NFT Culture in 2021

Link: When the Stagnation Goes Virtual

Intro

Ginevra Davis is a student at Stanford University. She went to NFT.NYC in Nov 2021. It was, as the name suggested, an NFT event hosted in New York City.

This article is about her experience and thoughts during the event. If you are not very familiar with the NFT culture, reading this article can be very eye-opening 😮

Highlights

NFT.NYC was a 5,000 person extravaganza described by The New York Times as a coming-out party for the emerging NFT subculture. The event itself consisted of a $600-per-ticket conference held in Times Square, as well as over a hundred satellite events spread across New York. Early adopters and speculators came to New York to revel in their newfound cachet and meet their internet friends in real life.

The term “NFT” has become synonymous with digital art, but the object of an NFT can technically point to anything: an animation, a sound file, or even virtual real estate. Most of the time, NFTs are used to indicate ownership of easily copyable digital assets like JPEG images.

But today's NFT culture is another thing.

I went to NFT.NYC because I wanted to learn about digital art. But I quickly learned that members of the burgeoning NFT community see themselves not as art collectors, but as the vanguard of a larger shift from physical to digital life.

The NFT boom is not about art or ownership. It is about escape.

1960s phenomenon of young people who ran away from their comfortable, middle-class lives hoping to find something in California.

Our generation is notable for our lack of a youth-led counterculture, or any coherent rebellion

But there is no natural scarcity in the digital world. All the scarcity in this metaverse economy has to be imposed, against the nature of the medium

In the physical world, competition exists by necessity. In the metaverse, it exists for its own sake—or maybe for the sake of investors.

Today, bound by the limits of web2, metaverse enthusiasts are limited to buying cartoon profile pictures and digital art to signal their affiliation with online communities. Tomorrow, they imagine that their communities will gather in immersive digital worlds, complete with NFTs for virtual land and virtual houses, virtual tickets to virtual events, and virtual clothes for their shiny new avatars.

About Bored Ape and other profile pictures (PFPs):

He cut me off. “It’s not art. Don’t call it art. That’s offensive to real art.”  “This,” he gestured to the ape on his phone, “is a new fraternity.”

So, it is a community.

most NFT.NYC attendees would not affiliate themselves with a stodgy, real-world institution like a fraternity, the motto of the conference might as well have been community.

Everyone there attested to the power of NFT communities to change lives.

I met one clean-cut, suit-wearing lawyer who, somewhat astonished by his own devotion, declared that he would never sell his Bored Ape, even if the market crashed or it was worth $5 million. “It’s a part of me now,” he said. “It would be like cutting off my left arm.”

Or symbol of status.

The beauty of NFTs is that it is extremely simple to confirm who owns what, and thus to create and enforce social hierarchies based on your virtual holdings. This is very real.

When ordinary people buy followers or go to expensive music festivals just for social media photos, they have accepted the idea that their digital appearance is worth spending real money on.

Meanwhile, the primary narrative they have been fed about the physical world is that it will probably kill them one day, via COVID-19 or climate change. Our generation may not be consciously hostile to the physical world, but we have little affection for it either.

online life does not actually make up for physical decay, either in people or in society. Extended time in digital worlds necessarily takes time away from the few factors consistently shown to improve human happiness: family, physical health, and time with close friends.