunistic dude bro artists grifting on this - but there were lots of independent, freelance or commercial concept artist types of people, many of them women etc that have been chipping away for years to get become viable in the field, that were just saying things like “what’s all this about, and should I get into it?” and then immediately getting pitchforked and backing away. But the dude bros are still in it and capitalizing like they did before those other people breached their club. That aspect feels shitty and backward.

beeple seems like a new chapter, i guess because he reflects this harsh, reactionary kind of meme aesthetics. the spirit of his work just seems really "off" to me, like if the art world embraces it, they're embracing the worst aspects of themselves.

― treeship., Thursday, March 25, 2021 3:13 AM (five hours ago)

I guess I view the art world as similar to capitalism, in that it will incorporate things of value or perceived importance into itself. It recoups.... Like, after "The Art of the Motorcycle" and all the corporate-sponsored consumer goods-as-art exhibitions, and the expansion of art museums into "design" ... this thing seems consistent. Granted, the museums aren't doing shows like "The Art of Napalm" or "Fascists' Favorite Paintings" ... like, the scope of what is art may be broad, but there are ethics in terms of the exclusion of "bad" things. I guess my question for you is, should this be excluded because it shouldn't be "art" or because it is a "bad thing"?

I’m seeing a lot of conflation of NFTs with digital art by people who seem clueless that institutions like the MoMA have already exhibited digital art for decades.

I think my problem with it is that crypto is larger than the art world, and doesn’t care about the quality of art at all. It’s irrelevant. How much is it worth, though?

The art world already exists within capitalism, of course (as I’ve been reminded by many crypto dude bros. I’m not sure if Kim is referring to me as a dude bro, but yeah, I did check my follows on Twitter to see who was more into crypto than art, then loudly unfollowed a handful of people. But I’m pretty sure no one gives a fuck what I think, not on Twitter, especially not in the art world). But I think NFTs/crypto is different. Because from the very beginning, crypto envelops the artist into the currency. You have to mint it. That’s complicated. You have to have a crypto wallet and all that shit. it’s not that hard, but it takes time to figure out what it’s worth. Then boom! You convince some rich prick to buy your ugly digital art, for which the artist receives ETH. Now the artist has ETH while the rich prick has the art. I imagine the former artist getting way more interested in ETH at this point, making some money, and trading it around, because that’s what it’s for! And of course they will want to spend some of that ETH on some crappy art made by an online friend of theirs that was also conned into the game. Now you’ve got two artists with ETH. It’s more interesting than the art they were making - way more! Only now, their Twitter bio leads off with #NFTartist instead of #artist

Bad post, on my part, but they can’t all be winners.

I guess - imagine trading your art for 400 six flags bux. Or wait, don’t imagine that

Except, all the people that buy your art live in six flags

And it’s helloween, you know it’s fucking helloween

lol back in the day artists just traded their work for drugs, booze and/or a place to crash ...

There's also a particular attitude I hate in the NFT world of people who don't seem to have prior interest in or knowledge of art or the art business showing up and saying "this is going to revolutionize art!" It reminds me a lot of when tech discovered music (MP3s, then streaming) and constantly lectured everyone about how great all these new developments were for musicians while having no actual clue about music or the existing economics of music. Just kind of theorizing from reason about why this is obviously good for art and then unquestioningly believing one's own bullshit.

bet there’s a Kevin Roose NYT article that is now a NFT. It’s up past 100K with a few minutes to go

xp like I saw a tweet that said something like "this is the art museum of the future!" And it was just a gallery with some displays of short digital animations up on the walls. Like do these people not realize that there were already shows exactly like that before NFTs became a thing?

They don’t. NFTs aren’t digital art or any art, as we’ve all mentioned I think. This week it’s beeple, but it’s coming to other sectors quick. Hopefully that means it’ll blow up in everyone’s face soon, but I’m feeling more of a social media dread. The inevitable, you know it’s bad, and you know it’s going to be very popular

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/595180/pet-rock-history

There's also a particular attitude I hate in the NFT world of people who don't seem to have prior interest in or knowledge of art or the art business showing up and saying "this is going to revolutionize art!" It reminds me a lot of when tech discovered music (MP3s, then streaming) and constantly lectured everyone about how great all these new developments were for musicians while having no actual clue about music or the existing economics of music. Just kind of theorizing from reason about why this is obviously good for art and then unquestioningly believing one's own bullshit.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Thursday, March 25, 2021 12:35 PM (forty-five minutes ago)

what's funny about this is the tech people went from "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE" to "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE MADE ARTIFICIALLY SCARCE & FINANCIALIZED" in under two decades

i think a bunch of people that i thought "didn't care about politics" were really just "libertarians"

Karl Malone, no, not calling you a dude bro. Unless you are secretly Android Jones or something.

hahaha, nope!

i ope android jones lurks on this thread though :)

it's weird/interesting because i was in college classes discussing marx and post-structuralism with a couple of the early rhizome people ...

...For Ms. Jin, the auction was an experiment to explore a new frontier of the attention economy. As a venture capitalist, Ms. Jin focuses her investments on businesses in the creator space, which is loosely defined as individuals whose influence and fame originates from online platforms. She’s a deep believer in the power of technology and the internet to empower younger generations and build careers — she described the allure of influencing to me recently as “monetizing individuality.”

But the more time she spent with influencers and creators, the more she realized an unsettling truth: Creating a living on the internet is almost always precarious and lopsided. Those at the very top are showered with riches and fame, but even those with large followings struggle at the whim of online platforms and algorithms. In an excellent December article for Harvard Business Review, she detailed her findings at length, arguing that there is no creator middle class and offering solutions to build one.

Back to the $25,000 GIF. The moving image Ms. Jin put up for auction was an illustration of her Harvard Business Review article. Her hope was that turning it into an NFT would be a bit of performance art and that the process would gin up conversation about the article but also about new ways for creators to make money and control the ownership of their work.

She expected it to fetch a modest price. But overnight, a bidding war took place. Eventually, a cryptocurrency investor and founder of Collab.Land named James Young — who helped build the popular game Farmville and a cryptocurrency-powered adult entertainment network called SpankChain — won the NFT.

Mr. Young says he bought the NFT in part to prove a point. He wanted to use the purchase to signal that cryptocurrency and NFTs in general could be a solution to the problems Ms. Jin outlined in her article. “In college I read Marshall McLuhan and how the medium is the message and thought, ‘What if I communicated via this transaction?’” he said in a recent podcast about the purchase. So he paid up.

“It made me come to this conclusion of, I don’t know, YOLO, let me just try this,” he said. Ms. Jin was stunned and humbled by the final bid. “It’s so exciting,” she told me. “He wanted to start a conversation with me. He was drawn to the image because of what it represented and it started a real relationship. For him, buying it was a form of activism.”

If all this makes you want to roll your eyes out of your skull, I would like you to know you’re not alone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/opinion/what-are-nfts.html

a thread:

I’m now the owner of one of the first Music Copyright NFTs (terms and conditions apply). It was a very painless process!

