However, I'm not sure that NFTs show how silly owning land is, rather the opposite: holding land, or holding the violence voucher for a piece of land, shows how dumb NFTs are. With land, you can own the title and then call the police (or in some cases even legally defend your property yourself) if someone violates those title rights. With NFTs, the only right you have is to the number on the ledger. An NFT is like if you could buy the land title from someone, but they keep the land and all associated property rights. You get to own the piece of paper saying you hold the title, and no one else can own that piece of paper, but the paper itself has nothing else attached to it. That's the real reason NFTs are so stupid. They're property without the benefits of property.
I do agree that NFTs are a good way of showing the 'property as violence' concept, especially as scams and hacking and so on have shown that blockchain doesn't actually solve the problem of state enforcement of property, because without the state to enforce the property, you're left with enforcing property yourself. That might be fine with some folks, but it's not really a functioning argument that property ownership can exist absent some sort of centralized enforcement mechanism.
I quite like Matt Bruenig's piece on property as 'violence vouchers':
https://mattbruenig.com/2014/03/28/violence-vouchers-a-descriptive-account-of-property/
However, I'm not sure that NFTs show how silly owning land is, rather the opposite: holding land, or holding the violence voucher for a piece of land, shows how dumb NFTs are. With land, you can own the title and then call the police (or in some cases even legally defend your property yourself) if someone violates those title rights. With NFTs, the only right you have is to the number on the ledger. An NFT is like if you could buy the land title from someone, but they keep the land and all associated property rights. You get to own the piece of paper saying you hold the title, and no one else can own that piece of paper, but the paper itself has nothing else attached to it. That's the real reason NFTs are so stupid. They're property without the benefits of property.
I do agree that NFTs are a good way of showing the 'property as violence' concept, especially as scams and hacking and so on have shown that blockchain doesn't actually solve the problem of state enforcement of property, because without the state to enforce the property, you're left with enforcing property yourself. That might be fine with some folks, but it's not really a functioning argument that property ownership can exist absent some sort of centralized enforcement mechanism.