NFTs are blamed for everything from tacky art to economic inequality and environmental destruction. But, the arguments by critics don‘t add up, writes
NFTs are blamed for everything from tacky art to economic inequality and environmental destruction. But, the arguments by critics don‘t add up, writes Something Interesting‘s Knifefight.
“For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Toward the end of January, one of my favorite content producers on the internet Dan Olson (aka Folding Ideas) published a video titled Line Goes Up — The Problem with NFTs outlining his complaints about nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. At the time of writing, Line Goes Up has accumulated over six million views — almost twice as many views as his next most successful video. That’s an impressive reach for a 2.5 hour documentary with very little marketing behind it.
In the film, Olson lays out the following argument:
- Cryptocurrency is useless except to sell to a greater fool.
- NFTs, DAOs and play-to-earn games are just ways to find more fools.
- The fools who buy in become accomplices in marketing the scam.
- NFTs are ugly, centralized, pointless, exploit artists and damage the environment.
To be honest, the movie bums me out. It is not because Olson doesn’t like NFTs — it is perfectly reasonable not to like NFTs. It bums me out because one of my favorite things about the Folding Ideas canon was how much sympathy he brought to previous subjects. Consider how hard Olson worked to humanize flat earthers or 50 Shades of Gray. In contrast, Olson describes NFTs as “incomprehensibly tasteless” and cryptocurrency enthusiasts as “terrible people” with “poor judgment” and “low social literacy.” He calls Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin a “butthurt warlock.” He summarizes the entire space as “Amway but with ugly ass ape cartoons.”
In short, NFTs make Olson angry. He is not alone.
super normal discourse pic.twitter.com/ejLsaOmGMH
— 𒐪𒐪𒐪 𒐪𒐪𒐪 𒐪𒐪𒐪 𒐪𒐪𒐪 𒐪𒐪𒐪 𒐪𒐪𒐪 (@SHL0MS) January 28, 2022
To be clear, I agree with a lot of Olson’s criticisms of the space. It attracts gamblers, fraudsters and fools. Motivated reasoning and dishonest marketing are everywhere. I have written extensively about what I think are the fatal flaws of Ethereum, I am very skeptical of DAOs and I don’t think the current generation of P2E games is compelling.
Olson describes a lot of examples of shitty behavior and, for the most part, they are accurate descriptions — there are certainly plenty of similar examples that he could have used to make the same points. The history of crypto is littered with failed projects and overt scams.
The problem is not that Olson is wrong about the examples he identifies, the problem is that he is wrong about the conclusion he draws. Some people misunderstand cryptocurrency, but that doesn’t make cryptocurrency useless. Some people make bad art with NFTs, but that doesn’t make NFTs bad art. Explaining the value of NFTs by finding the worst possible examples of how they are used is like explaining the value of the internet by making a list of the worst possible websites.
Olson sampled the NFT projects he describes by accepting random spam discord invites — roughly like evaluating average website quality by clicking on every spam email link. It’s a foolish way to measure average quality and average quality is a foolish thing to measure in the first place. The quality of the “average” website doesn’t really mean anything and doesn’t matter anyway — what matters is the quality of the websites you choose to interact with. The same is true of NFTs.
There is no such thing as NFT art
A common complaint about NFTs is that they are ugly. In Line Goes Up, Olson describes them as “fugly,” “garish” and “incredibly cringeworthy.” But, to anyone who understands NFTs, it is immediately obvious that the criticism makes no sense. Not just because art is subjective and no one has the authority to dismiss a genre of art as unworthy, but because NFTs are not a genre of art at all. NFTs don’t look like anything. They can be associated with literally any visuals or with no visuals at all. NFTs aren’t a style of art, they are a tool that artists can use.
There are NFTs for portrait photography, generative art, songs, virtual real estate, poems, memes, mood stones, video game items, financial contracts and athletic accomplishments. There is even an NFT that represents a work of 1010×1010 transparent pixels arranged recursively. Anyone who tells you that NFTs are ugly is telling you more about the limits of their imagination than about the limits of NFTs. It is like someone who has only ever watched Marvel films confidently asserting that movies are inherently unrealistic.
Cryptocurrency is useful — that’s why people use it
Olson opens Line Goes Up with a description of the 2008 mortgage crisis and how Bitcoin emerged from it. His criticisms of…
cointelegraph.com