I feel like we’ve passed through Gibsonian cyberpunk dystopia, are currently somewhere in the cartoonish morass of Stephensonian Snow Crash cyberpunk dystopia, and now I’m just waiting for the tripped-out machines-get-spiritual hyperdimensional Rudy Ruckerian transreal cyberpunk something-or-other.
I for one am ready to sell cuttlefish to the interdimensionals.
I think the best comparison would be to a numbered print from a photographer.
He sold heaps of paintings … when he was an art dealer in London.
The problem I have with that is that reality in the corporate dystopia is so much less cool than cyberpunk promised.
Some of the marketplaces attempt to verify that the people “minting” NFTs are artists and are who they say there are, but as I understand it some are more lax than others. Nonetheless, and perhaps inevitably, people creating NFTs from other people’s art has already happened multiple times that I’ve heard about. Here’s one instance.
I don’t really know what happens in such cases. When somebody uploads somebody else’s art to a print-on-demand site or some such, it can at least potentially be taken down once it is identified, but NFTs presumably cannot be removed from the blockchain, and there is no refund mechanism if somebody has spent a significant sum on a fraud. In the case linked above, the stolen art is no longer shown as created by the account that stole it, and is apparently not viewable on Rarible anymore, but it is still on OpenSea. The account is still active and has other people’s art listed for sale.
I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before there is a relatively high profile instance of this.
Yeah, someone will have to do it just to show the flaw in the system.
The pixel art community (of which I am a member) are all about these things recently, and I feel like I’m losing my goddamn mind.
A cynical but accurate take…
artists pay to list pieces, buyers pay to place or cancel bids, artists pay to accept bids. this is all paid in speculative funny money that you need to buy in advance.
sure seems like a system where people with money/audience can benefit from this at the expense of others.
this is not the democratization of art. this is not taking the power back. this is techbros and investor backed platforms sitting on mountains of funny money converting you into fuel for the turbo train to climate hell
The rest here…
So that people with lots of semi-imaginary money can convert it into dollars and/or mess about with it in the hope that it will become even more money
What is required is a digital version of this
Ah, what the hell - let’s go old school…
There are plenty of “cool” cyberpunk things going on in the world. Most people living in cyberpunk scenarios, the background characters, are just trying to scrape by in a world growing increasingly stupid, unpredictable, and toxic both literally and figuratively. We just happen to be those people living those lives.
Honestly the most useful thing I can think of for this would be an open/online registry/title service. Like as an online representation of the title of your car or deed to your property or for ownership of IP (which I guess it is). If you say owning this NFT means you “own” a song in the sense that you own the rights to it vs owning a license to listen to it, this all kind of makes sense to me.
I’m sure they’re excited to make a buck off something they never thought they could.
