Ideas

Crypto Isn’t About Money. It’s About Fandom

And that’s why we will fight about it forever.
An illustration of a casino and bitcoin slot machines.
Illustration: Elena Lacey

Thanks to NFTs, half of my friends now hate the other half. I know because they send me messages about each other. “Ugh, more crypto garbage,” reads one DM. “I guess we need to destroy the planet for some stupid GIF.” And then, from someone else: “I do feel, at some level, that this is the most important thing that has ever happened to digital art.” Words to that effect. Everyone is sincere.

You used to have to create a product to create a marketplace. Like Google: Make a search engine first, then sell ads. But now, with crypto, you can skip straight to the marketplace and the products will follow. (They don’t really—“decentralized applications” aren’t very interesting, but everyone says they’ll be good soon.)

As we all know by now, an NFT is a non-fungible token, a cryptographically signed receipt of ownership for a digital thingy. It works because some people choose to believe that digital thingies can have value. Some thingies can even be art. So because (1) some people choose to believe that you can “own” something that exists in the ether, and (2) blockchains let you make public “receipts” of purchases that are backed by irreversible math, you can put these beliefs together and make a marketplace for digital thingies. Like everything with blockchains, it’s a psychological hack done with number magic, like a card trick at 3.2 GHz. And it will yield, depending on whom you ask, the future of art, the end of culture, or an ecological disaster. Or all three. (Of course, the NFT market is crashing as I write this. By the time you read it, who knows.)

Nonetheless, I am surprised at the furor and specificity of the backlash as it plays out on Twitter. Why this, now? Most of the disgust focuses on blockchain’s exorbitant use of energy, on the fact that the Ethereum network—which is what those first big NFTs, like the $69 million mega-artwork by Beeple, were transacted upon—has used as much electricity as Portugal. Look, that’s a bad bug. Your code shouldn’t be measured in Portugals. Then again, Ethereum is rebuilding itself to reduce its carbon footprint. Lower-impact blockchains are already out there. There are NFTs available on Hic Et Nunc, which uses the ecologically sound Tez cryptocurrency. I’m just making up words now (not really, alas), but you get it. We’ll end up with less deadly crypto if we want it. That’s the power of the marketplace of marketplaces. I hope.

The climate effects are just one thing. A lot of what people are fighting over is the way that NFTs work. They don’t actually contain the artwork, like an email attachment might. They just point to it. To some people, that’s utterly fine. To others, the idea that you could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars buying something and simply get a link to that thing is absolute fraud. So the argument ping-pongs between one camp that says NFTs are earth-destroying Ponzi fraud coupons, and others who think they’re the answer to our broken, fractured world, where artists are treated like trash or thrown penny shavings on Spotify.

My friends are fighting over it in the same way they used to fight about books, movies, and indie bands—i.e., as if it is the most important thing in the world. Crypto to me feels like a variant of fan culture: People patrol fandoms vigorously, to protect the borders, to keep outsiders out, debating canon with Socratic rigor. NFTs make the relationship between money and media explicit and force a fan culture to pony up. That could be very good. Artists have been so utterly screwed by so many platforms, and this is a way for them to be unscrewed. I wish I could figure out how to buy tez.

I once met a chemist who told me that when he looked at trees he saw their chemical composition. I’m the cofounder of a company. Every week I watch spreadsheets with accounts receivable, chat EBITDA, establish lines of credit, manage hiring plans against cash reserves. I have read at least the introductions to many finance books. I see the world as one vast budget. How much did it cost to build this road? What does it cost to operate this bus? What is the daily revenue of the bagel guy? Career paths, new initiatives, parental leave, health insurance plans, PTO, the quality of your frosting—one thing I’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter if your company is Facebook or Tastykake, it all boils down to costs and revenue. I thought that coming into this world from far, far outside, with a healthy reserve of irony, I might one day have something wise and funny to say about money. But the thing about capitalism is, it’s about money. I want so badly for it to be more complicated. But it’s not. If you want to understand capitalism, just think of it as money’s fandom.

So, capitalism is the fandom for money. Bitcoin is the fandom for people who hate central banks. Tez is, today, a fandom for art collectors. Dogecoin is a fandom for people who love Shiba Inus and mocking other coins. Blockchains don’t replace money so much as they financialize fandoms, and that’s a wild mix, because it means that your money directly carries your ideology. (At which point Enlightenment-era men in tricorner hats rise from their graves near Wall Street and say, exactly.)

So what am I going to do? I’m going to buy some NFTs, ecologically sound ones. If that’s the way certain artists want to be supported, I’m willing to meet them there. I’m going to suggest that everyone calm down. And I’m going to watch and wait, because I expect before long we’ll see what is today a bit of a joke become mainstream: Cryptocurrencies listed on dating profiles, associated with different political parties, some currencies being cool and young, others old and boomerish. You’ll be able to make a lot of snap judgments about a person by the kinds of NFTs and post-NFT objects they collect. I wish it were not so, truly, but this is the world people want, and at a certain point you can fight it or you can just give up and get on with life. I accept that I live in the cryptocurrency future, and please never mention it to me again. And yes, obviously some things are more important than money. We’ll have coins for those things too.

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