Cybernetic ownership vs primitive accumulation in NFTs

in #blockchain2 years ago

There are lots of antiNFT people out there and most of them seem to be leftists.

One of the greatest misunderstandings of NFTs is that they are compared and confused with primitive concepts of ownership based on exclusion of access. Old private goods are those that exclude others (non-owners) from their usage. Land, food, houses, water, electricity, institutions, etc, are all examples of scarse goods that have been territorialized by rich people to exclude people without money from enjoying them. These are material goods, not just physical necessarily but quite material because they have an impact on people's material experiences and conditions.

However, the content of an NFT can be easily accessed by anyone because blockchain data is public. This new form of ownership is not the same as old forms of ownership because it is not based on exclusion of access but rather in being able to control the owned thing. It's like having a TV in a public space and one person or a group of people owns the remote control so they can select what to put on the TV. Everyone can watch the TV but the owner(s) control it. They can sell the remote control and so on. It's what I call cybernetic ownership.

Cybernetic ownership is certainly not primitive but lots of people (on the whole spectrum from crypto boomers to crypto bros) confuse it with primitive ownership. We have seen NFT owners that get mad at others because they downloaded the jpeg of "their" NFT, it was stolen, they think. We have also seen, with much cringe, crypto boomers getting mad because they assume crypto bros think NFTs are primitive ownership. Are they wrong? Who cares. The reality is that NFTs contents can be accessed without any difficulty, images can be screenshot or saved, links can be opened. But the person that configure the fees, the internal mechanisms or have access to things through cryptographic signatures are the "true owners".

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Sometimes NFTs are indeed used to exclude others, and they can easily be used for that through cryptographic proofs. They are backwards compatible with old primitive ownership, of course.

At the technical level, owning an NFT means having the private key of an account that is registered inside the owned thing (the NFT smart contract) as the owner of that thing. Depending on the code of the contract, this could mean that the owner can sell this owned thing by changing that owner registry, it usually includes a fee that is directed to the original creator everytime the owners speculate and sell the NFT. This is already giving lots of artists and developers an income.

Hating "NFTs" as a concept is like hating the blueprints of hydraulic arms because they are used in bulldozers to deforest. Hating NFTs because they resemble primitive private ownership or because they are used for money laundering makes some more sense but if you understand the tech that argument falls apart because any tech can be used for that. Hating NFTs because there are lots of scams around and lots of ugly apes in twitter profile pics is also understandable but it only shows how little they understand the tech. USDs can also be used for scams , money laundering and primitive private ownership, and hating USDs is kind of crazy to me.

Let me put it this way: I wouldn't waste my energy hating something as generic as the concept of NFTs or even money laundering. NFTs and money laundering can be used for good. For instance, remember Enric Duran laundered money to give it away to anticapitalist organizations. That's not really good or bad, its tactics, its praxis. I don't care about taxes specially if we are talking about a government that spends them in the military and the largest corporations and not in food and housing.

NFT concepts and implementations are still very generic, basic and flexible. They are barely a new thing and at the same time they are quite old. The Domain Name System is an NFT system. Domain names in the world wide web are non fungible tokens too. It's a system where URLs are registered, owned (in a cybernetic way, because the point is that the owner wants to control where that URL points to) and speculated with. And I bet you can find lots of other examples of NFTs not just in the informatic era but in earlier social systems.

As an socialist I am quite interested on social systems, I mean that's basically being a socialist. And I think NFTs could be used in social systems just as any other generic tech out there. And I don't even feel constrained to follow the same primitive or contemporary scheme of NFTs where there is one owner that can sell them in an auction and receive fees. NFTs could be colectively owned, they could just signal stuff and owners could set properties on them in order to communicate something. We could program them to rotate ownership or even to randomize ownership. They can have limits programmed in them so that people that interact with them can only do certain things at certain times. I don't know but I think NFTs are barely being born and the samte time they are already adult schemes in the informatic era.

About crypto art, I don't care much about it and also find annoying crypto bros trying to push it desperately to make their money bags bigger.

In general NFT's are post-humanist tech and lots of crypto boomers are thinking and discussing about it as if it was a humanist thing. It's not that surprising that these misinformed rants about NFTs are so common and I suppose it is only dialectical but it's frustrating watching them confuse things and being assholes about it ^^.

If any, NFTs will be post-capitalist. It won't definitely be a (primitive) communist thing but it won't be a (primitive) capitalist thing neither.

Primitive property has crashed with post-modern ownership not so long ago when piracy was everywhere. Digital goods are easily downloaded, copied and shared without limits, unless corporations put lots of efforts on territorializing it. But at some point those territorialization efforts end up failing. We all participated in piracy and now corporations have managed to lower prices of access to entertainment and culture but at the same time they have increased control and persecution of piracy actions. It's been quite a collective negotiation.

Was piracy good or bad? I think it was fun for some people, bad for poor producers and good for rich producers (because we gladly stole from them). But it's hard to make a veredict about it. It's not as simple as just saying "tech bad" or "tech good". And I think the same about NFT's.

From where I am it's fun to watch the cogs moving and the multi(dia)lectical desiring machines moving their parts in all directions to make things more complex than what they were before. It's certainly not a revolutionary victory, indeed. Meanwhile there are so many important things to do in other aspects of material life, rather than ranting or shilling about an ambigous piece of tech.