In a former life, I worked for a consultancy that worked with many blockchain clients. Beyond the clients in our portfolio, I was also tasked with doing extensive market research into art market NFTs. While some projects seemed to be built by clever, well-meaning people with interesting ideas, the vast majority of blockchain projects were cynical cash grabs. In addition, even the best-designed chains with thoughtful user interfaces were still clunky, dysfunctional, and wasteful. At best, I saw artist-driven marketplaces that operated as circular economies where artists traded works amongst themselves without deriving any meaningful income unless they lived in a developing country and were able to take advantage of exchange rates on fiat currencies. (There’s a bigger discussion to be had about how these technologies are pretty broadly inaccessible outside of the upper and upper middle classes in the global south.) Basically, these platforms became glorified zine swaps. Artists deserve better financial compensation for their labor as well as better legal protections for their intellectual property, but blockchain ain’t it.
Thank you for your thoughtful and informed comment. "Glorified zine swaps" that exclude those who won't pay (Bitcoin of all things) to play is spot-on.
I was excited by Tim Green and Katie Doziers espousal of minting poetry NFTs and so I minted a few myself. It was a pretty steep learning curve and the only "sale' I made was to a friend and fellow poet. Part of the minting is deciding how many copies are available for sale, and I think the initial interest was for "collectors" to purchase these works, as they started to purchase digital art NFTs. But now I'm kind of soured on the the whole enterprise in that it is taking me more energy to stay on top of the NFT world which is taking me away from the normal poetry world. Obviously, anyone embarking on a cutting-edge process experiences this and one has to evaluate where and how one wants to spend their time and energy. I still have two feet firmly in the non-NFT poetry world and that's where I want to stay until the poetry world goes to majority NFT or substantial NFT. Advantages: you can purchase individual poems, the work is digital so there is no problem with real world storage, you can get paid, the poems can have an art component (digital image) along with text. Disadvantages - you need to be familiar with blockchain tech (less complex than it sounds) and set up multiple accounts, depending on what you're minting, including an account that accepts/converts crypto. If you're a young poet, given that at least part of the future is crypto, it is likely worth the learning curve. If you're a web literate old dude like me, I'm not sure it is. I suppose there are moral issues as well given that crypto is used and was developed, to avoid government detection, which means it is the venue of choice for criminals and those who want to hide payment for nefarious transactions.
Thank you for your very thoughtful commentary, which is probably more useful than my screed, which amounted to the same thing. The featured editors are painfully naive and perhaps understating how limited the reach of these NFT's will be.
People are looking for Community in all sorts of spaces. Crypto/NFT communities are just one example. What's unfortunate is the rep associated with the type of people engaged... also, it should go without saying, the energy use is disturbing and that needs to get worked out ASAP.
I agree with you Gary about the energy it takes to get involved in NFT poetry does not seem worth it to me. People that were involved in crypto before the recent years had a much easier time of onboarding because they didn't have to give their personal information in order to get involved in cryptocurrency. Now the government is involved so you have to give your social security and so forth. I also minted a few NFTs a couple of years ago, but I still haven't figured out how to buy cryptocurrency without disclosing personal information to these companies.
Yes this is where I first read the word. Sad that it fits so much of what is here or is coming. For me the writing on the wall really became legible when Google dropped their corporate motto of “Don’t be Evil”
Your comments have made me wonder: how will the journal handle work from writers who have published there in the past? I had a story appear there a few years ago. What if we do not consent to participating in the NFT marketplace? I will have to look into this further.
But, as many are asking, is remaining relevant enough of a reason to destroy the icecap and give our endorsement to cryptos that enable terrible atrocities all over the world? Rape. Genocides. Mercenary violence. If I have that false choice you have presented, I will give away my books and jump off a bridge. I intend to do neither of those two things. I will find other ways to be relevant. I fear your formula is predicated on the idea that writers need to follow the lead of people who do not have our interests at heart. We can actually make choices to defend what, to many of us, is sacred ground.
