Like most people, when I first encountered NFTs I thought they were a scam: a lot of grifters taking money from impressionable fiance bros, tech bros, and technofetishist by hyping up a worthless new application of a technology. After watching Line Goes Up a few months ago, I became convinced that NFTs were a vanguard of this current global wave of fascism. The primary drivers behind NFTs aren't grifters but instead capitalists, just not ultra wealthy capitalists. Near the end of the video, Olson refers to NFTs as a battle between the 5% and the 1%, a relationship primarily based on the capitalist response to the end of capitalism. The writing is on the wall for everyone who isn't in the Gates/Bezos level of owning the means of production, which includes smaller capitalists still larger than the petite bourgeois. These capitalists know this, and they resent it. They aren't mad about extreme inequality and rampant oppression, they're mad that will soon no longer be the oppressors. In a desperate bid to keep their material position over society, they turned to creating a system whose goal is the corporatization of everything, a system that's based on atomizing and exploiting every tiny aspect of our lives - and they dreamed themselves the rulers of this new system. Conflicts like this, where smaller capitalists are willing to turn to social upheaval in order to take power from larger capitalists are exactly how fascism begins. NFTs are an incredibly dumb grift, but at their core, their underlying ideology is geared towards the creation of a new fascist social order. Where christofascism and QAnon are the worker response to the end of capitalism, technofetishism (specifically NFTs, DAOs, the blockchain, and all the rest) is the capitalist response to the end of capitalism. They're two opposite, class specific manifestations of the advent of fascism.

Of course, the NFT and crypto markets have collapsed. While this is potentially a diffusing of the capitalist infighting that heralds fascism, I don't think this is the last we'll see of NFTs. As stated above, the very function of NFTs is to turn everything about a worker's life into a commodity. Capitalism naturally ends as it runs out of markets to exploit, causing it to increase the exploitation of existing markets and laborers to unsustainable levels. That creates the material conditions we're seeing now, which directly leads to anti-capitalist sentiment that fascists take advantage of. Fascism as an ideology is essentially a more overtly violent continuation of capitalism after its collapse. The reason this is relevant to a conversation on NFTs is that big market players recognize the need to find more markets to exploit. Not in a Marxist sense where they are aware of their own inevitable collapse, but rather just by following their natural systemic incentives to grow infinitely. NFTs are a dumb grift, and they were a complete failure due to a lack of systemic backing and omnipresent scams. But what if a company like Facebook built their own NFT infrastructure? If enough keystone capitalists decided to recreate the architecture of crypto exchanges and NFTs, they could actually succeed in using technology to create markets out of thin air. This was the end goal of the existing incarnation of NFTs, the players involved simply lacked the institutional power to force everyone to participate by being required to register your resume or lease as an NFT. Should they choose to rebuild these systems under their control, web3 would give large capitalists more markets to speculate on and exploit at the cost of ever decreasing material conditions for the working class. The final days of capitalism might include systems not entirely dissimilar to what web3 aims to be, just not controlled by the original designers.

It seems unlikely at this point that NFTs will herald fascism in the way that I initially worried, but that's not to say that web3 won't be a contributing factor. By contrast, the failure of web3 and the potential recreation of it by large capitalists will provide ample room to radicalize its former advocates. Crypto bros, often middle class white men, who have been financially harmed by NFTs and crypto while companies like Meta recreate the same structures they once participated in will likely feel indignant and cheated out wealth they believe should be theirs. From their perspective, if NFTs were a viable idea why then were they unable to profit off of them despite being in on the ground floor long before larger capitalists became involved? This sentiment will be easily exploited by fascist agitators who will argue that this is evidence "the elite" rig systems so that "the people" cannot succeed financially. From here we'll see the typical fascist pipelining and bending of a legitimate criticism of liberal capitalism into an argument in support of a more overtly violent form of capitalism.

