NFTs are perfectly explained in this article by British software engineer Stephen Diehl, who writes "I see the philosophy behind NFTs as giving rise to a dystopia I call
The Tinkerbell Griftopia."
Quote:
Much ink has been spilled describing the technical internals of NFTs, and about as equal as much ink has been spent on obscurantism and decentralized woo woo to explain why the internals don’t matter. There is very little common ground on such debates because to the faithful the value of NFTs is a presuppositional truth instilled in them by the revelation of making money off them. And simultaneously the non-believers can “right-click” or Torrent any NFT as a statement of the rejection of the ontological status of playing word games with the term “own”.
Still to a lot of us technologists, it looks like NFTs are the emperor running around with no clothes and crypto acolytes are selling broken hyperlinks to each other as either vanity projects or get rich quick schemes. But truly that is the message of the Andersen folktale, that power begets the capacity to inspire delusion in the masses. And that’s why this subject is such a divisive one, because the entire enterprise of NFTs is like a mental contagion that can only sustain itself by perpetual proselytizing and conversion. A lot of us feel this in our bones, because we know and lost friends that went “down the crypto rabbit hole” and turned into wildly different people, oftentimes for the worse because these ideas tend to have a comorbidity with risk-seeking and gambling problems.
There’s nothing new under the sun and the phenomenon of self-perpetuating faith-based economic schemes are well known to exist, there’s even a term: the Tinkerbell Effect. The phenomenon where things that are thought to exist only because people believe in them. The crypto acolytes really believe they can will into existence a whole new epistemé of value detached from the classical economics of the previous order.
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