This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The whole point is that "got some set% of the resale value of their art" stops working as soon as someone takes art outside blockchain.
Typical image NFT is just a weird link to image, nothing stops people from copying art outside blockchain. Pretending that it is not easy and trivial is a typical fraud by NFT crowd.
Again: NFT is unrelated to ownership of art, does not enforce anything outside blockchain and so on.
Yes? That's known by everyone who's done a 50 second browser search. They're just tokens that confer a certain status/exclusivity. Having a CS:GO knife skin doesn't mean you own the art of the skin. Having a CS:GO skin doesn't mean you can take it off Steam. The 'right-click save' meme is braindead. I can right-click save the Mona Lisa and nobody cares. I can right-click save any gacha game waifu and nobody cares. People want to have them (and no this doesn't mean that Biccus Tittus actually belongs to them in a legal sense, the game might shut down tomorrow and they lose it). People fundamentally do not understand what NFTs are and what the purpose is.
I seriously don't get why everyone on the planet woke up and decided 'let's hate this.' Ok, bored apes and goblins look pretty weird. I don't want them. I wouldn't trade perfectly good Eth for them. That's fine. I just move on.
And @RandomRanger was suggesting that despite this NFT would be useful for following:
no, they cannot do this. They, at most, can ensure that artists get some $ resale value for NFT transactions on blockchain. Which is much less useful.
NFT people kept lying, for start.
I don't think you understand what an NFT is. The WHOLE POINT is that they are on a given blockchain and stay there. That's what tokenization means. Nobody goes around buying and selling actual passwords and keyfiles for all kinds of reasons. It's just like how we sell shares, not trading accounts.
NFT stays on the blockchain. Art does not.
Therefore NFT cannot achieve "Wouldn't it be good for artists if they got some set% of the resale value of their art?".
They, at most, can ensure that artists get some $ resale value for NFT transactions on blockchain.
NFT alone cannot enforce what happens outside blockchain, and if you have authority that can enforce stuff outside blockchain the NFT itself is useless bondoogle.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There was a time where serious press coverage of NFTs was constant on eg CNBC or in the WSJ. That's really it. Which comes back to "NFTs" as we understand them in this conversation, weird ugly cartoons of monkeys, have become the standard understanding of NFTs as a concept, which are just a blockchain chunk that represents one particular thing. The latter has significant applications and value, and I predict will ultimately come to be vital to understanding a lot of property law within a few years. The former is just a toy example that built out the infrastructure, in the same way that Nvidia was a name mostly familiar to PC gamers before the last few years.
Latching onto one of @Corvos examples below, Gucci handbags. Gucci has a massive problem with fakes, especially as Chinese manufacturing improves in quality and European manufacturing becomes divorced from tradition in capitalist modernity, there's a whole universe of fakes so good that they've been passed back as returns at Gucci retail stores and reshelved as real bags. This has lead to escalating cycles of complicated verification methods, created by Gucci and imitated by the superfakes just as quickly. Simultaneously, designer resale sites like TheRealReal and Grailed and Poshmark have allowed for a much more liquid market in luxury secondhand goods, allowing willing sellers and buyers to connect from far off, rather than having to go through a consignment shop or similar, which Gucci sees as a threat to selling new bags.
Gucci, among other brands, have proposed using NFTs to verify authenticity of bags. Each bag would be sold with a particular NFT, associated only with that bag, and at each sale of the bag the NFT would be transferred to the new owner. This would serve as an "unfakeable" verification of the bag, in the sense that no more of them could ever be created. This is actually fairly common with desirable variants of luxury goods: there are more Paul Newman Daytona Rolexes today than were originally made, because so many other Daytona specs/colorways have been modified to resemble the desirable variant. Impossible with an NFT verification: Gucci makes 1000 bags, with 1000 NFTs, and no matter how good the fake it will never have the NFT attached that makes it "real."
