I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. Here are the thoughts.

NFTs are tokens for financial speculation that are uniquely suited for taking money from gullible people, centralizing power in the already-wealthy, and accelerating climate catastrophe. NFTs must be stopped.

Fortunately, the reason they are proliferating (and the reason they are so expensive) is not because they are useful, but because they appeal to a particular psychology of value.

It’s very similar to the value of rare baseball cards or stamps. Stamps do not perform any particular function and you can buy them very cheaply. Very expensive stamps are only expensive because there are a limited number, and because they were printed at a verified location. That’s where the extra value on rare stamps comes from — brand recognition and scarcity.

Right now, NFTs gain their value from brand recognition and “scarcity”. People recognize NFTs as NFTs on sight, and there are allegedly limited numbers of them. This is why Twitter implemented the hexagonal profile pics — it makes the NFT more immediately identifiable.

In order to make NFTs lose their value, which is exactly what we want to do, all you have to do is expose those two characteristics — scarcity and legitimacy — as the illusions they are. This is why right-click saving the NFTs is so devastating: it shatters that illusion of scarcity. This is also why insulting them as ugly and stupid is important work — it shatters the illusion of brand prestige.

And they are both nothing but an illusion. NFTs do not benefit from any extra copy protection beyond conventional digital material (which is why so many NFTs are minted from stolen art). The “scarcity” comes from someone applying a serial number post-creation and selling that string of numbers to somebody, with no more actual credibility than those fraudulent companies that sell stars. There is no way to prove the claim of ownership, and no way to stop anyone from replicating it.

That’s why an NFT bro, when faced with criticism of the NFT’s false scarcity, will tell you that you “don’t get” how NFTs work. It’s to protect the sham value of their investment. The NFT has to be scarce or it wouldn’t be valuable. If you point out that it’s not scarce at all, you must simply not understand the mechanism of scarcity.

But you DO get it. NFTs are exactly as stupid as you think they are. That’s why exposing the mechanics behind NFTs is actually important work. It’s praxis. The value of NFTs is entirely a rhetorical game, and every time you convince someone that the scarcity of an NFT is a scam, the scam loses some of its power. The value of NFTs is entirely contingent on belief. It’s like believing in fairies, only we want the fairies to die.

Addendum: stamps do have a function