NFTs and Zettelkasten
I feel like I've been thinking about NFTs all wrong.
I blame myself for not initially being more curious, but I also blame all the NFT-hype bros for making what felt like 90% of the NFT conversation about quick money. Big money. "Get the new drop now!" It also made it hard for me to be curious when so many NFT projects are, IMHO, either ugly, purely "derivative" or both. My buddy Sean has written well about some of the ways that derivative work can be interesting. I'm not going to argue with any of his points. Instead I'll just try to figure out where I stand.
A big part of my problem with derivative projects comes from my time in advertising. I cut my professional teeth first as a copywriter, then art director at one of the big international agencies. When brainstorming for a new campaign or individual spot someone would always bring up the idea of "borrowed interest". What borrowed interest means inside an ad agency is, "find something popular and steal it".
As an aside, Picasso's famous "great artists steal" quote is super, and fantasitically misunderstood. It's a quote used as a cudgel by people with no ideas, who are afraid of sticking their neck out and saying "yes, I like that" when a thousand other people haven't already said the same thing. It's creative cowardice, but you're quoting one of the most famous artists of all time so you get to feel smart about it.
"Borrowed interest" is the strategy that gives us a gajillion Marvel sequels, endless reboots and "things that look like other things". For a culture to thrive, it needs new ideas put into it, not an endless recycling of old favorites. Cryptopunks brought some new ideas to the table. The 99th version of "pixelated avatars, collect them all" is creatively empty. It's a money-grab.
And look. I get it. I would love to sell my work (physical or digital) for thousands of euros, and making a living purely from my artwork. It would be great if there was a secondary market where my work was selling all the time and I was getting paid every time. But I'm not a financial speculator. If I was, I would have gone into banking. There is literally no way to bore me more quickly than to describe how financially successful your "art project" is going to be.
Another aside, tell me about your business plan, great. That's cool. I should have more of a business plan than I do, if we're being honest. But when you talk to me about your artwork, let's talk about the work, okay?
That's a couple hundred words about my narrow-mindedness. What about my possible conversion?
I started thinking differently about NFTs when I was pouring through a box of old papers I bought at a local Trödelladen (junk shop). Someone saved all of these papers. There are personal letters, receipts, letters to and from lawyers, photographs with names and dates scribbled on the back, and things I still haven't deciphered. At one point each item meant something, and in their aggregate they tell the story of someone's life, or at least the part of the story they considered worth saving in a shoebox, or tucked into a folder and put away in a drawer.
It's easy to save and conserve memories when they're attached to pieces of paper. Papers have edges. Photographs have edges. Digital things don't have edges, not in the same way. I'm playing here with ideas taken from Robin Sloan and Craig Mod. Sloan writes,
The internet works against the feeling of starting and finishing, against edges, because those things all imply endings, and the internet never ends.
And Mod,
A good enough reason why many of us make the books we make. Why we may print out the things we print out. To give form to the formless. To remember. Holding it — however piecemeal — in out hands and saying, “Yep. This. We did this.
Edges.
One of the amazing things about the internet and about digital documents is their mutability, and how they can be collaborative, endlessly interlinked, and simultaneously local and worldwide. But acknowledging a benefit doesn't mean that you can't also acknowledge a downside. It is, at least for me, harder to imbue meaning in digital notes and documents. I can screenshot text messages from my daughter or from my wife. But then what do I do with them? Where the hell are they? On my laptop, maybe savecd in Dropbox, or in in Time Machine backup, but not really "at hand". I have a digital photo album with tens of thousands of pictures. Apple Fotos frequently offers me packaged remembrances, soundtrack included, but unless I dutifully save them, they're gone the next time I open up the application. The edges of these memories get blurry when the items are endlessly mutable (again, in some circumstances a benefit).
An NFT is a cryptographical way to create that rarity and uniqueness in a digital item and prove that something isn’t a copy.
I think, though I don't yet fully understand how and how to best appreciate them, NFTs are a way of adding edges. They can make "this one document" different, and differently ownable and valued. I'm clearly still working these ideas out. I'm not surprised that I don't yet grok it. I'm old and I'm an unabashed fan of old paper, but that's me. There are generations of people who are much more rooted in the digital world than I am. Their formative experiences have been online. Their earliest memories may already have digital components. But maybe these memories need edges too, but edges that look different than the ones I'm used to.
Regardless, enjoy some photos of all the old papers I found. There's actually a somewhat tragic story running through some of them, a story I may share at some point soon.