— Mint Royale (@MintRoyale) March 23, 2021

honestly, i didn't copy my "this NFT thing leads to black mirror" from anyone, except the tv show black mirror, but i'm glad that someone who is more powerful and persuasive than me is spreading the message:

Recently, my colleague Taylor Lorenz profiled a few companies that were looking to find new ways to help digital content creators and influencers make money online. Among the new ventures was a platform called NewNew, which wants to build a “human stock market,” where fans can vote to control mundane decisions in a creator’s day-to-day life. Other ideas included custom influencer cryptocurrencies (in essence, tokens that can be used only to purchase items directly from the influencer), paying for fan interactions and using NFTs to give fans shares of ownership in YouTube videos and other content.

A quote from NewNew’s founder and chief executive, Courtne Smith, gave me pause. She told Ms. Lorenz, “We’re building an economy of attention where you purchase moments in other people’s lives, and we take it a step further by allowing and enabling people to control those moments.”

Human stock markets! Controlling an influencer’s every life choice! That feels like the logical end point of the attention economy — the part where The Machines win for good.

Anil Dash, the C.E.O. of the programming company Glitch and a veteran of the tech industry, went a bit further, calling NFTs a scam. That’s noteworthy because Mr. Dash accidentally helped invent the concept. Back in 2014, while onstage at a tech conference, he bought a GIF from artist Kevin McCoy and published the transfer of ownership on the blockchain as a quirky experiment in ownership, making him one of the first people to participate in the cryptoart market. But Mr. Dash argues that what’s taking place today isn’t empowering or sustainable, but exploitative.

“If you were going to say, ‘Let’s let creators own their work and profit from it in perpetuity,’ the system you’d design would be the opposite of this,” he told me recently. “Instead, they designed an environmental catastrophe in which the only way you can participate is to have already bought into hyperinflated prices on a completely contrived market.” He compared the NFT market and its exorbitant prices to expensive condos in cities like Manhattan bought by billionaires that sit empty. “It’s just a store of value,” he said.

What seems inevitable is that all of this will push us to re-evaluate how we assign value to attention. This is why people like Mr. Dash are worried about the creep of NFT speculation under the guise of celebrating and empowering creators.

“The gig economy is coming for absolutely everyone and everything,” he told me. “The end game of that is the GoFundMe link posted beneath a viral tweet so they can pay for their health care. Being an influencer sounds fun until it’s ‘keep producing viral content to literally stay alive.’ That’s the machine we’re headed toward.”

i don't really think NFTs are going to stick around because like every other crypto "innovation" people at large will eventually figure out that they're an obvious scam and pretty much no one not already successful is actually making money from them. the well of artists who can be convinced that it's good for them to spend more money minting an NFT than they will ever make from selling it will dry up and cryptocurrency weirdos will then move on to their latest grift.

Personally I think they're here to stay, though we may not have yet seen the first implementation that will have lasting impact.

yeah, i agree.
downloading .mp3s became streaming, a bit later.

i don't know what to do. i can't control it. my therapist would tell me this! i know i can't. i can't even influence .0000001% of what will be said about it. i know a handful of people in my old life/meatspace that are crypto people. i give them a pass because i know what their lives have been. it's another lottery ticket, it's a way to finally stick it to people, i get it. oh yeah, and also something about libertarian bullshit! it's always something like that. but fuck. gross. goddammit

there is a virus-like mentality, too - seriously. i don't express myself well these days. i can't concentrate. i'm constantly high. i don't read enough. i don't follow it, i'm just fucking lost most of the time, clearly. but it's almost like a torrent what.cd oink thing - no one's forcing anyone to do anything, exactly. but by uploading/downloading something and combining that with money, you say something about what you support. you add to the "ecosystem" (BLECH) while also becoming invested in its continuity. it's an investment, both in the token but also in the medium itself. that's always been true. i post on ilx, which in some ways is an investment in ilx. i want it to last. i want to make good posts for a number of reasons. i want other people to do the same. i would send you all 100 ilx bux if i could. some of you, definitely most. but one key difference: i know this community, sorta. i'm proud to send you all ilx bux. the crypto people? fucking take a look. fuck that. fuck aaaaaall of that, and i say that knowing that with the covid vax era, many will be having awkward conversations about robin hood and crypto with a brother-in-law or some shit soon. good luck to us all, and may god fuck the united states

the only reason there's any money for the idea at the moment is the blockchain nonsense hype and blockchain shit is clearly not at all an actual good solution for the concept of "digital certificates of authenticity" anyway and is where the majority of the problems come from. if you made something similar that solves those problems by not using blockchain shit, no one is going to care or spend money on it, and blockchain is very much not in any way the future in general.

xp - i up my bid to 200 ilx bux to you Karl

lol back in the day artists just traded their work for drugs, booze and/or a place to crash ...

― sarahell, Thursday, 25 March 2021 16:31 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJEf35V8_ac

I'm really heartened that there are still young people whom I know who make and sell and trade zines, tapes, and other things that actually exist in the real world.

All of this is a fucking scam, afaic.

i subscribed to a $75 "art CSA" over the pandemic: a quarterly mailer of whatever product they make or are able to replicate to a collection of 50-100 patrons. that included a "make-your-own-cell-phone-bed" and sachets of tea. some of it was interesting and some of it was junk but it felt like a fair way to support someone who was trying to figure out how to keep it together.

awwww that's cute.

i think she's done now but if you're curious:
http://emilybate.com/solo-work/csa/

$75 quarterly for 50 subscribers is $3,750, do that four times a year for $15,000. hmm.

you know what would be a cool idea? find the livable wage for your area + living situation (for me: chicago, no kids, net worth around zero), make that the target amount to raise, and then the more people join the CSA, the lower the price goes. CSA won't go into effect unless a minimum threshold of subscribers is reached.

for me, a livable salary would be somewhere around $34,000 (rounding)

and let's set the minimum subscriber threshold to 100. if exactly 100 (and no more) subscribe, that's $340 each per year (or $85 per quarter). so i'd have to convince 100 people that it's worth $85 every three months for me to send them some shit. and then those people have to either re-subscribe, or there have to be other people to fill up their absence if they stop subscribing.

but if 300 people subscribe, the cost goes down to $113/year, or about $28/quarter. i'd be much more comfortable asking people to pay $25 for three months worth of weird shit then $85, that's for fucking sure.

but really the true business plan is to get 10,000 subscribers. that way it would work out to less than $4/year! of course, if i have to mail out things to 10K people, that's going to cost me...at least $30K in expenses, probably? which raises my cost of living up to about $65K. which would then raise the subscription cost up to $6.50 a year. that seems like a deal! ok, first i need to rent a warehouse, then i need to quickly sign up 10,000 subscribers

if you set your CSA as a digital humble bumble bundle, your distribution costs are almost zero.

that's right! i didn't think about that. hmm. it's a bad time for me, personally, to be shifting from digital to analog! but it's true, doing it all online would be a massive cost/distribution/time saver. energy, as well.

i'm 90% goofing off, but i am truly interested in new ways to make art and live at the same time, which i think is why i feel a little extra burned by the NFT shit. i had been loosely following blockchain for years, as it pertains to authentication issues, because i thought (and think, still) that blockchains are potentially a huuuuge change in how society creates and enforces contracts (a topic that i know just barely enough about to know how much that i don't know). de-centralized. cool!

but in the end, it seems to fall prey to the same forces that ruin everything else - the need for some people to make more money than they need which always seems to involve other people "losing". fuck that. is it possible to think of ways to live that don't involve making tons of money beyond subsistence? Does running a sustainable business/practice become any easier if you just openly admit that you're only trying to make the bare amount you need to avoid dying?

