Non-Fungible Bullshit

Beginning at some point in 2021, the Non-Fungible Token — the latest cryptocurrency-adjacent fad to sweep the nation — was suddenly everywhere. As if by way of some unknowable alchemic process, it seemed, people were somehow turning a profit by trading thoroughly unremarkable clip art images while others were inexplicably shelling out big to claim their title deeds.

Celebrities and social media influencers also couldn’t seem to shut up about them. From Serena Williams and Logan Paul to Matt Damon and William Shatner, the NFT craze quickly transcended generations and swept up an eclectic cavalcade of the rich and famous in its wake. (Jimmy Fallon, incidentally, spent more than $200,000 on the Bored Ape NFT that now graces his Twitter profile.) Beeple, name-dropped by Paris Hilton in her Fallon segment, fetched more than $3.5 million in an NFT auction. Ape NFTs have been “stolen” in digital heists. One B-list reality star has even gotten in the action by monetizing her own farts (these NFTs, incidentally, come with the tagline: “Be part of history with the first ever generative Fart Jar NFT collection — Imagine the smell!”)

If you’re not already immersed in this glorified Pokémon card ponzi scheme, it’s all a little perplexing, and you may be wondering what any of it actually means. In essence, an NFT gives you exclusive ownership over a digital object of some kind (images, songs, tweets, and virtually anything else can be turned into an NFT).

On its face, buying one can be a bit like buying an original artwork, though with digital usage rights and stored on a blockchain. You can’t, in other words, actually hold it in your hands like a poster or painting. The NFT market being a kind of property rights Wild West, some have been converted into tokens without their author’s knowledge or consent. Still more incredibly, the original media object almost always remains totally accessible to anyone online — essentially rendering the whole premise of exclusivity moot (except in the abstract sense of “bragging rights”).

In a word, NFTs are bullshit. And, like most forms of bullshit in America — think WeWork, the Fyre Festival, or any number of other venture capital-hatched disruption rackets — they’ve come packaged in a phony populist language of community and an even phonier rhetoric of innovation.

Like cryptocurrency, it’s hard to make a case for their actual use value and, like the very dumbest Silicon Valley startups and multilevel marketing scams, they’re best understood as speculative investments in which a privileged few can wring money from something of no redeeming social benefit. The majority, in fact, are about as useful as trash. As Vulture’s Rebecca Alter put it, most NFTs “are about as valuable as a QR code on a Coke bottle cap that sends you to a dead link to an mp3 download.”

Value in any recognizable sense, suffice it to say, is not really the point.

Decadence and Boundless Commodification

The NFT boom, fittingly enough, has coincided quite directly with a period of particularly grotesque collective hardship and surging inequality. As both a threat to public health and an historic economic disruption, the COVID era has been an extraordinarily difficult time for many working and middle-class Americans, but a veritable land of milk and honey for its corporate overlords and lumpen bourgeoisie.

Events of recent years have arguably represented the best occasion in decades to reimagine the fundamentals of American society and transform the economy into something other than a handful of hedge funds and tech monopolies sitting on top of each other inside a trench coat. Instead, the country’s bipartisan ruling class opted to greet mass death with a dollop of inadequate and temporary social protections while its criminally undertaxed ultrarich were left to seek out novel ways of profiting from their own money and new totems of their elite status.

Nothing has been more symbolic of this trajectory than NFTs, the latest symptom of a decadent and increasingly post-democratic consensus resting on little more than predatory rent-seeking and boundless commodification. As the New Republic’s Jacob Silverman put it last year:

NFTs reflect a view of the world in which anything can be monetized, even if its value is entirely specious. Having exhausted traditional investments like property and stocks — as well as boutique services like concierge doctors or privileged access to the COVID-19 vaccine — the country’s idle elites are now seeking to expand their financial footprint to cover, well, anything to which they wish to lay claim. . . .  It’s the financialization of everything, with practically anything eligible to be tokenized, chopped up into tranches, converted into securities that intrepid day traders could buy and sell.

In effect, a political economy that has eschewed even the thinnest notions of social contract or public good in its elevation of the market — along with a manufacturing base that once actually built things — is laying the groundwork for a new and more expansive kind of post-materialist commodification.

In this latest incarnation of our second gilded age, speculative bubbles based in the digital ether will help affix an ersatz version of innovation and progress to a top-heavy economy structurally incapable of delivering the real kinds. As digital commodities, NFTs thus signal the ongoing descent of capitalism into pure simulacrum and the growing remove of its greatest beneficiaries from anything even resembling productive activity.

As a civilizational metaphor on the other hand, they’re perhaps the perfect symbol of a political order so dismally unjust and a regressive culture so thoroughly exhausted that even the rich people brandishing them on late-night TV struggle to do so with any conviction.