Non-Fungible Tokens. The value of nothing?

Until now, the value of a thing for sale has always boiled down to the availability of that thing, which is determined by how rare it is, or by the difficulty of its manufacture. And then there’s the demand for that thing, whatever it is. Things that are difficult to find, or produce, and are very much in demand, command high prices. On the other hand, things that are abundant or easily mass-produced, but for which there is no demand, say because they’ve fallen out of fashion, or have become obsolete, aren’t worth anything.

These traditional laws of supply and demand have held true, until now. But now, the digital age has begun to render things that are very difficult to produce worthless, by virtue of the fact that technology enables them to be re-produced instantly, and infinitely. A practical example of this, is the chess set I’m modelling.

In olden times, my chess figures would have been hand carved, and each chess set would have been unique. In the right market, a maker of such ornate pieces could reasonably expect to make a living from it. I’m in the process of sculpting them, digitally, using a piece of software called Blender. Amongst other things, it simulates very well the process of modelling in clay. The end result is a three-dimensional digital model of whatever you care to imagine.

But what use is a digital chess set, you ask? Well, having defined their shapes digitally, as computer files, one of the things we can do is print the pieces out, using machines like this:

When they first appeared, in the late 1980s, 3D Printers were the stuff of science fiction. They cost more than a house, and only big engineering companies ran them. Now you can get one for the price of a washing machine.

There’s a lot of modelling work in each of these chess pieces, hours and hours of it, but a set made by digital methods is essentially worthless, because, once finished, the technology of 3D printing renders it easily, instantly and endlessly reproducible.

3D Printed Chess Pieces – Crealty Ender 3

I’m going to gift the set I’m making, so its value in monetary terms is irrelevant, but my little hobby here also illustrates how seriously our technology is upsetting economic norms. Capitalists are starting to worry about it too, and they’re coming up with ideas to artificially inflate the value of digital assets. To this end, we now have the Non Fungible Token, or NFT.

You may have heard about these as the latest get rich quick thing, with people trading NFTs for large sums of money. What NFTs are, in essence, is a way of offsetting the infinite reproducibility of a digital asset by registering ownership of the original file. Then, like any other artwork, you can make as many copies as you like, but there will still only be the one original. I could register myself as the original artist of my chess pieces, which would make the files I hold unique, and any copies you hold, not. You can copy and paste your files as much as you like, but the originals, in theory, retain their value – if they ever had any – because there’s a ledger out there in internet land that says they’re the original. What you buy when you trade the NFT is, if you like, the title deed that says those files once belonged to me, the artist, and now they belong to you.

But here’s the thing I don’t get about NFT’s, and perhaps someone can explain it to me. For the NFTs to be worth anything at all, be they the data for my little chess set, or the original word-files for my writings, or a doodle from a digital paint program, I’d have to be a name by other means, and much trumpeted by the machinery of name-making celebrity culture. In which case, we’re no longer trading purely on skill – say in a work of art, or a piece of music. We’re no longer manufacturing a product at all, we’re manufacturing value.

The skill is still required, a product must be produced – there’s no getting around that – but no matter how well executed, the digital product, as a thing in itself, is not worth anything. What grants it any value at all is how easily a potential consumer can be persuaded the original creator is a name whose name is worth more than other names, or is at any rate a star that is rising, so an NFT, perhaps traded modestly to begin with, might one day be worth a fortune. But this is a very strange business, that we have come to value no longer the thing in itself, but its digital seed, and in fact just one seed in particular, when, for all practical purposes, it is identical to all the others copied from it.

The owner of an original painting can take pleasure in that ownership, in its display, its history. It can be gazed upon, and appreciated as a work of art. But one does not display an NFT. It has no aesthetic value, no line, no shape at all to the naked eye. It says nothing, speaks nothing to the soul.

Capitalists have embraced all previous industrial revolutions, but it seems to me, they’re not so keen on this one, whose business it is to blur the boundaries between the physical world, and the virtual. The creative types were among its first victims, but now it’s coming for the capitalists themselves, since the basis of “capital” is becoming less tangible, infinitely reproducible, and therefore materially worthless. I may be thinking about this all wrong, but the NFT strikes me as a dubious last ditch fix, a way of holding on to a decaying system of values, and a value culture, that technology would otherwise have little trouble sweeping away. That said, what the world looks like, if we let the machines loose from the NFT noose, is anyone’s guess. It would require at the very least, a fundamental restructuring of society, how we earn, and live in an equitable fashion, but thus far, that seems not to be up for discussion.

I could create an NFT for my chess piece data, but unless I make a name for myself, or have someone else make it for me, no one’s ever going to speculate on its value, so it remains worthless. Meanwhile, more marketable NFTs change hands for tens, or hundreds of thousands of pounds. In this privileged version of the world, NFTs might mean something, but it is a world that seems designed only to give the wealthiest something to spend their money on. Meanwhile, the food charity queues grow longer, and our escalating energy prices mean people cannot heat their homes.

In the latter world, which is a big world, and getting bigger by the day, NFT’s don’t mean anything at all.

Here’s a humorous take:

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A collective psychosis

In observing the political and economic turmoil of the world, I feel I should be writing about it more, since if I’m not writing my life feels a bit like a rudderless vessel. And, politics, world affairs, these things are, after all, interesting subjects, subjects that determine the fate of nations, but I find it difficult to get at the facts of them, and without the facts one cannot help but be partisan.