The NFT comes to represent the brand value of authenticity, divorced from the value of the bag itself. It makes the bag it is attached to real. In theory, if you get a Superfake which perfectly meets construction specs of the bag you purchased originally with NFT, and you sell the Superfake on to someone else with the NFT, the Superfake becomes the Real bag and the bag you own, originally manufactured by Gucci, becomes the fake. Hell, one could imagine a world where Gucci releases specs for the bag, you get it manufactured by whoever you choose, and you bring it in to a Gucci outlet where they verify that procedure was followed and then issue the NFT that authenticates the bag as Gucci.
It would also allow the authorities, here Gucci, to control transfers of their bags if they maintain control of the ledger. They can refuse to endorse a transaction, even if the physical bag changes hands they refuse to transfer the NFT and recognize the change of ownership. Hell, one can imagine Gucci selling bags with morality clauses, and revoking the NFT-authenticity from bags that belong to an Epstein or a Weinstein. It's a way to give Gucci complete control of the transfer of their bags, the way the government attaches a title to cars or real estate and controls the transfer.
I envision a world where notaries and title agents are largely NFT brokers, with the NFT representing true ownership.
In this view, the monkey jpeg weirdoes are working out the kinks of a system that will be very important. The scams, the theft, the complexity of transfers, all need to be worked out in this toy example to be ready for primetime. They're monkeys getting shot into space, their deaths teach us how to get humans up there.
On the other hand, for people who don't realize the future value of the technology, they don't get why CNBC and the WSJ are reporting on this weird new form of Neopets.
Thank you for the detailed look into Gucci brand dynamics! I quite agree with you that an exclusive proof of ownership for say, a house, has many practical applications.
Let’s get back to this:
If authenticity means anything, surely it must mean that the bag was designed by Mr. Gucci and was once touched by one of his skilled artisans, in the same way that a signed copy of the Lord of the Rings was once touched by JRRR Tolkien himself.
If none of that is true, if it’s literally just another chinese-manufactured fake with a certificate attached, how can the NFT possibly have any meaning beyond ‘I paid far too much for a SuperFake’? At this point I think we’re right back to the monkeys: apelike competition for a limited number of tokens purely on the basis that they’re limited. Even a child stealing another child’s toy on the playground knows the toy has some inherent value beyond just being something that somebody else wants.
Entirely possible! But the point of owning the NFT would be to obtain the physical rights to the thing you actually want, surely? What good does it do me to own the rights to a little getaway in Valencia if the original ‘owner’ is squatting in there and the police refuse to make him leave on the basis of my NFT?
(I accept that I might be a little out of the general stream on this. I’ve always felt that a really good fake of a thing is pretty close to being as good as the actual thing. I’d pay a bit more for that signed copy of LoTR or an authentic 10th century castle, compared to an identical physical copy, but only a bit.)
That's all it is now. There is no quality underneath the luxury that can't be matched, there is just a trademark. Every luxury house other than Hermes has moved production overseas, or into cheaper EU countries. And other than Hermes, which basically keeps the entire traditional leatherworking industry operating in France, the luxury houses are employing cheap labor anyway, often Asian immigrants are making the Italian leather goods in Italian factories. Mr. Gucci has no skilled artisans. Yet people are still paying for it. How divorced can we get the value from the underlying product? Idk, ask Supreme about their stupid brick.
And that kind of luxury competition Veblen good is a ridiculously large global industry. The worst one, in my mind, is the NFL/MLB/etc authentic jersey. A $200 piece of plastic crap, available for $20 on DhGate. Yet some people will still buy it from the Team Store. I'm not much for it myself, but quite simply: if you'd only pay slightly more for a signed copy of LOTR, you will never own a first edition copy of LOTR unless you get extraordinarily lucky at a yard sale. To be fair though, the historic castle may be cheaper than a repro, as the repro will be more modern and easier to maintain.
My title agent examples are largely orthogonal, there I'm talking about NFT transfer becoming the essential legal ceremony indicating ownership, in the way that now it involves signing little pieces of paper in front of the correct witnesses and sending them to the state capital and then having them sent back. Where that starts is with accepting NFT ownership as ownership.
eta: WSJ is reporting today that Dior spends $58 on labor for bags that retail at $2,900. There's no underlying value there, just branding.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
First, this use is entirely controlled by Gucci and is therefore served by a regular database and regular accounts on their servers, no blockchain required.
