NFTs (thread now extremely NSFW)

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