KM have you ever shared pics of your art here? insta?

yeah, i've beaten ilx over the head with my stuff so many times it's kind of humiliating. + my most successful stuff (conferencecall) is a full-on ilx collab. if it ever made money i'd send Z_S stimulus checks to everyone who helped, but as it is, my net career earnings for my websites is around $-2000

https://marker.medium.com/if-you-cant-afford-to-do-it-for-free-don-t-be-a-creator-569488f3ef72

i know, medium, but it's not a bad piece!

i think if you can find a group of collectors who like your work (physical work, not digital), you could cultivate them over time to do a subscription program. But it's hard! I know a couple of production potters (which means that they make work explicitly for sale and design their work with the intent of making it cost effective to live on) and the margins are slim, the work is hard and the chance of breaking beyond subsistence level is sadly slim. I know you know this but art is not valued by its hourly creation rate but by its worth either in the eyes of the purchaser or in some invisible bullshit market. your work is unlikely to break into the invisible bullshit market because you are not famous and to become famous you'd need to be in the invisible bullshit market but to get in the invisible bullshit market you have to be famous, etc. So maybe best to develop a small audience of collectors by doing local shows?

or get famous!

lol! sounds easy!

curious though, why did you say "(physical work, not digital)"? do you think the subset of people willing to subscribe to that kind of thing would be more enduring if they received something physical in the end, rather than a link?

i do! i think 25 a month for a unique piece of art (or two) is a not unreasonable indulgence for even vaguely middle class people if they like what you do but not if you're selling pdfs. I know i'm old but i think of digital as bonus stuff and the thing you hold in your hand as what you're paying for.

Some production potters rotate in new mugs for $45 or $50 and sell new ones to the core customer base every three to six month and that's how they pay the rent.

But they hit niche markets and are good at selling themselves. here's a bunch of production guys, might give you a sense of how they work their markets. No idea if these guys are "successful" but they have over 10k followers so they've developed a following at least!
https://www.instagram.com/murava_ceramics/
https://www.instagram.com/clarissaeck/
https://www.instagram.com/canopicstudio/
https://www.instagram.com/davezackin/

basically the rules seem to be that you learn to do something really well, then figure out the thing you would enjoy making for free for the rest of your life, then do it for almost free for several years and then you get famous in the smallest possible way and then you kinda make enough money to live. cheaper than college i guess.

yeah. i get that, i see what it takes. i think it's possible for some people.

but it all reminds me of something from the venture capitalist at the end of that NYT piece by Warzel:

Ms. Jin understands the precariousness but sees it differently. The path to a creator middle class, she argues, is to democratize your income streams across a variety of digital platforms. She described it to me as being like a pyramid — at the bottom are standard advertisements, which monetize viewers, even if they’re coming to your work accidentally. Higher up, you have affiliate links, where fans can buy something an influencer recommends. Atop that might be a subscription fee to a Patreon or Substack newsletter. Higher up still is custom merchandising or social media posts for superfans. NFTs, she argues, are for the single superfan — a creator’s one true fan who is willing to shell out an extreme amount of money.

As we spoke, I argued that NFTs seemed like the ultimate way for creators or influencers to monetize their audience’s attention. She suggested I had it backward: NFTs are a way for those with enough means to gain the attention of a creator. “In this case of my NFT, it’s really that I am paying attention to him,” she said, referring to Mr. Young. “I ended up forming a real bond with him because of his investment in me and my idea.”

Are NFTs just an attention hack? Why shell out $1 million for a tweet from the billionaire Elon Musk if not to catch the eye of the notoriously mercurial richest man in the world?

While NFTs as the ultimate form of patronage makes sense, I’m still unconvinced that they help solve the problem of the internet’s class inequality. This isn’t to impugn Ms. Jin’s work as an investor in companies trying to lift up new creators and build a more sustainable business model. I first reached out to her in part because her work has centered on creators as a powerful and important segment of the digital economy. But the current pyramid structure Ms. Jin described to me sounded like an exhausting hustle (she agreed). It also seems to herald a maturation of the attention economy — one that feels increasingly precarious and that continues to privilege those with big audiences whose attention is worth a considerable sum.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/opinion/what-are-nfts.html

oh it is absolutely an exhausting hustle! i don't personally know a single artist without a rich family/spouse who lives comfortably. but i think they do it because they have to.

an exhausting hustle. that sounds exactly right. that's how i feel, just thinking about this shit. "you have to be willing to do it for free", i completely agree. i'd say you have to be willing to do it at your own expense, actually, because that's more accurate. we don't have basic income, we don't have enough kingly courts to bestow drunken patronages to artisans, and mostly, we have an incredible oversupply of art, and very little demand. in order to exist within this, it has to be an exhausting hustle. how else will we know who the fittest are unless others don't survive?

i guess i don't blame people for jumping to NFTs. they're a scam, but so is everything else, it seems.

i think that's why my mind drifts to schemes that centers around people getting a minimum/living wage. that's what i want from other artists, too - i don't really care to support people whose ultimate goal is to make money. i get that people have to feed their kids and pay for medical bills and all that shit. but i think it sets a good standard to show that you're just trying to achieve the minimum viable wage. i dunno. i don't know what the fuck i'm talking about

in a reverse pyramid scheme of human empathy, the subscriber threshold for "activating" a project would be at a level high enough to guarantee a living wage during that time period for the artist. any surplus subscriber money/donations would be applied to another artist working under a similar living wage system

^^honestly, that's the kind of thing i want to do^^

why is that so hard?

and then, it's like if it doesn't hit that threshold (100 people, 300, whatever), then it doesn't fucking happen, and you don't have to go through the humiliating process of watching your patreon dwindle down from 9 to 3 subscribers after week 4 while sending out miserable updates about all the upcoming work you're so proud to show

plus, the reverse pyramid scheme of human empathy puts a cap on success. yeah, you could get more subscribers than the amount needed for your livable income, but by design it's not a fucking fame contest, it distributed the surplus to other people who need it. i think that's a better goal than something like instagram, where the goalposts are evershifting (500 followers! no, 1000! now 10K!...but the true level of success is always out of reach?)

who is it that basically predicted / theorized all of this? *looks up "theorist who argued that capitalism turns everything into a commodity" and finds wikipedia article on karl marx's concept of commodity fetishism* oh

listen, i'm familiar with the marx brothers, groucho is my favorite

See I like harpo

I have been running my own poetry writing workshops digitally for a while. It's made me about 12 grand or so since last summer, and is a great way to read work from both established and very green writers without the absolute bullshit of academia. It's a hustle, and a ton of work, but it's my life's work, and I hardly advertise any longer, word of mouth really works.

that's so cool. that's the best.

