For whatever reason, I was compelled to watch Dan Olson's video "Line Goes Up" again recently. Well, the first part of it, at least. It got me thinking about how strange it is that NFTs kind of just disappeared after 2022. I'm perhaps more grateful that they're gone than anyone else but I worry that we're leaving the door open for history to be completely rewritten a few years down the line. There were just too many people who were insistent that they'd be worth something for me to be comfortable, and lets not forget that even near the end the thing NFTs were synonymous with was art. Bad art, at that.
The thing about art is that it's a symbol. Good artists make their symbols obvious without over explaining them, using pictures of flowers and trees to convey something about the deeper nature of humanity that an art novice might miss but an art expert will see instantly. Bad artists mess up in a hundred different ways, but they always leave the door open to reinterpretation in a way good art never can. You would think that the procedurally generated garbage that NFTs became would leave no room for meaning or interpretation, but that's not accounting those who either don't know what good art looks like, or they simply don't care. Not to mention the contrarians who will value things because the world thinks that they're ugly. Things that are common, boring, and meaningless have a power to them. They attract those who want to make something meaningful but don't have the skills to create something unique. They become the fodder of belief for those hungry for something that's safe for them to believe in. Do we really want NFTs to serve as the next generations idols? Are we really willing to risk the future where our children worship this tech as a god?
Let's also not forget that as more and more of the servers keeping the links the NFTs reference go bust, those that stay intact will become more and more valuable, leaving the door wide open for a future where people are convinced that NFTs were always the future and we just weren't ready to admit that yet. There are children primed to be lured in by a narrative that the tech that nearly ruined our world was a boon no one wanted to accept. They're not old enough to remember how dangerous NFTs really were. They'll hear nothing about those who were hurt, those who have been shamed into silence, they'll only hear about how stupid and ugly the pictures they represented were. If they're lucky, they'll get the narrative of how useless the tech was. They'll hear nothing about societal damage, of the people who believed with all their hearts that NFTs represented a new form of reality, especially with the advent of the metaverse, only to have their hopes, dreams, and sense of reality crushed once the whole system collapsed. They won't hear about those who clung on, both out of stubbornness and out of sincere desperation, a need to believe that everything would come out alright if they just waited long enough. To them, NFTs will be nothing more than a technological dead end at worst, a future that never came true at best. They won't know that there were some for whom NFTs marked the moment their world ended for good.
With AI seemingly taking the niche that NFTs once filled, I worry that we're being lulled into a sense of complacency. We're letting ourselves believe that the door to damnation is closed and that no one will dare risk opening it because we have a cultural immunity to that sort of tomfoolery. But as PT Barnum once famously said, "A sucker is born every minute," and we're leaving a world ripe for the exploitation of our future suckers. We've already watched our world end once, I don't want the future to face what we've had to face this past decade.
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