Whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg drop a collaborative NFT to benefit press freedom
NFTs
The work focuses on Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers from 1971.
In 1971, one-time Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg walked into Boston Federal Court ready to surrender to authorities for leaking 7,000 classified documents to New York Times. The vast collection of records, collectively known as the Pentagon Papers, revealed the US government’s efforts to cover up the full extent of its actions during the Vietnam War. Stopped by the press and asked to consider the implications of his surrender, Ellsberg ruefully observed, “Wouldn’t you go to jail to help end this war?”
It is a line that effectively cemented Ellsberg’s activism, and which now features in an NFT project, jointly led by Ellsberg and his fellow traveler, Edward Snowden.
The whistleblower pair have collaborated on a one-to-one Ethereum-based video NFT, aptly titled Wouldn’t you go to jail to help end this war? It centers on archival footage of Ellsberg’s interview amid a press frenzy on the steps of the Boston courthouse, superimposed by a generative roll of documents from the Pentagon Papers.
The work was created by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), of which Ellsberg and Snowden are board members, using custom-built code and software. On 12 January at 3pm EST, it will be released in a live auction presented by PleasrDAO via its new initiative, PleasrHouse. Funds raised at the sale will go to FPF and the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy.
“More people need to know who Daniel Ellsberg is,” Chris Eberle, PleasrDAO’s chief marketing officer, told Artnet News about the project’s motivational power. “That as a 91-year-old he still speaks truth to power. That it was he who pushed Snowden to come forward in 2013.” (Ellsberg apparently has a photograph of them both hanging in his home.)
The PleasrHouse logo. Image courtesy of PleasrDAO.
Wouldn’t you go to jail to help end this war? also marks the launch of PleasrHouse, billed as “a new experiment created to disrupt the shared experience of live art auctions.” Each episode of PleasrHouse will include discussions and conversations around a work of art, and a live auction of the work. Ellsberg and Snowden will be interviewed live on the first episode of PleasrHouse, and a short documentary about Ellsberg will be released after the program airs.
“You can think of it as Show tonight meets Twitch meets Sotheby’s combined into one live episodic moment, said Jamis Johnson, PleasrDAO’s head of pleasing, in an interview with Bankless.
PleasrDAO became acquainted with Snowden in 2021 when the collective purchased the NSA whistleblower’s first NFT, Remain free, for $5.4 million. The sale “funded a year-plus of [Freedom of the] Press Foundation operating costs» according to Eberle.
Since then, PleasrDAO, which was originally formed to acquire a work by Emily Yang, has taken up IX Shells Dreaming in the twilight (2021) and more prominently, Wu-Tang Clan’s outstanding 2015 album, Once upon a time in Shaolin, formerly owned by pharma brother Martin Shkreli. Some members of the group also formed UkraineDAO in 2022 to raise funds to help the country’s war effort.
In the words of the collective, “After Remain freewe went from a provisional DAO to a movement.”
Edward Snowden, Stay Free (Edward Snowden). Courtesy of the artist.
Eberle thinks Wouldn’t you go to jail to help end this war? a “spiritual successor” to Remain free, noting its similar stylistic format and ideological imperative. The need for truth-telling, as exemplified by Ellsberg and Snowden’s whistleblowing, remains urgent, he added, especially at a time when disinformation and mistrust are rife.
“From Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to Snowden’s leak of global surveillance in 2013, much had changed in the world, and in 2023 it is harder than ever to know the truth,” he said. “More people need to stand up and share the truth and demand the truth from those in power.”
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