I also know a lot of ceramics and other visual art based people who make quite a living from their stuff.

Part of it for some, tho, is having a built-in audience. I have a pal who makes jewelry using old railroad china, and old train nerds and foamer types make her releases sell out in literal minutes. It's nuts.

Another thing is that some friends make more low-key items that are 'low stakes' like stickers and badges, then the audience finds out they are also making lovely vases or coffee mugs.

Anyway, I guess I feel like it's a double-edged sword, as such projects can take away from the impulse of the artist, and lead to burnout really fast. I did two workshops on different days while I was working full-time just recently, and it made me want to die because I had no time for myself or my own writing and reading.

back when I had an art job, I seriously was talking to my boss about possibly commissioning you, Karl ... or like, some small stipend to feature your web-work on our blog or something ... idk, I spend a lot of time talking to artists about money and the hustle and seeing what they make, and how, and ... it's really challenging.

i really appreciate that, sarahell. that's really nice of you, it really is. <3 thank you. i think if that would have came through in the last few years, i would have massively fucked up the opportunity! i think the thing that precipated my big breakdown a few years ago was the Longmont Potion Castle opportunity. Seriously, basic income is better for me. just give me a check, let me do my thing for just a couple people. hustling is terrible for me, it hurts my body

i just had a really wonderful moment that probably illustrates a healthier relationship to art (for me). i just learned how to play find the river on guitar, and then sweetness followed followed, on spotify, so i learned how to play that last night. i just got my second shot in my arm, and i'm going to a backyard BBQ at a friend's place in a couple weeks with some early vaxxers. maybe i'll just play those songs for them. i don't do that, normally (ever. at all), but i feel like just doing it and they all know that i'm in a weird place and be accepting and understanding of it, i think. these are people i know, and i'll play them the songs and they'll remember that i liked rem a ton in high school 20 years ago, and i think they'll appreciate that. that seems so much better than having some special motion graphix trick appreciated by some libertarian turd for .42323 ETH, and having that awful subsidiary thought "should i do this stupid mograph trick again, only slighly better, to please some other turd for slightly more?", gross!

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdj79/peoples-expensive-nfts-keep-vanishing-this-is-why

Clements distinguished between the NFT artwork (the image) and the NFT, which is the little cryptographic signature that actually gets logged.

"I use the analogy of OpenSea and similar platforms acting like windows into a gallery where your NFT is hanging,” he said. “The platform can close the window whenever they want, but the NFT still exists and it is up to each platform to decide whether or not they want to close their window.”

This is such a tortured metaphor. They had to hint that the artwork is still on their platform (it is on their server, but they'll never make it available), which led to "windows" in a gallery.

Show me your NFTs dude

*looks toward the clouds*

Some say they’re always there, if you have the eyes to see them

An NFT for a picture of 1 paper share of circuit city stock

can't we just go back to trading stickers

Pogs, please

Last month, Tom Kuennen, a property manager from Ontario, coughed up $500 worth of cryptocurrency for a JPEG of an Elon Musk-themed “Moon Ticket” from DarpaLabs, an anonymous digital art collective. He purchased it through the marketplace OpenSea, one of the largest vendors of so-called non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, in the hopes of reselling it for a profit.

“It’s like a casino,” he said in an interview. “If it goes up 100 times you resell it, if it doesn't, well, you don’t tell anyone.”

:D

i don't have a very large art collection. just a few real things. but when i look at them, i do think of the potential profit, and it brings me great joy, perhaps the greatest i've felt

gee, i hope elon musk's butthole rises in value today

a rising butthole lifts all shits

i have brought this upon myself

he may have turned to the dark side, but lol

https://davidoreilly.medium.com/the-definitive-nft-medium-article-500855317d8a

list of links at the bottom hits kinda hard after all that

It is from this turning point that I began a journey of discovery that opened my eyes to the danger and cost of this technology. Make no mistake — NFTs are not harmless and not benign, and have zero to do with artists making money. They are — and I do not say this lightly — without a doubt the single greatest threat that planet Earth has ever faced.

not that any of this justifies NFTs, it's just quite funny

Oh, I kept reading. Well I’m still the king

for you Karl

paddington bear has made an NFT (New Friend Today)

— Paddington Bear Updates (no affiliation) (@fakepaddington) March 30, 2021

One of my favorite crypto-asshole arguments is that crypto is actually GOOD for the environment because the demand it creates for renewable energy is driving innovation, or something.

every fucking dipshit is using NFTs as their april fools joke, brilliant work marketing people

NFTs may finally bring about the magical economy, where everyone in the world's income is derived from taking in everyone else's laundry buying and selling NFT-tagged images.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2021-04-03/robot-s-nft-art-sells-for-over-688k-video

https://artreview.com/why-the-artworld-loves-to-hate-nft-art-beeple-christies-grimes/

good ^^

I feel like even calling it "NFT Art" is a misnomer. It's digital art. An NFT is just a thing you sell that is nominally attached to a piece of digital art.

But what kind of digital art is valued by NFT investors? So far you aren't seeing NFTs for Sothebys-style art make much of an impact.

i prefer "NFT Art", because it carries with it the meaning "this is shitty art, in addition to the shitty people who buy and sell it"

But what kind of digital art is valued by NFT investors? So far you aren't seeing NFTs for Sothebys-style art make much of an impact.

modern art institutions are coming around to digital art in slow motion (comparable to how it took decades for the "art world" to come around to "motion pictures" at art, or the excruciating "conversation" around the idea of "games" as art now)

imo a good artist should reject NFTs and crypto-bullshit, but they sure as fuck better be rejecting whatever "art world" previously existed as well.

trying to sell good digital art to a NFT turd is like selling pogs to a rich adolescent

NF(art)T

http://blog.seanbonner.com/2021/03/12/wtf-nft/

it's hard to believe someone is comparing the environmental cost of cryptocurrency with the entirety of the global banking system
bitcoin's total value right now ~$1 trillion, I wonder how much the entire global banking system processes in a year?

Whenever I see this thread title I immediately think of newts and efts, as in this article. Once my brain saw this connection, it cannot unsee it.

from that artreview piece

https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/b1e-1230x586.jpg
"A popular internet meme of 2020 features an outraged bowtied figure who insists to another figure (representing the US Federal Reserve) that he can’t just ‘artificially inflate the economy by creating money’. To which the Fed character, next to a printer busily printing dollars, grins ‘haha, money printer go brrrrr’. Billions have been minted by central banks to support the incomes of people suffering the economic effects of the lockdown response to COVID-19. But printing money means that interest rates for fiat currency are effectively zero. In those circumstances, it’s not hard to see the attraction of moving fiat currency into cryptocurrency, or flipping virtual artworks that might increase rapidly in value, as Beeple’s CROSSROADS did in February, when it was resold for $6.6m, from an original sale of $66.6k. Cryptocurrency, NFTs and visual art have, without the artworld quite grasping it, combined at a moment when fiat currency has, in essence, become worthless, wages are dead and there is no reason for most people to save for a future that seems utterly without promise."

zero interest rate means money is worthless. right.

