Another angle on the artificial scarcity point is that scarcity is very hard to do in the digital world. Until NFTs showed up, there really was no way of signaling being the first to own/post a blog post, jpeg, meme, whatever—information like this used to be coded in “lore”, stories about people who made the best online game maps or particularly good blog posts, often backed up by links to the internet archive.
In other words, NFTs are for users what DRM was for media producers, perhaps.
I think Patreon is kind of also the same idea (though there are probably better ways to do public good funding than either of these models). You couldn’t own a blog post, but you could have your name etched into it at the top of the patrons list. Patreon is much more explicitly about supporting the creator, though, so the comparison isn’t perfect.
I think NFTs, in the platonic ideal form that I think about, are actually the opposite of DRM in some sense. DRM aims to make the actual content scarce; NFTs aim to make the intangible essence of owning the Schelling point scarce. In that sense, NFTs are immune to what made DRM fail. It’s fundamentally impossible to make the content scarce, because of the analog hole. With NFTs, even if everyone has the underlying content, the value of the Schelling point isn’t diminished. If anything, the more famous and well known the underlying content is, the more valuable the essence of the Schelling point becomes.
Good point, you are correct. I conflated the status conferred by ownership with a part of a content distribution mechanism.
Though I think NFTs are about something bigger than patronage. Our brains are wired for building and navigating hierarchies. Status management is a huge aspect of that. On the NFT-less web, managing status was hard and more often than not boiled down to things like post or follower count. But NFTs change the game by allowing more of our built-in status-seeking drives to exist online. One way the game is different is that, unlike followers, NFTs can be gifted—although a version existed for this in the form of “guest posts” and similar mechanisms to share status.
Also, unrelated to this train of thought, I wouldn’t want to own the Mona Lisa. I don’t find that image helpful or inspiring or anything like that. But my monkey brain would love to own an NFT of Meditations on Moloch because of how meaningful that text is for me—and for the community I care about.
Another angle on the artificial scarcity point is that scarcity is very hard to do in the digital world. Until NFTs showed up, there really was no way of signaling being the first to own/post a blog post, jpeg, meme, whatever—information like this used to be coded in “lore”, stories about people who made the best online game maps or particularly good blog posts, often backed up by links to the internet archive.
In other words, NFTs are for users what DRM was for media producers, perhaps.
I think Patreon is kind of also the same idea (though there are probably better ways to do public good funding than either of these models). You couldn’t own a blog post, but you could have your name etched into it at the top of the patrons list. Patreon is much more explicitly about supporting the creator, though, so the comparison isn’t perfect.
I think NFTs, in the platonic ideal form that I think about, are actually the opposite of DRM in some sense. DRM aims to make the actual content scarce; NFTs aim to make the intangible essence of owning the Schelling point scarce. In that sense, NFTs are immune to what made DRM fail. It’s fundamentally impossible to make the content scarce, because of the analog hole. With NFTs, even if everyone has the underlying content, the value of the Schelling point isn’t diminished. If anything, the more famous and well known the underlying content is, the more valuable the essence of the Schelling point becomes.
Good point, you are correct. I conflated the status conferred by ownership with a part of a content distribution mechanism.
Though I think NFTs are about something bigger than patronage. Our brains are wired for building and navigating hierarchies. Status management is a huge aspect of that. On the NFT-less web, managing status was hard and more often than not boiled down to things like post or follower count. But NFTs change the game by allowing more of our built-in status-seeking drives to exist online. One way the game is different is that, unlike followers, NFTs can be gifted—although a version existed for this in the form of “guest posts” and similar mechanisms to share status.
Also, unrelated to this train of thought, I wouldn’t want to own the Mona Lisa. I don’t find that image helpful or inspiring or anything like that. But my monkey brain would love to own an NFT of Meditations on Moloch because of how meaningful that text is for me—and for the community I care about.