When the Stagnation Goes Virtual

&gt; ... the NFT community is not interested in remaining a subculture. NFT community leaders believe that they are just early to understand that the future lies in virtual worlds, and that normies will embrace the metaverse in good time.<p>An alternative explanation is that they _are_ the normies who have bought into the techno-grift in exchange for social status in a small community of believers.<p>&gt; Like, right now, if I have a sword in a video game, I only have it in one game. But if we had a metaverse, then I could take it anywhere, and it would still be mine. And maybe it’s like, the only sword in the whole world that could kill a certain monster. That would be really cool.<p>The idea that game companies will allow players to share resources between games with NFTs is both technically questionable and financially absurd.<p>---<p>If you can spare the time, I highly recommend watching Line Goes Up - The Problem with NFTs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g</a> . It&#x27;s a bit long-winded, and I suspect I&#x27;m preaching to the choir regardless, but it&#x27;s worth it.

&quot;This time is different. It’s not just speculation, it’s about community.&quot; (from article)<p>&quot;Let me assure you that this is not one of those shady pyramid schemes you&#x27;ve been hearing about. No sir. Our model is the trapezoid!&quot; (from The Simpsons)<p>But seriously, I can imagine that being in such a community would be all fun and games when there is a sufficient flow of new community members to keep the prices going up and so to keep making the existing community members richer and richer. However, at some point the music will stop and the party will come to an end, in which case what will happen to the sense of community then? And perhaps more importantly what will be its wider impact on society? If that community just forms a relatively small segment then the fallout could be contained, but if it sucks in an entire generation, or worse still an entire country, it could conceivably get physical. See also the collapse of pyramid schemes in Albania in 1997: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Albanian_Civil_War" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Albanian_Civil_War</a> .

&gt;In the NFT community, we are witnessing the logical conclusion of a generation that is so alienated, so profoundly unfulfilled, that they are considering abandoning the physical world altogether.<p>the comparison to 1960s counterculture as a form of escapism for (presumably) Gen-Z is laughable. how is something counterculture when backed by the likes of billionaires, VC firms, and the gaggle of techno grifters that make up the space. any sense of &quot;community&quot; or &quot;sticking it to the man&quot; is to make money by getting others to buy your speculative assets for something that doesn&#x27;t even exist yet<p>I love the writing of the piece, but found this idea not even believable for a second

My main problem with this &quot;you can own a video game asset!&quot; argument is that you just don&#x27;t.<p>You own a token on the blockchain that currently points to something. Tomorrow, it could point to something else. Let&#x27;s take the &quot;only sword that can kill a certain monster&quot; thing, and have a look at the parts involved.<p>The parts are:<p>- The token on the blockchain - The art assets of the sword - The stats on the sword (including what it can and can&#x27;t kill) - The list of games where this sword is a valid item<p>Of those, the NFT will only let you own or in any way control the first point. Let&#x27;s say I get The Sword Of Dragon Murder in game A, and it is currently also accepted in game B. Woohoo, metaverse! The company in control of game B will control what it looks and sounds like in game B, and they will also control what it does there. Maybe it <i>only</i> kills dragons there, but the game has no dragons? It doesn&#x27;t even need to be called the same. For a joke, they could have it display as &quot;The Toothpick of King Arthur&quot; and using it will have your character do a &quot;pick your teeth&quot; animation. Zero dragon murders to be had, no matter what you paid for the NFT.<p>Even worse is that you can&#x27;t even control what the item does in the game you got it from. At any time, they can change the art assets so it looks like any ordinary sword, and remove the dragon murdering stats.<p>We even see kind of that in games now: Power creep.<p>When the next expansion comes out, your current gear is likely to be outdated, and you have to grind for the new stuff (or &quot;microtransact&quot; yourself up to date), and it doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s an NFT or a regular entry in a regular database, because your old stuff is still crap in the new area.<p>In your favorite MMO, take a five year old &quot;best item&quot; and try to sell it on the auction house. You won&#x27;t get &quot;best item&quot; sort of prices. Why would that magically change with NFTs? Why are they exempt from this?<p>It seems obvious to me that the people talking about NFTs and secondary markets in games have not played any MMO for any length of time, or they&#x27;d know about nerfing and expansions.

I really enjoyed the article. It gives insights from inside that I couldn&#x27;t understand from outside. The sense of community and the idea of getting some reputation (even if it only makes sense inside that community, as any reputation) helps me to understand some of the motivations of the people that are inside (I know is not the single and maybe not even the main one).<p>Thanks OP for sharing!