I always trust artists to have a firm grasp of Central Bank monetary policy. I would like the author of that piece to do a performance art piece where they destroyed piles of 'worthless fiat currency" to prove their point.

hard to put into words how fucked america is, but this article headline almost thoroughly does it pic.twitter.com/INMg4zyvz4

— Younger (@JustinYounger) April 8, 2021

the subheadline does it too

https://babbykense.medium.com/a-response-to-jisus-nft-superdocument-33ac27a5ad38

catching up to this one, in the wake of catching up to Jisu's popular 'voice of reason' / 'voice of the younger & minority NFT middle class'

blockchain is good because decentralization is good. what do NFTs ultimately decentralize? they decentralize authentication

When I see artists I admire promote N f Ts now I just smh

RIP NFTs

https://crypto.jayandsilentbob.com

just saw an artist friend has started doing this, guess he has no other way to stay afloat, sad times all round.

Is there any possible doubt in anyone's mind that these are going to be looked at as the pogs of 2021?
feel free to quote this to me in 2030 when beeple is president

I agree, but I thought bitcoin would be a joke by now.

bitcoin benefited from arriving on the last train before the end of capitalism, social media overload and nihilism as smart business
i imagine a sunspot is gonna wipe every server on earth and then all this shit will be so much dust in the wind aka SOON A CLEANSING

great news for "success kid" and "bad luck Brian"

https://www.yahoo.com/now/disaster-girl-meme-nft-214005699.html

the only nfts i deal in are nerds in the Fucking trashcan. suck my Dick

— wint (@dril) April 30, 2021

Interesting interview between curtator Michelle Kuo and artist Seth Price on NFTs here:
https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/547

relevant quote

SP: You were talking about getting at some idea of what art is, or how it behaves. Actually, there is one way that contemporary art is kind of the perfect vehicle for NFTs. A financial instrument is a contract between people. That’s literally all it is, a highly abstract agreement. And that’s what art is, too. There’s a weird consonance there. Art has no consistent agreed-upon value, there’s no common definition of what art even is. So an NFT artwork is a pretty complex social agreement that, first of all, this is art; second of all, it has value; third, we’ll transfer it into this even more crazy realm. All of this transformation is a kind of suspension of disbelief, or a kind of magic. It’s like, the more we dematerialize everything, the more potential material we can get. We don’t really have a cosmology that can hold all these weird contradictions we’re making. That’s the paradox of the moment we’re in.

maybe I misunderstand, but quote seems to imply that the creation of the NFT is "transferring it into this even more crazy realm" and "dematerializing". But the NFT is doing the opposite. it's taking something less material, say a moment in time, and making it material by sending light over a network that then instructs computers to reorganize some electrons into a state that is maintained. If all of the computers containing the distributed ledger were destroyed, the NFT would cease to exist.

sold an NFT of the meme for roughly $500,000 worth of Ether

yeah, but where's she going to store all those cans, eh??

and even the "art" that's less material generally has something more material but less scarce than the an NFT associated with it, such as a digital image or video from the moment. it's like we all rode splash mountain and had fucking hell of a great time doing so. disney makes an NFT for "riding splash mountain". person who buys that NFT should be concerned that everyone who loved it already has a picture of themselves riding splash mountain in their living room.

maybe I misunderstand, but quote seems to imply that the creation of the NFT is "transferring it into this even more crazy realm" and "dematerializing". But the NFT is doing the opposite. it's taking something less material, say a moment in time, and making it material by sending light over a network that then instructs computers to reorganize some electrons into a state that is maintained. If all of the computers containing the distributed ledger were destroyed, the NFT would cease to exist.

― If you value Vox, we have an axe (Sufjan Grafton), Friday, 30 April 2021 19:57 (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i would go even further than this. I can't get over conceptual hurdle that one must accept that the relationship between (the photograph) and the NFT is somehow real which is kindof hard to take when every piece that illustrates this story illustrates it with a picture of that photo As the use of the image in the article intimates, the image can continue to operate just as it did and is not itself altered by the fact of the NFT. The relationship between them seems really one way, with the value of the nft deriving from the image but nothing about the image is derived from its new status as underwritten somehow by the nft.

The concept of an NFT attaching itself to this image is an abstract relation and a 'new' one and a social one that needs to be weirdly manufactured. like we are to believe in some way that the 'creation' of the nft in some way officiates this relation? this doesn't feel especially credible to me and I'm a little bit mystified by the source of the credulousness. you know if we accept that all value is a kind of social value, i just dont understand what social agreement really underwrites this particular instance.

maybe I misunderstand, but quote seems to imply that the creation of the NFT is "transferring it into this even more crazy realm" and "dematerializing". But the NFT is doing the opposite. it's taking something less material, say a moment in time, and making it material by sending light over a network that then instructs computers to reorganize some electrons into a state that is maintained. If all of the computers containing the distributed ledger were destroyed, the NFT would cease to exist.

― If you value Vox, we have an axe (Sufjan Grafton), Friday, April 30, 2021 12:57 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I feel like he might be talking about physical artworks, in which case the quote makes some more sense.

Tbh, I don't really understand how any of this works, and every explanation I read just sounds more and more like bullshit. I just thought the interview was interesting.

i would go even further than this. I can't get over conceptual hurdle that one must accept that the relationship between (the photograph) and the NFT is somehow real which is kindof hard to take when every piece that illustrates this story illustrates it with a picture of that photo As the use of the image in the article intimates, the image can continue to operate just as it did and is not itself altered by the fact of the NFT. The relationship between them seems really one way, with the value of the nft deriving from the image but nothing about the image is derived from its new status as underwritten somehow by the nft.

yeah, I think we would agree that a material object that is generated as part of the creation of the art is necessary to give it a meaningful relationship to that art. People can use an image from a painting you own without your consent, if they have the consent of the artist (or other rights holder). But if that image is the art, it still could not have been expressed and shared without that painting you own.

you can point at your painting and say "all of that came from this". Even if you make an NFT at the same time as you make the art, it's still very clear that you could have made the art without making the NFT at all.

the art, such as it is, is conceptual in every way and is mostly represented by the action of playing along by taking part in the charade of capitalism

I’ve enjoyed NBA Top Shot. I don’t really care about art or collecting, just making money. I buy all the packs I can and almost immediately flip the moments for a profit. Off my initial $9 investment, I’ve turned it into 4-figure profits. So every pack I buy is playing with house money at this point.

The great thing about Top Shot is the ease of on boarding. No need to have any knowledge of the intricacies of crypto transactions, just sign up for an account, attach a credit card, and hope you get lucky on pack drops.

On the other hand, I’ve been trying to get into Zed Run, but the barrier of entry is much higher. I’m finally trying to buy a horse today. To do that, I had to figure out what MetaMask is, connect it to Zed Run, purchase some ETH, convert it to wETH, all of which had associated fees.

That’s all I’ve dabbled in. Everything else has been way too expensive to get started.

I’m finally trying to buy a horse today.

Still trying to get one, this release has been a shitshow.

