People attach value to all kinds of nonsense. While “NFTs” are not uniquely ridiculous, their rise is an extreme illustration of status anxiety in our grossly unequal economy.
Are NFTs The Dumbest Thing To Happen In The History of Humanity?
Yes.
Consider this recent article in Current Affairs:
Earlier this year, the news media began reporting on a strange phenomenon in the art world. Instead of selling physical paintings, some artists were now selling digital files, with many going for astonishing amounts of money. A JPG file of a work by the digital artist “Beeple” had sold for $69 million at the auction house Christie’s. A pixelated graphic of a man smoking a pipe sold for over $7 million. The works are sold as what are called “non-fungible tokens” or NFTs, which means that the sale of the work is recorded in a secure digital ledger, giving buyers permanent proof of their “ownership.”
The trend went beyond artwork. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet as an NFT, and fetched over $2.9 million. A New York Times writer reporting on the phenomenon was shocked when he sold his column as an NFT and received $560,000. Tesla CEO Elon Musk offered an NFT of a tweet containing a techno song about NFTs. Bidding reached $1.1 million before Musk announced he had decided not to sell after all. Things have only gotten stranger since. People apparently pay hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to get a particular custom cartoon of a monkey to put on their social media profiles. A few weeks back, a simulated yacht in a computer game sold for $650,000 in real money. Not an actual yacht, a 3D image of a yacht.