There is no ethical use for NFTs – Skepchick

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Transcription:

Avid viewers of this channel may have noticed a topic ripe for skepticism, but which I have so far avoided discussing. I mean, there are probably more topics I haven’t covered, but there’s one I CONSIDER talking about at least once a month and every time I decide to skip it. Well, no more, my friends. Today we are discussing NFTs.

Some of you have simply asked for a video on NFTs in the past, and honestly I’ve always decided not to, because while I’ve always thought they were a giant scam, I’ve also always thought that there might be something I’m missing, because I’m no expert in this area, and I’ve always had a bit of trouble wrapping my brain around things like blockchains and stuff. And then Dan Olsen made the video “Line Goes Up” and it was so good and thorough that I realized, why bother?

You should watch that video if you’re at all interested in NFTs, but if you don’t have time, I’ll give you my best quick explanation of what they are: “NFT” stands for “non-fungible token” and is essentially a unique label that can be attached to something, usually a digital something like a picture or a song, to be sold or traded. When an NFT is sold or traded, the new owner’s name goes on a list that is public, so everyone knows YOU own THAT NFT.

It’s worth noting that owning an NFT doesn’t necessarily mean you “own” the thing it’s attached to, at least not in legal terms. It’s all in a legal gray area where an accompanying “smart contract” may grant some rights and may not. For example, you can buy an NFT that points to a server containing the 1996 Whoopi Goldberg dinosaur buddy cop movie “Theodore Rex,” but that doesn’t mean you have the right to re-release that masterpiece in theaters, or start producing merchandise , which I would definitely buy, by the way.

NFTs are, at the most basic level (and as Olsen points out in his video with respect to all cryptocurrencies), a “Greater Fool” scam – you gain nothing by buying one except the hope that it will eventually come a bigger sucker and buy it from you. Can you make money from it? Sure, if you’re early or lucky, or if you’re the one who came up with the idea and pumped it to your existing audience, but all of those things require you to be either completely clueless OR actively predatory and slightly sociopathic about what’s going to happen to the bigger idiots.

I know a scam when I see one, as I have spent the last decades studying and discussing them, but I held off on talking about it on this channel because I wasn’t sure that after all the scams, maybe there are some uses for crypto, or the blockchain, or even NFTs. I mean, I don’t know! I am not educated enough. Maybe Cory Doctorow has already written a dystopia where young cyberpunks use NFTs to, I don’t know, destroy Big Oil somehow. Right now the NFT marketplace is completely flooded with scammers trying to get a piece of the pie, but there has to be some ethical use case for NFTs, right?

Well no. At least according to a new study by digital ethicist Dr. Catherine Flick, which concluded “there is currently no ethical use case or methodology for implementing NFTs.” Cool, well that’s pretty cut and dry isn’t it?

Flick’s research sought to answer three questions: “Are non-fungible tokens (NFTs) ethical technologies, what ethical issues do NFTs raise, according to professional ethical standards, and how can non-fungible tokens (NFTs) implemented in such a way as to mitigate any ethical concerns?” Exploring these issues within the framework of the Association for Computing Machinery’s ethical guidelines, she identified “issues of harm, well-being, discrimination, fairness, intellectual property rights, privacy, the quality of work, the competence of those involved, legal issues, the ability to provide and receive critical review, lack of education for users, personal gain over public good, security, maintenance and end-of-life of NFT ecosystems, and ensuring the public is key when developing, deploying and sustaining NFTs.” And more. I basically, NFTs violate every imaginable ethical guideline, and so her final conclusion is that NFTs do nothing that cannot be done better, more ethically, and more efficiently with existing techniques.She could not find a single instance of an NFT that was distributed ethically and that did a better job than what humans have been doing for years, decades, centuries, millennia depending on whether you’re talking about to ‘sell art’ or ‘validate’ ownership of property’ or ‘play video games’.

This research obviously won’t convince people who are completely invested in the scam. The author actually appeared on ir/science comments to answer questions and was met with responses like “How many NFTs do you own? How many discord servers are you on? Curious how deep you got into this research (disclaimer: didn’t read your entire article sorry),” as if the author who is on several dozen discord servers is going to trump her PhD in computer ethics and finally convince this jabrony to actually read paper. And when another guy complained that companies using NFT -‘s to establish ownership of physical assets was a legitimate use case, she suggests that he actually reads the paper because she discusses it at length there, to which he replies “No”.

They don’t want to read papers, they want to “hoddle” their hideous monkey images with “diamond hands” until they take them “to the moon”, even when trading collapses to 97% of its peak and crypto exchange FTX fully implodes with the founder rushing to the private jet his with sacks of money bound for South America. Because NFTs were a really well-crafted scam: they targeted greedy, gullible people with low information and poor social skills, giving them a way to buy their way not just to wealth, but to coolness, to acceptance, to a elite society, into a cult with its own language and rituals. And because it’s a Greater Fool scam, the only possible hope these people have is to ignore or dismiss all criticism and be relentlessly positive to attract the fool who will eventually buy in and let them cash out.
Although it is too late for them, I hope that if you are considering entering this realm, you can now take a minute to think about whether it will really be worth it. If you’re just looking for a community, hell, join Discord! You don’t even have to become a patron. And I promise you will never have to buy a scary picture of a monkey unless you really want to. Let me know.