Exploring the Fever Pitch

Non-fungible tokens or NFTs

Is possibly a buzzword you have heard over the last few months. It certainly has flooded my outlets for enjoying media and has been a topic of discussion with friends, family, and colleagues alike. Beyond the nuts-and-bolts of how they work, I have been grappling with an existential question that NFTs present in my own practice.

I make software for a living. I combine graphic design and computer programming to achieve this. Like a painting the software I make produces something inherently visual. Unlike an individual painting both graphic design and computer programming focus on the system to produce images rather than one final output. In an implicit way, the way I work devalues the rara avis. Furthermore, technology is anchored in the here-and-now. There is always something new to capture my attention.

NFTs break this dynamic. They bring value (real or fabricated) to a singular digital object (jpg, gif, song, video, website). They also live outside any centralized platform like Facebook, Google, or Apple. The decentralized nature of this framing gives an optimistic look towards permanence; digital objects can now outlive the platforms they were conceived on. As someone who has spent over a decade grappling with mastering and building systems within these platforms, this is destabilizing. It has made me question what I do and where I should place my focus moving forward.

This is something that keeps me up at night (in a good way) and that I continue to form an opinion on. If this interests you. Then I offer my musings on the topic and my early NFT pieces at the link below:

I am interested to hear what shifts (societal, technological, scientific, etc) are changing the way you think?

—Jono