NFT’s Are Dead claims PC player, says Love Steam’s dominance – Trustnodes
NFT’s demise has been announced by none other than PC Gamer, a paper we’ve thankfully never had the pleasure of coming across. Or rather by the editor, Tyler Wilde, who says he loves the Steam monopoly.
“I think the internet’s NFT bullying has had an effect on mainstream game publishers… Even if it hasn’t, maybe making fun of things online is something we do for each other, to remind us all of what is real and confirm it overwhelmingly feels like it’s all very stupid, says PC Gamer’s Tyler Wilde.
This statement is somewhat intriguing in what for NFTs is the same period that the first bitcoin “deaths” were “announced” back in 2010-11.
NFTs in their current form are a very new invention, launched in only 2021, and are going through their first bear which is potentially a “death test”, but the data is interesting.
The market value of NFTs has remained somewhat stable at around 10 million eth, while volumes have also stabilized since June.
Most notably, the boring monkeys maintain a very stable price against eth, or at least have so far.
As a brand new class under the first bear and disillusionment, as suggested by this player article, you can expect a significant drop in value.
That has been the case in fiat, but maybe only because eth fell. In eth, this trades for more eth than it did when eth’s price was $5000.
Oddly, BAYC even had an attempt to maintain its value in fiat by increasing in eth, until the Terra collapse in May when crypto sentiment overall plunged.
What this means exactly at this stage is still unclear because no one can say whether the value in eth will go down or otherwise, but the nature of the auction may well bring in new mechanics, and thus potentially a new asset class.
NFTs as of now therefore do not seem completely dead, but a very open question mark, and if they are “dead” as such in a straight floor price, then no doubt a good sort as they maintain value against eth.
But Wilde has an interesting statement to make, if somewhat difficult to decipher. He says:
“I think NFTs inspire so much pushback on social media because they seem to corrupt something that people actually want.
Uniformity is everywhere in this era of mass production, and what started on assembly lines was almost perfected by computers, which can duplicate data almost instantly.
From that perspective, the scarcity and uniqueness of NFTs can be seen as subversive: They push against the flow of history.
It feels like something could be cool about it, somehow. But not like this.
While individual NFTs are unique, the obvious goal for companies is to do what they always do and mass produce the unique.
The majority of NFTs are just another type of mass-produced plastic tchotchke, or commemorative gold coins like the ones sold on TV at 2am.
They contain nothing that is good about handmade, unique items; all they do is irradiate the concept with high-end art collector snobbery and Beanie Baby-style financial speculation.
What is a “Web3 fan” other than a fan of buying and owning things? Isn’t this about art?”
Uniqueness is subversive. It’s a very good catchphrase, but his problem seems to be that you can mass produce uniqueness, which sounds like a contradiction, even though the universe arguably does.
Presumably his argument is that this is not a Mona Lisa by Leonardo, but hundreds or thousands of different versions of Mona Lisas produced by a computer or an artist, and often both.
And? Well, presumably his problem is that brands do it or companies, and there we have to assume they have an agenda to manipulate us.
Even assuming the worst of intentions, NFTs have nothing to do with the kind of problems: that brands can advertise or mass produce or try to brainwash you into mindless NFTs that he might imagine.
Not least because anyone can do NFT, even the starving boy in Africa if he had a computer and knew how to do them. If there is any leveling or hierarchy, it is therefore not of the technology because the technology itself is very flat.
He gives no other arguments against NFTs, except for environmental concerns, but they no longer apply now that ethereum is Proof of Stake, and almost all NFTs run on ethereum.
Not so empty hate
So why is he cheering on the haters? Well, we can assume the worst too. After all, he writes for a company, with Future Plc owning PC Gamer and Future Plc being listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Just what relationship these news companies have with game studios is probably a matter for the books, but there was an entire gamergate episode that might lead us, assuming the worst that he does, to suggest that maybe Wilde is protecting something like Steam.
Maybe in fact this “internet” is just Steam sockpuppets, or more likely a black or white marketing agency specializing in “internet” shaping.
This near-monopoly game distributor potentially even has total power over the game market, and of course it doesn’t like NFTs because Steam gets a 30% cut from the sale of all games.
In fact, the owner of Steam, Valve, updated its rules over a year ago to disallow “applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow the exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs.”
We can all guess why. You can sell or buy NFTs without going through Valve, and then effectively Valve pretty much ceases to exist, just like that.
Because their whole business is to be the payment processor for the game, the permissions give. If these payments or permissions are made on the blockchain, they have no business.
Support Steam Monopoly!!
As it happens, however, we don’t have to completely assume the worst because this editor amazingly states:
“I think PC gaming has quietly (and sometimes loudly) supported a Steam monopoly. For all the virtue PC gamers and this publication preach about the platform’s openness and freedom of choice, I think it’s also understandable that so many of us value the predictability, convenience and centralization that come with Steam’s dominance.”
We thought we were in for a nice debate. NFTs are new, there’s a lot to discuss, criticize, analyze, and words are our business after all, so who doesn’t like a nice debate.
However, we assume certain things, such as monopolies being bad, and we are not at all interested in a debate about such matters.
If the dominance of the gaming industry by one company (were not corporations bad?) is your schtick, then one understands why in some other contexts he says that corporations are bad because only a corporate cubicle monkey can use his microphone to tell the public to love a monopoly .
This NFT hatred therefore clearly has nothing to do with NFTs as such. Instead, we were wrong to assume that only banks would feel threatened by these new innovations, as the tech monopolies and semi-monopolies have instead been or become the biggest antagonists because they know the law can’t do anything about them, but code can combat code.
Far more than Jpegs, therefore, NFTs are to some extent the disruptors of the disruptors who have now become dominant and dare to order us around.
NFTs are a liberating force because they remove art, gaming, even ticketing or entertainment from walled gardens to the mainstream public blockchain.
They remove hierarchy, at least for now and maybe a few decades, and open the gates that these guilds have built from the ashes of the brick and mortar warehouses they destroyed.
They are, of course, of different kinds. Unlike bitcoin or eth which can be spoken in the singular, there are “corporate” NFTs, there are junk, there are art, there are community buildings and all sorts.
But what unites them all is that they are free, as in freedom. They are on our computer, literally, on our nodes. We are the platform. We are the ones who dominate ourselves.
Over time, that may change. Intermediaries may come, but for now we have a whole new community for a big public party where the haters can thankfully just be dismissed as Steam lovers.
That’s while we carry the banner Subversively Unique, and proudly, in an excellent description of exactly what NFTs are and why some agenda-pushers hate them.