Heavy Metal comic magazine now doing this shit so you too can burn down a rainforest in order to pay through the nose to "own" a hyperlink to a page from a comic with a woman who has her massive tits out.

https://oncurio.com/collections/heavy-metal

i pledged to not look at this thread or care about NFTs ever again, but it's hard because it appears that the entire world should eat shit and fuck off for life and someone needs to say it

nfts are for rich people that don't deserve their money

but yes, it's here to stay, i think. you can't put the lid back on the bottle.

representative of how dumb human beings are: https://pitchfork.com/features/article/11-indie-musicians-on-how-theyre-navigating-the-nft-wave/

zola jesus has the only coherent answer, and it's amazing how vapid the rest of them are. i hope they get rich and die due to eating too much shit

ANOHNI's answer is pretty good:

“I think it’s shit. They won’t stop until they have sucked the life and value out of every remaining shred of organic life and every last gasp of analog craft or thought and crammed it into Elon Musk and Grimes’ patented space dildo, headed for Mars to reauthor the future of sentience in their own psychotic and ethically bankrupt likeness.”

unfortunately pitchfork decided to use the sub-hed "The Climate Advocate: ANOHNI" above their answer. anohni's not wrong, but it sucks that it's the main "environmental" perspective out of those who answered.

although, anohni knows it probably doesn't matter anyway. people, demonstrably, don't give a FUCK about climate change

yeah it doesn't really seem like any of them understand why this is so dumb and wasteful. it's more like...the philosophy of NFTs. who gives a shit. FWIW I'm in favor of anything that helps artists pay the bills, especially if it's just at the expense of one rich superfan, it sucks that the actual implementation of it is so fucking stupid. but I can't fault these people for trying to make it work considering no one can tour right now and their 68 cent monthly checks from Spotify probably aren't making ends meet

should really copy that to "Elon Musk", the thread, and lock it

im p sure i never need to own an nft

also anohni otm. the bits i skim read of the others they all sound like such hollow ghouls lol

yeah it doesn't really seem like any of them understand why this is so dumb and wasteful. it's more like...the philosophy of NFTs

i think it's worth countering them on philosophical/stoner grounds as well. there's something really sad and pathetic about accelerating and expanding speculation based on empty, mediocre, market-driven culture. i don't know how to talk about that shit with these crypto people. they put fucking $DERP signs in their twitter bios for fucks sake, it's like telling everybody to buy a certain stock or something...fuck you?

and it spawns these demonic gangs of american psycho/clockwork orange hybrid twitter dorks who work as a group to troll people with "HAVEFUNBEINGPOOR" memes, and it's just like, could you go express your alienation from late capitalism with loud music or something instead of adopting libertarians as your new heroes? again, it's just fucking sad.

seems sad to be an artist so uninterested in the things you are making or worse: "This is a chance to grab a foothold in a whole new world.”

they should go find a foothold in their new world and fuck off

i wish they'd skip to the part where they plug in and have virtual sex of their dreams for eternity while i die at age 69 of a heart attack

and the old trolls will yell "nice!" at my death as they cum in their little tanks

but my online gravestone will read "i'm rather be dead than you, #cryptoturds" and that will hurt them a little

more and more, i envision a future where so many people self-raptured to digital riches and virtual heaven, while i walk around earth's abandoned fields listening to "key west" and talking to horses

about a month or so before I made this thread I was considering making some nfts to possibly make a quick buck and then I got too lazy to do it

another way to think about being lazy is that you're taking your time. sometimes taking your time keeps you from shaving your pubes (Isaiah 7:20). by which the lord meant nothing for or against shaving them, just that sometimes it does change things to just wait

you should definitely take your time when shaving your pubes to avoid being that person in the emergency room

I never got a horse. Fuck NFTs. Unless I end up with a horse.

Christie's is selling NFTs of 'original' Warhol drawings made on an Amiga in 1985 - but Warhol's drawings were 300x200 and the ones Christie's are selling have been upscaled to 6000x4500.

It should be clear that a 6000x4500 image in Amiga's uncompressed .PIC format could not possibly fit on a 1.4MB floppy, nor in the Amiga 1000's 512kb RAM. I'm not sure if your collectors care that they're bidding on a secondary by-product, but I would.

— Golan Levin (@golan) May 20, 2021

oops, start of thread here:

Dear @ChristiesInc @gcerutti: As you advertise the authenticity of Warhol's "five original drawings" on the NFT blockchain, I'm concerned that your collectors might be confused about what they're bidding on—since you're not auctioning the originals, which were created at 320x200.

— Golan Levin (@golan) May 20, 2021

reading about NFTs makes my brain freeze up faster than anything else, it seems truly misbegotten, like a flaw in the human code or something

lol, that warhol thread is amazing

xp

they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

i think it's worth countering them on philosophical/stoner grounds as well. there's something really sad and pathetic about accelerating and expanding speculation based on empty, mediocre, market-driven culture. i don't know how to talk about that shit with these crypto people. they put fucking $DERP signs in their twitter bios for fucks sake, it's like telling everybody to buy a certain stock or something...fuck you?

true but I think there's maybe an argument to be made that it's not ~~that~~ much different than say, record collecting today. like the whole philosophy of Record Store Day shit kinda harkens back to this. though the fact that it's some digital token that may or may not point to something does add an inconceivably dumb layer to all of this

https://protos.com/nft-market-bubble-popped-crypto-collectibles-are-over/

90% decline in daily trading value, sports collectibles are now a higher proportion than crypto-art.

Bonsai trees are blowing up.

whats funny about this is there are probably dozens of serious artists who spent the last several months developing "the most complex NFT of all time" who are gonna wind up selling them for like....a thousand bucks

Top Shot was fun when I could buy a $9 pack and get 10x-15x returns. Now I basically can make a few dollars on a pack. The thrill is gone.

"CO:QUO presents Music Futures & Simulacra: Exploring Without a Map" — seminar on NFTs and music happening live rn, watching out of morbid curiosity.

their site: https://www.coquo.co/musicfutures
the stream: https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=451919682566367&ref=watch_permalink

ok the panel is not fulfilling its stated goal, which is to "break down elements of the technology as they apply to specifically to music communities." maybe i'm not familiar enough with how NFTs are supposed to work for musicians/communities to appreciate this discourse, but from where i'm sitting this is just a bunch of woo. their was mention of the 90% decline and rebuilding from the ground up but i'm not hearing answers about how that is supposed to be achieved

i'm turning this shit off and going back a few months on this guy's timeline instead

Every day this month I am going to tweet about a use case for music + crypto.

31 days of music + crypto ideas.

1. A use case
2. Example architecture
3. Existing thinking and projects working on the idea (if applicable)

Day 1: Payment Splits 👇

— Jack Spallone (@JackSpallone) March 1, 2021

fair payment splits is a bunch of BS. usually based on smart contracts, which doesn't solve the problem. covered extensively by david gerard in his book and probably on his blog.

