Baby steps to a new world
Towards the end of last year, NFT.NYC – a “venture-capital sponsored rave”, a “5,000 person extravaganza” to celebrate the emerging NFT subculture – was charging $600 a ticket for a conference with satellite events spread out across New York city, says Ginevra Davis. Anyone who attended the conference will have come away knowing that NFTs – “nonfungible tokens”, a notation in a digital ledger that indicates who owns what bit of digital stuff – are far more than a fad of the art world. They are more “a first step in the metaverse”, a passport to a new digital world.
The 20-somethings most excited about all this define the metaverse as an emerging “fully immersive digital world that will in the end take precedence over, or at least exist in parallel to, the physical world”. We are approaching, they say, a “singularity”, when “our digital selves will become more important to us than our physical selves”. Indeed, given that Americans already spend seven of their waking hours a day looking at a screen, you might wonder how much of the real world there is to give up.
The new rock ’n’ roll
Once the singularity is reached, we will no longer have a problem spending real money on digital assets because they will be as important to us in our digital lives as physical assets are in our physical lives. In other words, the market for digital assets could someday be as large or larger than the market for physical assets. From this point of view, an NFT is “an investment in the metaverse”, a “baby step into the brave new world of digital ownership”. Today, NFT enthusiasts are buying virtual dresses and cartoons. Tomorrow, they will be buying virtual land and houses in a new virtual world.
It’s easy to dismiss this as the ravings of a subculture of online fanatics – it is, after all, far from the only one. But the NFT community is different in that it is not interested in remaining a subculture. Its adherents earnestly believe that “they are just early to understand that the future lies in virtual worlds, and that ‘normies’ will embrace the metaverse in good time”.
The 1960s counterculture rejected the values of their elders and embraced instead sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.
The NFT community has a similar feel. There is a buzz in the air, a feeling of hope that the difficulties faced by their generation can be escaped. They are deadly serious about creating this new world and getting rich in the process. “By buying in today, you can secure your piece of a multi-trilliondollar market that could dwarf the current global economy.”