Web3 is a Giant Decentralised Art Performance
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Are you confused by Web3? There’s a lot of confusing text typed into the internet (often by people with ape avatars) about some glorious but vague future of the decentralised, tokenised web. I too had struggled to find any fruits of this innovation, except perhaps increasingly bizarre variants on “number go up”). But then I realised it’s all a giant decentralised art performance and it all makes sense now.
Having founded an art marketplace I’m familiar with the quirks and ridicularity1 of the art world, and so I was willing to give NFTs a wide berth. On the face of it, it seems ridiculous that people are willing to bid millions of dollars for a pointers in a database (blockchain) that don’t even confer any kind of legal ownership over what they point to.
Fake Scarcity is Beautiful
However you can reduce the art world to almost the same thing. The value of any artwork is almost entirely down to what someone is willing to pay for it.
Consider a world in which art critics, gallerists, collectors and all memories of them from all time suddenly disappeared in a puff of logic, what is the value of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting at that moment? You could perhaps argue that “oil paintings of flowers” are more likely to be popular than “oil paintings of manky buttocks”. But there’s already a lot of oil paintings of flowers and in this temporal non-art-world world any given painting, including The Sunflowers, would not be priced that much above the value of the canvas.
So if people decide there’s beauty and meaning in pointers in a database (the ETH blockchain), then I find an artistic beauty in that.
Note that I’m not saying that the all those egregiously shit NFT ape avatars you can see twitter are “art” - they are unquestionably shite. The beauty is in the fact people value the unique/scarce (that aren’t really scarce)2 pointers in the database.
Right Click on my Rights
It’s even more beautiful that many (most?) web3 peeps and owners of NFTs don’t understand the technology they are using (or for that matter copyright law3). Like some sort of metaverse Fyre Festival, people just turn their cash into tokens and pile into the party.
Centralised Decentralisation
Web3 is much more than NFTs of course. You’ll find it enthusiastically described with terms like democratisation, decentralisation of the web. There’s so much enthusiasm in fact, that people don’t mind that web3 is coming up with all kinds of cool centralised solutions. So beautiful.
Pre-idea
Web3 also brought us the term “pre-idea”. I’ll just leave this here:
It all Makes Sense Now
What a beautiful work of art it all is.
There’s no leader, no plan and nobody knows what direction it will flow in next. The whole internet has complimentary front row seats to the largest ever art performance, giant, decentralised and utterly meaningless. Sit back, relax, open a bag of pixelated popcorn and enjoy the show.
Further Reading: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
I made this word up
If I make an NFT of one of your farts, what’s stopping you making an NFT of the exact same fart? Which one is the canonical fart of the NFT? Or what we both mint the same fart on different blockchains?
Most people on the internet probably get some aspects of copyright law wrong, it is rather complex. But there’s something extra wrong about thinking an NFT confers copyright ownership - the idea that blockchain records somehow sit above legal systems and the courts.