We have to make a way for crypto to work. I mean, music plus crypto

I'm still not clear on why anyone would ever want to buy an nft

Like other than as an 'investment'

i think it's a combo of:

1) wanting to make money, thinking of it as any crypto investment. like, buy really low on this awesome digital art (heehee) or the true only NFT-certified copy of this song, and in 10 years it's going to be huge and you'll be on a space flight and won't even notice the change in your bank account because you're a fucking genius and you bought low when it was a new thing and the dumb people who wanted to be poor were yelling at you

2) being a total fucking dick

xp

sorry, disregard 1) then. all the other reasons are subservient to the health of the investment.

it's just 2)

on the side of the person selling the NFT, i think some of them just want to make some money, and that makes sense because the vast majority of artists don't make money and know they never will...until now. problem is, once they accept crypto as payment, they'll find that using it and spending it is an investment into itself, and now they're an investor. then, uh oh, you're an artist who is a fucking dick, and later you'll just be a crypto crypto who is a fucking crypto

I never got a horse. Fuck NFTs. Unless I end up with a horse.

So glad this crypto horse racing thing wasn’t around when my dad was alive, he’d have gone bankrupt in a week.

https://www.myfuckingpickle.io/

Someone offered to buy my fucking pickle for $68 this morning.

I guess one important thing about NFTs is they're bought with Etherium and when you see idiotic shit like the fucking doge jpg going for "a million dollars" there's a good chance that the person who bought it is someone who got in at the ground floor of ETH and is probably only *really* paying like $100 or whatever they invested in it, b/c to them money is infinite and easy b/c the bottom hasn't dropped out yet. this shit used to happen with online poker a lot, I had a friend who spun a $50 deposit into a five-figure sum who then started playing at the highest stakes and getting wrecked. he lost like 7 grand in a day but to him it wasn't "real money" because "I only bought in for 50" and "whatever, I'll make it back" (he did not make it back)

I’m still going on the original $9 I spent on a TopShot pack. Beyond that it totally doesn’t feel like real money.

i think making a bunch of money off of a really small amount and then eventually losing it all is a best-case scenario for gamblers. i think the real problems start when you start regularly adding in more of your IRL money to keep re-establishing your "starting money" as it drifts back to $0

All started when someone paid me $150 for a Will Barton jpg. It was so bizarre but I ran with it.

If anyone wants to buy my fucking pickle, step right up. https://opensea.io/assets/0xf78296dfcf01a2612c2c847f68ad925801eeed80/1133

I’d rather eat shit!!!

Is my standard response

And I would. Shit isn’t that bad

If anyone wants to buy my fucking pickle, step right up. https://opensea.io/assets/0xf78296dfcf01a2612c2c847f68ad925801eeed80/1133🕸

Now I need to just sell my banana.

📢 @noncefinance is building on Polygon!

🚀 With Polygon, NFT users will be able to increase the liquidity of their NFTs by utilizing Nonce's fractionalization protocol that creates a seamless bridge between the NFT and ERC20 world.

🌐 Learn more: https://t.co/BqOV6PDvxh pic.twitter.com/F4MPy21i4t

— Polygon (@0xPolygon) July 2, 2021

lol I just learned that in the cryptocurrency world "nonce" is an abbreviation for "number only used once".

cryptography in general so sadly we can't point and laugh at the bitcoin weirdos about it. (also cf. middle english 'nonce'.)

"the nonces of Middle England" sounds like a rejected specialist subject on Mastermind

It finally happened. I have my horse. I won’t race it, deciding if I should just immediately flip it or breed it. https://opensea.io/assets/matic/0xa5f1ea7df861952863df2e8d1312f7305dabf215/44560/

Hoping one day you'll put your kid through college on this $9 investment.

She’ll have to invest in her own NFT’s!

i have previously been against NFTs

however, i guess my updated position and life motto is if that you happen to come across a lot of money for an impossibly cynical reason, it's ok as long as you give everything away to people who need it more than you do, and that if you don't do that anything you buy with the money is cursed, even if it is another financial instrument

Well I sold my horse for just over $1000. Listed it for .5 eth and it sold within 5 minutes. Probably could have gotten more or made more long term with breeding, but that would have required more effort than I wanted to put into it. That’s the last NFT I was holding to flip. Going to take my cursed money and run.

Easy money out there

how easy is it at this exact moment in time to turn "etherium" (jesus) into US dollars in a bank account?

I’m sure PayPal will make it easy within a few months. The entire app is an advertisement for crypto now.

okay but how about right now? can you swap out with the same ease as you would euros to dollars or is everyone pretending the play money is totally real money even if they can't get it in their wallets?

Maybe, but right now, this stuff is so convoluted that it is a long way from mainstream adoption. Summary of my journey to get that damn horse:

1. Create MetaMask wallet to connect to the Zed.Run website
2. Purchase eth through MetaMask using my debit card (fee 2.9% + $.0.30 + gas fees ($5 minimum))
3. Wrap the eth to turn it into weth, more gas fees (which were astronomically high at the time, at this point I learned what gwei is/gas limits/transaction speeds, etc )
3. Use weth to try and buy a horse, failed.
4. Said fuck it and unwrapped with weth back to eth, more gas fees.
5. Another horse drop a few weeks later, eth to weth again, with gas fees, failed again.
6. Received free horse from Zed.Run because the whole experience was miserable.
7. List horse on opensea, which required me to do two transactions for verification, minimal gas fee for the second one
8. Sold horse, paid in weth, had to convert that back into eth, this time went through the polygon network, which required a couple of transactions and fees
9. Eth back in my MetaMask wallet, want to cash out but can’t from my wallet, have to use an exchange
10. Send eth to my Coinbase account, withdraw to my debit account, fees apply.

All of those could have been handled numerous different ways, so I’m sure someone who is more knowledgeable than me could do it with lower fees or jumping through fewer hoops. The gas fees themselves were perplexing. They could be minimal or more than the cost of your transaction, all depending on network utilization. This is made more confusing by being able to pick your gas price to speed up the transaction.

Until Paypal/Amazon/large financial institutions make this easy, it’s going to stay cryptobros, meme investors, and dorks like me with time and money to waste.

Not to mention tax implications, saving that headache for next year.

the future!

given the amount of time and fees that were involved in this and the time you will need to continue to spend to cash this in, what amount per hour would you say you have been paid for buying this digital horse? more or less than NY minimum wage?

How to get rich in 3 easy steps:
1) Steal hotel soap
2) Invest savings in S&P
3) Become millionaire pic.twitter.com/GSQBsopb6z

— TikTok Investors (@TikTokInvestors) May 17, 2021

given the amount of time and fees that were involved in this and the time you will need to continue to spend to cash this in, what amount per hour would you say you have been paid for buying this digital horse? more or less than NY minimum wage?

Oh and the wild fluctuations of the price of eth over this time frame makes it less lucrative as well. When I started this in early may, it was at $3500. Today, just over $2000.

https://niftys.com/events/spacejam#free-nfts

Summary of my journey to get that damn horse:

Getting to the 'create a MetaMask' blah blah blah line at the beginning of the Zed Run newb FAQ is where I jumped ship. Buying DMT off the darknet was simpler than all that shit.

Damien Hirst is launching an NFT. $2,000 for a digital print and ownership of a print (1 of 10,000 made). After two months, the buyer has to choose whether to own the physical object or the NFT, but can't have both.