The reason I struggle for the facts is I have laboured all my life under the misconception of a simplistic world view, a simplicity that’s comforting because the truth is more complex than most of us can make sense of. Indeed partisanship seems a necessary condition if we are to function at all, without the infinite ambiguity of the world rendering us permanently frozen in a state of catatonic schizophrenia. To be partisan, after all, halves the problem, since we can then dismiss the other person’s point of view and rest more comfortably in our own.

Of course, the advent of the world wide web has blown up a storm of imagery, revealing a world far more complex than we once thought, but this does not help because now the available information overloads us so we self-censor, pick the images that suit our narrow view, and block the ones that don’t. Yes, I can try to be non-partisan, but I’m working against myself, and I can be a devious fellow, but here goes.

Approaching now the end of our lost decade, we find American and Western European democracies polarising into entrenched positions to the left and right while the middle ground has fallen away. Unfortunately, the middle ground is where most people stand, and they’re finding no one represents their aspirations any more.

The economic system that has supported us since the Second World War – free market capitalism – is now impotent. It still generates wealth in sickly spurts, but fails to distribute it evenly. It is caught in a pathological malfunction that vastly enriches its captains while laying waste to the rest, both environmentally, and in terms of the life prospects of the majority of planet earth’s inhabitants. A mutiny, by the natural world, and the disenfranchised is an entirely plausible consequence, and some might say long overdue.

Politically, even the most cursory analysis reveals the West is not governed by democracies as we are led to believe, but by plutocracies. These are systems in which the democratic machinery exists and is indeed much vaunted, but its goals are more of an aspiration, rendered largely irrelevant by, and subservient to powerful moneyed interests. And plutocracies are resistant to change when change is due, since the beneficiaries, cosseted in wealth, do not feel the pain of the poor who are subservient to them, nor are they particularly aware of their existence.

As a consequence the global plutocratic vessel fetched itself up on the rocks for the last time in 2008, with political and economic efforts since then being devoted entirely to its salvage, at floating it off on an incoming tide of oft-touted market resurgence. But its back is broken, its cargo spilled and plundered. Persistence in this direction promises not a lost decade but a lost generation, or two. Yet this is exactly the course on which we’re bound.

There is a revival of left leaning, anti plutocratic politics, giving voice to complaint. Socialism, a term not mentioned above a whisper since the 1980’s, is spoken again, on both sides of the Atlantic, and without irony, but it remains to be seen if this will have any effect at ushering in a more egalitarian paradigm, since the forces arrayed against it, barricaded behind vast wealth, remain formidable.

But when consumer goods, things that have rendered populations docile, are beyond purchase, when the domestic budget forces a choice between food and renewing the contract on the iPhone, populations will become restless, prone to irrational frenzy. Thoughts will turn from the Playstation to activism. This is, after all, what the consumer society was invented for in the 1920s, as an opiate for the masses, and it cannot be allowed to fall away entirely or, whether such frenzies of want are tickled by charismatic, media savvy individuals, or by the phases of the moon, the half century to come will be an eventful one.

The Middle East is aflame, of course. The Syrian civil war has been raging for six years. Iraq and Afghanistan, theatres of western intervention, have been bloodletting for over a decade. Western Africa is benighted by an economic ruin largely ignored in Western Media. These regions have haemorrhaged their youth, set them on the terrifying migration routes to the heart of Europe, where their arrival arouses compassion and racist resentment in equal measure.

I do not know where this is going, only that it is a crisis terribly underplayed, and perhaps it is for this reason we seem immune to it still, ambivalent, by turns perplexed and apathetic, but generally believing things will still turn out well in the safe shires of the West, because they always have before. But this time they may not.

The world is not a dream, but in many respects the imagery coming out of it resembles the imagery of dreams. There is still the beauty of aspiration – the eye of the beholder – reminding us the human spirit can be stilled into appreciative contemplation by the simplest of things. Yet there is also the grotesque, the violent, the terrifying – all the stuff of nightmares, suggestive of the power of the unconscious bearing a dark fruit, sown by the seeds of things we have long suppressed.

This harvest is not a wholesome one, we shudder to touch it, but it must be gathered in all the same, dried out to harmlessness under the sun, and examined, not left to rot and fester in the fields, season after season, as we have always done before.

And as with dreams it helps to take each image in its turn, to ask ourselves what it is within us that gives rise to this picture. The dream, like the world, cannot be controlled directly. It simply is. And what it is is a consequence of our thinking, our desires, our prejudice, our imperfections, our inner most selves. We can only therefore each look to our selves and temper our hardness, temper the Ego’s will to power.

It is a retrograde step, and sad to see, the usual media popularising our leaders trading infantile insults live on TV. We have no need for warriors. Time more for all the great houses of power to temper their tone, for the Ego, that when shown its failings in the dream, even then persists in its will to power and the fantasy of its own superiority, gives rise to the most monstrous nightmares, to the apocalyptic imagery of the archetypal gods, on whose anvil all things are eventually broken.

Viewed in these terms, the world begins to make more sense. We are in the midst of a cataclysmic collective psychosis. Sadly, this suggests that what lies ahead of us is not a lost decade, nor even a lost generation, but perhaps a lost century.  And it’s only 2016.

Better to stay away from politics and world affairs – its study can make you maudlin.

Sweet dreams.

 

 

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