Second, I think you understate how big a problem it is that your nfts are actually completely divorced from the bags. What this use case is actually looking for are PUF (using manufacturing variance for unclonability) RFID tags in the bags, compared against a centralized Gucci database. Looking it up, they're apparently already doing RFID tags, though it's unclear what anti-cloning technology is in them.
Required? No. Valuable? Maybe. A lot of uses on blockchain "could" be served by something else, but blockchain offers something "unhackable" to the public mind. NFTs are mostly the Zoomer answer to infomercials promising me a Certificate of Authenticity with my commemorative Dale Earnhardt plates. What they offer is marketing, this is high tech and impossible to fake or duplicate. Right now I can buy a perfect fake of a Gucci bag. And some people will look at it, be unable to see a single difference between the real and the fake bags, acknowledge that fact out loud, and nonetheless will not value the fake bag as highly as the real one. NFTs offer a way to encapsulate that value in a single concept, when you own this you really own the bag.
NFTs offer a new vision of authenticity and ownership, which we do see developing in real time among the monkey weirdoes on Twitter. Everyone looks at them and says "All I have to do is hit right click and 'Save As' to own the Ape too?" And they say "No but then you don't own the ape, you just have a copy of the file!" There's a metaphysical belief that underlies the NFT weirdoes, that I use the Gucci example to explain because it's closest to branding power in our current understanding of ownership.
If you get the BoredApe idea of ownership, in which it is encapsulate in the NFT and not in any physical good or any utility provided by anything, and you market it effectively to Gucci owners, it's no longer a problem that the bags are divorced from the NFTs. Yes, bags will be lost, stolen, donated to thrift stores by careless owners or their heirs. But those bags will not be purchased or worn by any self-respecting fashionista without the NFT, they are rendered fake. In the same way that the BoredApe guys display in their profile the apes that they own, not ones that they don't own, despite the obvious fact that they could display whichever they wanted. It's socially unacceptable to display an ape you don't own. It could become socially unacceptable to own or wear a bag you don't have the NFT for, because it's a fake.
In the end, I think this is all beta testing, all the Monkey weirdoes and digital sports card traders and the luxury purse fanatics are paying early adopter taxes to build out infrastructure that can be used for more valuable purposes. Title Insurance is a $23,000,000/yr business that could be revolutionized with appropriate use of NFTs. Ditto car titles. I think fascinating things could be done with ownership of stock in publicly traded companies.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's a very good point, albeit wasted this far down the comment chain. I certainly hope Gucci doesn't end up controlling its own chain, these things should be on Eth or some reasonably neutral blockchain where people have their own accounts under private control.
I do it for the love of the game.
How to actually give normal people access to blockchain products without their inevitably losing it by either technical mistakes or fraud is an unsolved question at this time. The vast majority of people lack the technical sophistication or interest to utilize their own wallet. They lose the password and permanently lose the tokens, or they accidentally send it to someone, or they get tricked into doing one or the other. Most users who want to "invest" in crypto do so through a third party exchange, these have in turn routinely also had problems with fraud, hacking, abuse etc. The stakes of crypto, playing for keeps, just aren't the stakes most people are ready to play with.
I suspect that for high stakes uses, like deeds, there is a future in licensed blockchain users. Notaries and title agents and dealers and such will be empowered to make moves on the chain, but not others.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the rage-inducing element is the total divorce of monetary ‘value’ from any other possible source of value whatsoever.
A Gucci handbag, jewels, stocks in Nvidia… we can quibble about the true value of these things but there’s SOMETHING beautiful or useful there under all the posing.
With NFTs the value is literally zero. There’s nothing. You haven’t bought the image, because anyone can have it just by right-click-save. You haven’t earned it like a video game skin; it doesn’t look cool on your weapon. You’ve literally spent money to buy a token saying ‘I spent money’. It’s financial games and screwed-up monkey politics in its absolute worst, most braindead and bestial form.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link