NFTs (thread now extremely NSFW)

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.