nft minus 10 seconds & counting

Sometimes it feels like we’re in some sort of video game. Welcome to the supervolatile and seemingly made-up world of non-fungible tokens.

if you think nfts are a Fad, a joke or some weird glitch in the matrix , you wouldn’t be far off. But they’re also becoming serious business and threatening the capitalist ecosystem. In some ways, they should be celebrated for their disruptive nature and the fact they’re forcing us to question our reality, how we attach value to things, who ultimately has the right to allocate value in our world, what those “things” even are and how much stake in the “real world” a thing even has for us to consider it authentic.

Non-fungible means “can’t be replaced”.

It’s like a certificate of authenticity that lives in a blockchain universe.

You can buy bitcoin and swap it for other bitcoin, but an NFT is one-of-akind, utterly irreplaceable. The “thing” an NFT is associated with can, of course, be replicated or copied multiple times, but there’s only one original, and the NFT is the power and proof of ownership. It’s like owning the Mona Lisa. You can fake it, but there are ways to determine it’s not the original. Only you own the original. You can swap it for one of Picasso’s paintings, but then the Mona Lisa is gone.

NFTS can be attached to anything digital, which technically means that in reality, you don’t own anything but bragging rights, which is sort of ironic. However, NFTS are evolving to encompass physical assets too, and for this reason are primarily used by the art world at the moment, though the future has several practical applications in store. For instance, you could use an NFT to shortcut police clearances.

It’s still a little laughable in its teething phase. One of the founders of Twitter, for example, made headlines when he sold an autographed copy of his first tweet for a shit ton of money. Musician Grimes made millions off digital artwork. Things are getting messy too. Luxury brand Hermès, for instance, sued digital artist Mason Rothschild for creating 100 NFTS where his subject was their The Birkin bag. Are you as an artist infringing on copyright by painting and selling a picture that happens to be of a luxury handbag, even if you replicate the label? It’s not the original but a painting of it. Ceci n’est pas une pipe, this is not a pipe, as artist René Magritte once said. The other issue is this: yes, Mason created those digital artworks, but, as stated, an NFT is only essentially a proof of ownership and authenticity, so while he created an image that had already been reproduced and distributed globally, the rights to those images (a string of code) had nothing to do with Hermès or its bag.

it’s easy to understand why brands could be interested in nfts From the perspective of uniqueness and ownership. It screams luxury – the one-of-a-kind snootery that makes the world of couture so interesting. However, you can also see why brands are terrified by its democratising power, as the very grey lines of counterfeiting or copyright infringement and the fact that the Internet (we, the people, and not the brand powers at the top of the food chain) determines the value of an NFT and the freedom of expression or power to create.

Therein lies the rub; if we’re thinking about Grimes and her artwork, NFTS tend to favour populist moments or popular people. Celebrities and influencers are currently the only people really making any money on NFTS. And one has to question if those are adding any real value to the world – and how long their value will even last.