Fresh SciFi Story Sparks Dystopian Debate About NFTs, Crypto, and the Metaverse
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“Of course, art has always been toy money for the rich to play with. We just made it more ubiquitous, more efficient, more technologically mediated. We made it faster.”
Thus begins writer Tim Maughan’s dystopian not too distant story which imagines a nightmare scenario that occurs when NFTs, the metaverse, speculative finance, and predictive policing collide.
An art savvy hustler sets out to make a quick buck in the near future, weird art world setting of “Line Goes Up” in Noema magazine published Friday.
As a new artist there was little point wasting money and carbon on having your work minted when you could tokenize something far more valuable: yourself. Suddenly you were there, legit part of the art world: a line on a chart.”
At midnight tonight, as the tear gas still canisters still fall, we’ll drop an exclusive set of NFTs, just 20 stills from the bodycam footage. We will make a fortune. I wonder what patterns they saw emerging from his colors and lines that — when mixed with patterns from a hundred thousand other data points they’d extracted from the fumes of his data exhaust — matched the patterns they’d been told equaled potential.
He knows a lot of people with a lot of money and no fucking clue, who don’t know a good use of color from a bold line but will buy some art if an algorithm tells them it’s the right art to buy.
Pay an exchange to mint you into an NFT, split it into thousands of shards, and then put those up for sale. Suddenly you were there, legitimately part of the real art world: a line on a chart.
Uses the same algorithms they use for predictive policing to spot emerging talent.
Shortly after the story went live, David Carroll, Associate Professor of media design at Parsons School of Design at The New School Tweeted: hey don’t bother messing around with NFTs if you haven’t yet bc the gas fees are ridic just read @timmaughan’s new short fiction “Line Goes Up” instead.
hey don’t bother messing around with nfts if you haven’t yet bc the gas fees are ridic just read@timmaughan’s new short fiction “Line Goes Up” instead https://t.co/WDM6s8oGYu
— David Carroll (@profcarroll) February 19, 2022
“You’ve written Clockwork Orange for Web3” said Neil Turkewitz.
Actor Alex Winter, of Bill and Ted fame, said, “The breathless evangelism in this space needs to be checked. The onus is on those in the crypto community to prove how artists will benefit from these new systems or it should be assumed they will not. Those are simply the lessons learned.”
It’s gonna suck real hard. pic.twitter.com/U3sMftyA2s
— VriliantThorp (@DetectiveFudd) February 19, 2022
The messaging around NFT’s and Web3 ‘giving the power back to the people and to artists’ is the same as the early days of streaming and the gig economy and we all know how that went. The breathless evangelism in this space needs to be checked. The onus is on those in the crypto community to prove how artists will benefit from these new systems or it should be assumed they will not. Those are simply the lessons learned.
Carroll cited McKenzie Wark’s 2017 essay from e-flux Journal, My Collectible Ass:“The actual work is a derivative of the value of its simulations.”
“The future of collecting may be less in owning the thing that nobody else has, and more in owning the thing that everybody else has.” @mckenziewark on the past, present, and future of art @e_flux https://t.co/Tv7PbFR4Yc
— Andy Adams ???? (@FlakPhoto) February 18, 2022
To think about digital objects as collectable, it may help to start by asking what it is that is actually collected. We tend to think that what is collected is a rare object. But what makes it rare? Perhaps there is more than one way to make an object rare. To make a digital object rare, it can be “locked” in various ways. Take for example The Clock (2010) by Christian Marclay. It is only supposed to be seen in specially designed installations where it runs for twenty-four hours, although apparently the artist’s wishes about that did not stop the hedge-fund manager Steven A. Cohen from using his copy as a screen saver or his gallerist Jay Jopling from screening it for a party.
“inspired by” “but not affiliated with” is such a very interesting way to say capturing revenue that someone’s else’s art generates pic.twitter.com/zyl2VWmEDp
— David Carroll (@profcarroll) February 19, 2022
Rhea Myers wrote in January essay Desert of the Real: On certain developments in the content of NFT art as we enter 2021
Non-Fungible Token art associates digital art to blockchain identifiers as metadata, producing a saleable ownership proxy similar in concept and usage to a certificate of authenticity for conceptual or video art. In itself this makes no demands on the artwork other than that it ideally be minimally problematic (legally and technologically) for any services or platforms the artist uses to create and sell it. But that art still exists within a technonomic milieu that holds very specific promise and appeal for those who might be interested in it as an environment in which to produce and experience art.
Alongside three other people.https://t.co/HlnTUCpQjl
— Paper Magazine (@papermagazine) February 17, 2022
The issue is not the future dystopia of the story but the current misery of life today. From Meta controlling the platform, to the influence it has over current events that appears disparate yet are connected ranging from the Truckers stand-off in Canada, the murder of TikTok star, the continuing fallout of the January 6th Insurrection, QAnon, white supremacists tactics like acceleration, and Peter Thiel personally getting involved in the mid-terms, the threads seem already inexorably intertwined.
And all roads lead to Meta.