<i>&quot;All week in New York, the myriad token-gated parties and meetups applied social filters based on digital ownership. Tickets to these events could only be purchased once you connected your crypto wallet and proved that you held the correct NFTs. At any given party, the coolest people in the room were always the “whales,” semi-mythical figures who own over 1000 ETH ($3 million at the time of writing) in digital assets. Rumors of exclusive “whale dinners” trickled down through the ranks of attendees, who jockeyed in anonymous group chats for passwords to invite-only events.</i>&quot;<p>This honestly makes me physically cringe. It&#x27;s not even the worst aspects of new money, it&#x27;s people LARPing as the nouveau riche. Imagine sitting in a room full of adults with status anxiety who compare their 20 dollar deviantart ape drawings they bought with their entire savings.

&gt; Say that we actually give up on reality and fully shift our attention to virtual worlds. How would you find a real person to marry? Do we still need houses, or just dark rooms with computers? Do we make babies in test tubes? Do we still have to exercise? Does it matter?<p>It matters because somebody still has to build and peovision datacenters and defend them and the borders of the country. If (reduction to absurdity) nobody ever leaves home it&#x27;s going to be easy to pillage infrastructure or even people.<p>Furthermore our bodies don&#x27;t react well at sitting down all day long, every single day. Does anybody have that kind of health data about Japanese hikikomori?<p>And of course extinction.

<i>&quot;one man stumbled drunk through the party, wearing a tablet displaying an NFT cat cartoon around his neck. He was grabbing strangers for stability and telling them how owning his Cool Cat “changed my life.” “Before this cat, I was a loser,” he said to anyone who would listen, “but now, because of this community, my life means something.&quot;</i><p>Not. Sustainable.

If you feel the same way after reading the article -- that an actual metaverse _would_ be cool, and it doesn&#x27;t need to be Zuckerberg&#x27;s dystopia, I encourage you to do your own research and find one of the thousand companies that agrees and help them out.<p>In the right corners, it really does feel like &quot;web 2.0&quot; all over again -- and I mean that in the best way possible, because &quot;web 2.0&quot; set the course of internet technology for a decade.

This was a great essay!<p>Two great excerpts:<p>&gt; He cut me off. “[NFTs are] not art. Don’t call it art. That’s offensive to real art.”<p>This paragraph really drove home to me what NFTs are. They&#x27;re another club, like having a blog or a TheFacebook account used to be.<p>&gt; I didn’t tell him what I was actually thinking, which is that I suddenly could not imagine myself having children anymore, if I would just have to watch them slouch away into the confines of digital life. If I do have children, they will likely grow up in a world where living online is normal, or at least a viable option.<p>I think everyone who considers having or has kids worries about what kind of world their kids will grow up in. I know I have. The things we endure ourselves shouldn&#x27;t be inflicted on our kids.<p>That said, a partially digital life that is available by choice (rather than being inflicted on someone) seems pretty awesome in some ways. Look at how mailing lists have helped foster knowledge sharing and community, or how youtube has made it so much easier to learn skills, and imagine that in a more accessible format.

Serious Question: how is NFT anything but Intellectual Property rights on steroids? It seems the ideal method to allow the elites&#x2F;billionaires to track everything they own, in the online world?

Wow. Just...wow. Some things in the article just seemed right up satire;<p>the blonde dressed-up lawyer who left her job pursuing [buzzword]-[buzzword]ing ?<p>the drunk guy who now has a meaning in life by obtaining the latest [buzzword] ?<p>the crowd cheering crazy at the mention of the [buzzword] ?<p>it all seems too... weird and alien to me; I&#x27;m not a boomer, but I&#x27;m almost 40; I&#x27;ve cheered at the age of digitalization and I was publicly derided on my views of the internet in the mid-90s.<p>Now... is this how older people felt in the 80s-90s, when faced with news about the digital era? or the idea that internet will replace this-and-that?<p>How similar is this to the late-90s dot-com craze? I bet my ass off that at the time they had early-adopter parties like the one in the article.

Every generation has these cultural blips. It’s always a small subgroup of a particular generation ( the rest are the “normies” I guess).<p>Maybe this one is extra lame but like any teenage drama, it’s a phase..<p>And other people always monetized this, from bar&#x2F;club owners, baseball card printers, fidget spinners moguls and some hopeful Zuckerbergs now.

If anyone&#x27;s wondering, entry ticket for their 3 days event starts from ~600$ (of course you can pay in crypto).

Well, I missed this memo. Wow.