Exciting news! I have a rant about NFTs to share with you that I just know you're going to love. 1/(I'm already sorry)

My core frustration is that it seems to somehow deactivate critical thinking in what are otherwise cautious, skeptical, intelligent people whom I respect deeply.

All you need is a just-under-the-surface inspection. People throw around words like "decentralized" and "autonomous" like these are unassailably good. That the politics of an organization can be automated, removing the "need for human arbitration" is apparently always desirable.

So in case you were confused, when your bank automatically charges you a late fee on an automatic overdraft fee, and there's no accountable person to mediate on your behalf, that's a good thing. More of the world should be like that.

These words come up over and over again, "decentralized", "headless", "democratic." I have this really cool, hip, decentralized + headless organization to tell you about, it's called QAnon.

I remember how fast our opinions about technology can change. Yes, our favorite early internet memes (Nyan Cat) are making money now, and our favorite free press agitator (Edward Snowden) raised a lot of money for a good cause. But this tech has lots of other uses.

At one point we were celebrating Twitter for making the Arab Spring possible. At one point Obama won because the Left "got" the internet and the Right didn't. How did you feel about the internet in 2016? How did you feel about Twitter in 2017?

Wait until Ben Shapiro is raising millions on the sale of his first NFT. Wait for the rise of the first alt-right DAO.

The deployers of first-to-market blockchain tech will say "Of course this space is very new and complex, and we're excited to see how people use the technology. We believe in access and openness." So a platform that doesn't really care how people use it, so long as they use it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that people who deserve to make money are making money. But I don't love that the solution to "How do we support people who make something (art) that is not scarce?" is "Okay let's make that thing scarce."

I miss the dream of post-scarcity.

It feels like we've abandoned any hope that we could achieve a non-market solution to the problem of valuing art, and instead we've just found a way to allow the largess of very rich people to prop up digital art the same as studio art.

In the end I too think crypto and NFTs and DAOs are cool and fun and worth playing with. I'm just here for more criticism and less reliance on technology. I don't think these technologies are good just because they're "distributed."

I don't think we've "solved" the problem of valuing art, even if the people we love are _finally_ making money. Most of all, I just want to remember that accountability, attention, and human deliberation are the truly valuable, and truly scarce, commodities.