literally what the fuck is the point of any of this
As Justin Roczniak pointed out on an episode of WTYP - crypto, blockchain, and NFTs are all ways for people to turn LABOR + NATURAL RESOURCES into an abstraction of an abstraction, and then trade its value. Some poor miner in Africa making $1 a week digs cobalt from the ground, which is shipped to China where it's converted into a GPU, then shuffled off to Australia where it sits in a server farm crunching numbers, burning energy from a dam on an Aboriginal river, in order to validate the financial system.
The important part is: if you acknowledge that these "fake virtual things" have value, you are also accepting the entire capitalist system of land ownership, along with the global north's entitlement to the labor of the peasantry and proletariat of the global south, and the moral ability - necessity, even - for capitalism to use up all of earth's energy resources for short-term profits.
That's the point. The point is profit. NFTs are capitalism in its purest form - a rich white man tells you that this picture of a "Horny Star Fox" is more valuable than the lives of every child in Bangladesh. And you must agree. Capitalists control the banks, the money, everything. You must agree. Even if you don't agree, it doesn't matter. What matters is that they control you. That's the point.
As Justin Roczniak pointed out on an episode of WTYP - crypto, blockchain, and NFTs are all ways for people to turn LABOR + NATURAL RESOURCES into an abstraction of an abstraction, and then trade its value. Some poor miner in Africa making $1 a week digs cobalt from the ground, which is shipped to China where it's converted into a GPU, then shuffled off to Australia where it sits in a server farm crunching numbers, burning energy from a dam on an Aboriginal river, in order to validate the financial system.
The important part is: if you acknowledge that these "fake virtual things" have value, you are also accepting the entire capitalist system of land ownership, along with the global north's entitlement to the labor of the peasantry and proletariat of the global south, and the moral ability - necessity, even - for capitalism to use up all of earth's energy resources for short-term profits.
That's the point. The point is profit. NFTs are capitalism in its purest form - a rich white man tells you that this picture of a "Horny Star Fox" is more valuable than the lives of every child in Bangladesh. And you must agree. Capitalists control the banks, the money, everything. You must agree. Even if you don't agree, it doesn't matter. What matters is that they control you. That's the point.