There’s a thread in a list I’m on titled “NFTs are a Scam.” I know too little about NFTs to do more than dump here three thoughts I shared on the list in response to a post that suggested that owning digital seemed to be a mania of some kind. Here goes…
First, from Walt Whitman, who said he “could turn and live for awhile with the animals,” because,
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied.
Not one is demented with the mania of owning things.
Second, the Internet is NEA, meaning,
No one owns it
Everyone can use it
Anyone can improve it
Kind of like the Universe that way.
What makes the Internet an inter-net is an agreement: that every network within it will pass packets from any one endpoint to any other, regardless of origin or destination. That agreement is a protocol: TCP/IP. Agreeing to use that protocol is like molecules agreeing to use gravity or the periodic table. Everything everyone does while operating or using the Internet is gravy atop TCP/IP. The Web is also NEA. So is email. Those are held together by simple protocols too.
Third is that the sure sign of a good idea is that it’s easy to do bad things with it. Look at email, which is 99.x% spam. Yet I’m writing one here and you’re reading it. NFT’s are kind of like QR codes in the early days after the patent’s release to the word by Denso Wave early in this millennium. I remember some really smart people calling QR codes “robot barf.” Still, good things happened.
So, if bad things are being done with NFTs, that might be a good sign.
The image above is of a window into the barn that for several decades served the Crissman family in Graham, North Carolina. It was toward the back of their 17 acres of beautiful land there. I have many perfect memories of time spent on that land with my aunt, uncle, five cousins and countless visitors. The property is an apartment complex now, I’m told.
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