Here's a link to the @FT article covering my first NFT series 'The Currency'. Launching 3pm BST today! https://t.co/U7WiKnGpyX

— Damien Hirst (@hirst_official) July 14, 2021

makes u think.

"But here’s the special Hirst-devised twist..."

aaarrggh!

Grifter heaven

Until Paypal/Amazon/large financial institutions make this easy

this will never happen with cryptocurrencies as we know them

Leading speculator Hirst has entered the market

newchallenger.gif

I have Bugs Bunny and Lebron Space Jam NFTs, will I be able to retire on them in a few years?

ah Damien Hirst, all the fucking charlatans coming out to play

https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/27/shopify-now-allowing-imerchants-to-sell-nfts-directly-through-their-storefronts/

I was able to get the first two Bulls NFTs, one of only 26 people that have gotten them all so far. Just when I think I’m out, I get pulled back in.

There's that lake house, coming up. ^^

And now I’m 3 for 3. Next three drop over the next three days. I’m sure my luck will run out soon.

some of hirst's early work is interesting.

https://www.ranker.com/list/valuable-collectible-pogs/mick-jacobs

I'm the person who started all the fuss @FameLadySquad and @queenship_ project. I have enough proof to state that FLS was created by 3 males who are also behind a whole bunch of abandoned NFT projects.

And their "signature" convinces me Queenship is also their product. Thread/

— Fedor Linnik (@FedorLinnik) August 10, 2021

Those Damien Hirst NFTs that went for $2K in July are now going for over https://www.nftstats.com/collection/thecurrency00K.

Whoops: going for over $100K.

https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/thecurrency

i believe that converts to exactly three jugs of milk in the post-apocalyptic world

So much has happened with NFT’s in the last month, it’s been absolutely insane. I’ve stayed mostly on the sidelines, floor prices for everything I’ve been interested in have just been more than I’m willing to risk. Made a bit of money flipping the WNBA top shots that just dropped.

How is that Bulls one doing, Jeff?

Unfortunately, still waiting for them to launch their market place.

just the worst

what's the worst? NFTs?

nah. there's probably something worse. Something even more more speculative. Something that can be integrated even more tightly with things that have nothing to do with money.

https://dirt.substack.com/p/dirt-are-nfts-status-symbols

they're tacky status symbols

but reading that helped me understand the appeal more. i have never been one of those guys who wants an expensive designer jacket. i have never considered it. i would never, ever spend my money in that way, mostly because i don't have that money. maybe other people see me that way - they see me buying a $50 game that actually sucks really badly, and i only play it for 2 hours. i've done that a couple times. for me, at the time, i had $50 and it wasn't a big deal. now, at this time, $50 is everything and i would never throw it away like that. maybe nfts are like that for other people that have more money. they don't realize how completely tacky their purchase is. it's an investment, or a frivolous evening.

anyway, that hypothetical expensive designer jacket. maybe nfts are like that, for some people. it's probably more healthy for me to just think of them like that, and the people that buy them as the kind of people that buy really nice designer jackets. they're out there for sure, and they're usually really popular and influential people, but also they suck

Dirt is, of course, selling their own tacky NFTs

Ooh I been dirt, but I don’t care.

Coinbase launching an NFT market place: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/10/12/coinbase-follows-ftxus-into-nft-trading/

Glad to see OpenSea getting some more competition. They’ve had some growing pains.

it used to annoy me, but now i love how crypto and NFT language is sort of staring down German (the language) in terms of "ridiculous compound nouns"

I read a Twitter thread that describes NFTs as the evolution of spending money to put someone’s name on a star. It’s basically buying a spot in a ledger and you don’t own shit. Gotta respect the grift.

it's in the first post on this thread lol

I still haven't seen anything about nfts that make sense to me and I've been paying attention to a lot of different projects. I want them to make sense, because it feels like it could, but it just reads as another way to spend money, so it's like, cool, new money thing

Because of amazing blockchain technology every NFT is guaranteed to be absolutely unique in the universe. ofc, because of slight variations in DNA, every pig-ear dog chewy is guaranteed to be absolutely unique in the universe, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQrQcAzMb8E

Ugh

Dear Twitter Friends, good morning. A film I made for @interpol will be auctioned in 7 pieces on @superrare
Find them at https://t.co/m31joB4XHS

— David Lynch (@DAVID_LYNCH) October 26, 2021

Daddy needs a new meditation mat

Rising Eth prices and gas fees have killed a lot of my purchasing. Mainly focused on topshot and still turning a profit when flipping those. Also took a chance on a MLB icon pack today. No marketplace yet, so who knows if the pack will have a plus expected value.

Sold one of my rare Bulls NFT rings for $300. They screwed up the marketplace launch and made it difficult to buy, so I just priced it to recoup my total cost. Still have two more that I can profit from. If I can get ~$300 for the other rare one and a little more for the iconic, I’ll be happy with the investment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3QiUH_JHBk

If I can get... I’ll be happy with the investment.

Glad to hear you may make some money out of your speculation. But calling them an investment just seems wrong.

https://www.twitter.com/Bowsnonk/status/1455279107743305734

Coiners Taking L’s has been good this week with coverage of NFT NYC.

i hate this dumb fake money pyramid scheme shit so much

yeah it's excruciating

and if it works, if say, jeff, makes out well and makes a ton of money off of "investments": well, fuck you, it's exactly what's wrong with everything. but what can i say, i'm just a whiner. maybe i want jeff to make 1 trillion dollars off of total bullshit. what does it matter

what a fucking terrible world

it may be how the "world" works, but fuck the world, if this is how it works. a 100 times a million, fuck anyone involved with it. you might be rich and be able to afford your stupid bullshit, but i'd much rather go down with the losers, fucking hating you all the time

this thread might as well be titled "fucking asshole investors"

go lakers NFTs!

!!/!?1?1?1?1?1?1?!?!?!

of course anyone in the position of me is a loser. i lost already. you won, jeff. your dumb world of NFTs and crypto has won. congratulations

i'd rather eat shit, so i will

I HOPE NBA NFTS MAKE A BILLION BUCKS TOMORROW, HAHA

what a terrible fucking world this is, i don't want to live in it

i think the main argument against someone like me is like "what a fucking snobby asshole, i'm just trying to live here and make money and the world sucks anyway and i'm just trying to make some extra money", and my argument is something like "fuck you. fuck you. fuck you. fuck you. fuck you."

just such a failure of humanity, the worst parts of everything combined, gross, for money, for MONEY. fuck you

people who live for money, fuck you, and the fact that i care about how wretched it is, fuck me. but mainly, fuck you

gross

also fuck you

(you're cool)

Everything Karl said. NFTs crystallise so much that is shit about humans, capitalism, and the way we treat the world, and in the most vividly stupid way possible.

Solidarity with Karl. Everything about this is repulsive and I'm absolutely cutting contacts loose.

it's all reprehensible scams and the people participating are either sincerely falling for them or aware of how bad it all is but think they're smart enough to come out on top

I think jeff understands that he is making small gambles on a market that will collapse in the near future. i don't hate him........ much

NFTs are a junk product borne of too much money swilling around the system due to super low interest rates. Everyone investing in them will get burner, if that's any comfort.