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.