Do we work as hard as we do to create for its own sake, to contribute to open research, to sell the products of our creative process, or to make progress and transcend the limits of what we thought was possible before?
Yes.
There’s something about creative work that makes it hard to talk about. As if opening up the patterns of how it’s made, what it does, what it says, how we got here, or how you might take it in a different way to go farther still, means we will inevitably lose what makes us special. We can see a hint of that fear in the raw reactions to AI art, or the strange rejections of web3, by creators who have been burned by years of effort and belief in a system of the world that’s gone to waste.
There is work to be done still to communicate better the deep symmetries between open synth models, diy protocols for social mobility, and creativity.
But let’s first take a look more closely at one place where their shared properties should be obvious, through sales of NFTs.
The thing is, most of the market still doesn’t know what NFTs are. That’s a problem. For the market.
Superficially, it fills our feeds with noise, and gives incumbents an excuse to become tyrants. Fear of who owns what, who makes what, and near unlimited creative expression tends to do that.
The bigger problem is when in the middle of all that noise and conflict we forget what we’re here to do. Strip it all away to find the action.
Markets make raw materials into resources and move them from person to person, place to place.
The problem in virtual, latent, and IRL spaces for all of us who depend on markets is how much we lose when nothing works as it did, could, or should.
Web3, and less obviously NFTs, fix what’s broken in our markets by coordinating what’s made and how it moves.
Let that sink in.
At a descriptive distance, NFTs are conductors in code for the open praxis and patterns we didn’t know we missed. Ziegler would be thrilled.
They are, more plainly, nonfungible — — not all the same. No more than all art has the same value, whether made by human hands holding a needle & thread, a graphics tablet & wireless pen, or crafting prompts, training models, and running endless steps through night after night without sleep.
Like most things in glass dial economies, their value comes from appearance, what they say about status, and material use.
When they are recognizably good in one or more of those features, they shorten the distance between imagined and real. And when combined with hard work and good patterns to reference, the burning questions become:
In worlds run by interfaces, machine code, and APIs, like many other mechanisms made from the fabric stuff of web3, NFTs are devices tailor made for these questions.
For the answers, and the sales of water to thirsty people, we’ll look to the next great creative works yet to come.
• Flagship
• Docs
• FUD FAQ
• Transparency Reports
• Youtube
• Blog