LO-11

For this week’s looking outwards, I decided to talk a bit about why NFTs suck. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have been gaining a lot of steam recently with the boom of equally stupid cryptocurrencies. The entire idea of an NFT breaks a lot of artistic integrity, as it exists purely to be able to be sold. Owning an NFT doesn’t give you anything other than the ability to resell it. What is it you may ask? A piece of digital art, that one could just as easily right-click and download. Because of this NFT has devolved away from decent-looking art and into photos of toilet paper and tungsten cubes. They exist entirely as a tool for rich tech bros to make money. On top of that, the processing power necessary to load the blockchain NFTs run on has a massive environmental toll, amounting to over 30 million tonnes of CO2 a year. The idiocy of this all came crashing down two weeks ago when the blockchain was hacked, forcing NFT owners to overwrite their own blockchain, which defeats the whole “non-fungible” thing they seem to love and reverts you back to the system NFTs owners claim to hate. All in all, it’s time to end NFTs (and crypto for that matter) and move on to make art that’s more meaningful than its monetary value as a clipart.

https://mashable.com/article/nft-cryptocurrency-bad-environment-art
https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/art/nft-most-ridiculous-items
https://earth.org/nfts-environmental-impact/