How many times do we have to teach you this lesson old man?
There's a certain breed of people out there born and bred to be mocked by as many people as humanely possible. A breed that obtains actual living sustenance from their own disparagement and degradation, to the point they cannot live unless it's to be denigrated on the big stage with live reactions and brutal mockery accompanying it all. Most of these special breed of people have moved to the NFT space whereupon they regularly embarrass themselves trying to revive one the Internet's stupidest trends by praying anyone will take their worthless digital goods and imbue them with purely speculative worth. That's the dumbest part- like actual Ponzi-brain morons these NFTs are always fuelled by a innate dumb idea that value can self propagate as long as wealthy idiots keep flocking to their one idea and keep feeding it new money. There's only so many wealthy tech-savvy idiots however, and we already saw one crypto crash this year.
For any executive trying to justify their job position literal weeks before the quarterly report which is about to label them as an unnecessary asset, now is actually a decently good time to try and revive the NFT landscape. Afterall, with everything pretty much as low as it can go in terms of general value, the only place the market can go is up, right? And if ride that slow and steady wave to being somewhat valuable once again, you can turn around and claim your weekend project is single-handily injecting profitability back into this flagging market! Ain't that a fake notch to stick into your counterfeit belt? Which, I imagine, is the only reason why the Warner Bros. executive branch is currently in the process of flogging their Lord of the Rings NFTs, whilst HBO is dribbling out it's own Game of Thrones collection. (I guess Netflix better get on that Witcher collection right quick before that franchise goes belly up!)
The Game of Thrones collection is pretty much exactly what you think it is, randomly generated images; nothing worth writing home about, but the LoTR's collection has me curious. Not because it sounds like something actually interesting or valuable; but because it doesn't really sound like it needs to be an NFT at all. They are basically offering the full movie trilogy with all the DVD extras, with the only new thing added to the collection being the ability to attain different faux-DVD background stills in order to navigate around. So you're spending your volatile crypto currency for 'rare' DVD menu backgrounds, none of which appear to be actually made by hand considering how blurry they are, and some of which quite literally just look the DVD menus from back in the day. But there only appears to be three of four different backgrounds to pick from, and nothing else particularly unique about these film collections; so here's my question- what exactly is 'non-fungible' about a product that has been sold in replica? Doesn't it defeat the whole purpose of an NFT? Isn't this basically just a way to own these films on the blockchain, and the NFT label is entirely inappropriate? Someone needs to explain this to me, slowly.
Though it's absolute blasphemy to admit it out loud, I'd somewhat respect these companies more if they just spent all those frivolous marketing dollars in just funding some stupid Funko-pop collection, or maybe a figurine series; anything that has the potential to actually be valuable to some weird person thirty years from now. The problem is that these companies are all looking at NFTs as though they are the modern day equivalent of figurine collecting, totally missing the lack of cross-over on a conceptual level and the huge barrier of entry to actually trade crypto in the first place. Most people have literally no idea how to set up a wallet, when in order to buy a real life limited edition collectible all you need is a spare not. It's a damningly doomed grift which has limped it's way past it's own expiration date at this point, and is now just an exhumed zombified corpse of an idea desperately attempting to score some theoretic foothold in a theoretical future. Here's a tip for free; the public isn't going to become generally more attuned to the complicated tech, the tech is going to eventually demystify itself in order to reach a middle ground with people who can't be bothered to learn it's intricacies. That's when they'll be a wave to jump on!
Square Enix are also up in their stupidness again with this profitless trend on NFTs; although in their case I suppose it's desperation paving their route because as the world has come to realise; modern Square has absolutely no clue what it's doing. They've sold off half their studios, their live services have all, universally, fallen off and been shut down before they've hit sustainability; (Avenger's shutdown is coming, mark my words) and now they've taken a page out of Konami's book and totally lost touch with what it is that their consumer base wants. Which, though I don't really feel this needs to be said, is games. We want games, Square; that's all we've ever wanted out of you! But who are we in the face of stopping, ever approaching progress?
If that is, you consider progress to be their new NFT line they've introduced. Hidden in the name 'Symbiogenesis' with a deceptively evocative and pretty logo emblem, this latest project of theirs is not, as a naïve internet originally assumed, a revival of Parasite Eve. That franchise may very well have been inspired by the very process of Symbiogenesis; but apparently that is an absolute coincidence; this is a digital art project designed for 'Web3' fans. (Bold to assume that Web3 has actual 'fans' and not just a unending line of 'aspiring exploiters'.) Square are being almost mockingly secretive about what this new franchise of theirs actually is about, they provided the very bare basic premise of a typical final fantasy game as a blurb; but we know they'll be characters to collect and maybe even slowly distributed lore through NFT drops. Which, admittedly, isn't the least creative idea in the world, I have to give them that.
It's just a shame that burgeoning creativity has to take a back-seat to blatant money grubbing, because at this stage there literally is no two-ways about it; if you're pushing an NTF collection, it's for the complexity and ingenuity that Web3 provides. In fact, I'm convinced that most every one of these executives couldn't for the life of you explain the difference between Web2 infrastructure and Web3; let alone identify genuine benefits. Everytime this comes back to art becoming some sort of speculative asset that Square are crossing their fingers and praying becomes a type of hot-button ticket which people start fighting over for millions. (For which they'll receive a perpetual kick-back for every sale made.) It's just all a bit pathetic, really.
Perhaps this serves as a lesson to us all that even when they're not valuable or new, there's always going to be someone willing to revive the name of NFTs in order to fuel a dumb idea. Like that last ember of the first flame, cradled in the grasp of the Handmaiden and carried into the unknowable age of dark, knowing that one day, somehow, the flame would alight again. NFTs are that reality shaping vacuous hole that sucks in those plethoras of spotty, crypto bro, moths in it's dancing flames. And will it always fall on it's face? Maybe, maybe not. But I bet that it will, just about always, be fuelled by dumb people who can't even comprehend the utility at their finger-tips. Let that be a lesson to anyone who thinks they don't have what it takes to achieve; people like these still have jobs, so can you.
No comments:
Post a Comment