NFTs represent an opportunity for capitalists to extend the lifespan of capitalism by atomizing the existence of workers in the name of ever increasing growth. Simultaneously, the failure of cryptocurrency and the likelihood of its revitalization by large capitalists offers a massive opportunity to radicalize those who initially bought into crypto as consumers - a group already rife with fascist ideology and economically primed by declining material privilege to side with fascism. In this sense NFTs represent a way for fascists to reach an entirely different demographic than those susceptible to christofascism and conspiracy, creating an even wider tent of reactionary ideology.

  • wire [it/its]
    hexagon
    ·
    2 years ago

    I appreciate where you're coming from but I disagree. The difference as I see it is that NFTs don't just represent a new range of products but rather an entirely new way to make money of existing products, including products that aren't really products. Where something like VR is just another product to buy, the blockchain is a system which requires users to pay fees into the system in order to participate. The monkey JPGs or CS:GO skins aren't what's valuable about NFTs, it's the idea of creating non-fungible digital assets that itself has value. Instead of verifying you own this ape, what if you had to verify your lease via the blockchain? Meta can have a massive server that regulates the validity of the chain and make you pay them money for a contract you were already going to draft with a landlord by requiring it be verified on their chain. If you think the lease example is outrageous, imagine if Google required all of their Google certificate programs to be verified via their blockchain in order for them to hold meaning. Now professionals in all variety of fields are minting NFTs that Google gets a cut from all for certificates they would have gotten anyway. The true value of NFTs is that they can be leveraged to comodify existing under capitalism, no new products have to be created but rather a new market can be created out of existing products.

    Additionally, while they're not populated by a massive number of people, NFTs aren't just a meme. There are a lot of people who have bought into NFTs or crypto, and while web3 isn't so popular as to be common, it's not just a restricted to twitter. There's whole ecosystems here, and all of them are filled with people ready to be radicalized by fascists.

    • ajouter [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      There are lots of places where people are ready to be radicalized by fascists. The US empire and subsequently its vassal states are in active decay so we're naturally seeing more right-wing extremism. CAN crypto-bros be radicalized into fascism? Sure. But I'm not convinced that they exist in meaningful enough numbers that they will be a driving force here.

      A more interesting supposition is that crypto might be widely used for funding militias.

    • DinosaurThussy [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I think a bit advantage technically is that it decouples technical integration from collaboration with company who maintains the chain. Increasingly centralized mining is obviously the way things have headed and the ability to not have to maintain a whole API surface in order for people to add products into your storefront is likely more valuable than some of us realize atm

        • DinosaurThussy [they/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          No it doesn’t. It’s a hype thing for sure. The amount of conferences over the past years with a token “blockchain” session has been crazy. Like in completely unrelated fields

    • silent_water [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I wouldn't stop at how this kind of privatized legal system can be used at home. we should expect companies to pressure colonized nations to accept the legitimacy of, for instance, blockchain backed land registries, or contracts as you've already mentioned. in these subjugated markets, the state bends more readily to the whim of imperial capital and these more corrosive fascist privatization schemes can be hammered out, before as always they turn inward and return home.

      • wire [it/its]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        I'm not sure if you were trying to reference this, but what you're talking about already exists for land in Latin America and the Caribbean. No clue how successful the venture was but they tried, which is terrifying.

        While I'm at it, to give a more dystopic scenario where this would be used at home is if the US balkanizes or the strength of the federal government continues to be eroded. Arizona might functionally have a different set of laws than California in the near future, and something needs to sort out how information moves between those systems. Normally this is where a federal government would step in, but if that continues to operate with incompetence and be dismantled, you might start to see corporations step in to fill the role of information authentication across state lines.

        • silent_water [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I wasn't referencing anything in particular, just where my brain went when I realized what ethereum was a couple of years ago,what "smart contract" actually meant. I'm horrified, if unsurprised to learn that I was right.

          While I’m at it, to give a more dystopic scenario where this would be used at home is if the US balkanizes

          if the US balkanizes, we're fighting a war for local/regional control. real left factions will have the opportunity to win popular support because the liberals will have completely and visibly failed in a rather final way. technofascism won't be guaranteed to win that war and establish social and legal hegemony. I'm not saying it's a rosy path but this way lays one of our largest opportunities. a dystopia is possible but... we can't plan to fail to seize every opportunity that lands in our lap.