One of the aspects of poetry I value most is that it is not really part of the market economy. Years ago, Lewis Hyde wrote a book about how poetry was part of a gift economy. I recommend it: The Gift. NFTs are an attempt to remove literature from the gift economy and make it just another object of transaction. This is likely to fail for many reasons. The most important is, "Why in the world would I want a limited edition digital version of a typed piece of paper?" Investment? Really? I have a wonderful bridge to sell you. NFTs may be a way to market digital artworks, but I can't say I am a fan of those either. If you are a writer, consider for whom you write? Who do you want to be your readers? If you imagine some tech zillionaire sitting down at a shining desk crafted from lava and studded with diamonds to read your story or poem, then maybe NFTs are for you. Personally, I imagine a harried student or clerk on a lunch break pulling one of my books off a bookstore shelf and deciding that reading it might just give them some much-needed reflective pleasure. If that reader pulls the book off the internet, that's OK too. But, I am totally uninterested in someone treating my poems as their money-making scheme. Poetry and stories are gifts we give to each other; they're not a hustle.
Fabulous point, George. When anyone pauses for even an instant, they can see how ridiculous this is. This whole project sounds like a reversal of the Gutenberg Project. It's about making a sheet of paper with printed characters on it more difficult to obtain, more exclusive, more anti-democratic.
Keep in mind that purchasing an NFT does not prevent anyone else from looking at it or reading it. This is an often misunderstood aspect of NFTs. That millionaire, just like the harried student, can read a poem on an NFT. If the millionaire buys the NFT, the student can still read it - from the student's point of view, nothing has changed. The millionaire, on the other hand, can brag that he "owns" the NFT, and that by purchasing it he paid money to the creator of the NFT (i.e., the poet). For the millionaire, it's a "status thing," possibly coupled with a "philanthropy thing" since by purchasing it he is supporting the arts. This is similar to the millionaire purchasing a work of art, and then allowing a museum to display the art for free to the public, except that in the case of the NFT the millionaire has no choice - he or she cannot "hide" the NFT from others even if he or she wanted to.
The environmental considerations are sufficient reason to have nothing to do with this stuff. It's also a good rule of thumb to have nothing to do with something you don't begin to understand.
Crypto has always seemed like a ponzi scheme. I stay away from it. Thus anything that requires the use of crypto is suspect. We know that crypto is not traceable so widely used by criminals as well. The energy use for NFTs is also criminal when we have so many other places we need to expend energy for basic necessities for millions.
Man-of-Mixed-Feelings here. Tim Green has rarely been wrong about how tech capacity can be used to promote the practice of poetry. And I have often been wrong about how current innovations I am skeptical about have become ubiquitous (hello, internet!). And I also am aware that AI changes the whole landscape - especially for curator/editors trying to keep their heads above the flood of credible submissions they are sure to get of IA generated work.
All that said, Block Chain/NFT introduces several things that I think are incompatible with poetry/lit world. First, it is in incomparably gross producer of carbon. The server farms used to sustain even the currently modest use of block chain are substantial contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
Secondly, poetry especially, has thrived outside of "the economy." Yes, some poets have found a way to monetize their work. But it, almost universally, is not good for their poetry. As soon as a poet "responds to the market," their work is necessarily corrupted. There are many examples of this but for an object lesson, look at almost all "Insta-poets." I dare you!
Finally, as one who has dabbled in NFT poetry creation (under the generous tutelage of Katie Dozier), I have found the process daunting and unproductive. I am a tech savvy guy and it has still been a bit of a challenge to learn the rules of the road. BUT more importantly, it is a fragmented marketplace. There are many social platforms that an artist has to curate to get any meaningful exposure for ones work. (Also, curating ones presence in the NFT space seems to involve spending $$ on others' NFTs to develop credibility among NFT poets.)
I was really alarmed by what I saw from The Atticus Review. According to their about page, you're now required to get a crypto wallet in order to have work published with them. Additionally, blockchain technology is extremely energy intensive. Releasing all that CO2 into the atmosphere for something that is not a necessity for us to live . . . that is a sign to me that a magazine does not align with my values.
I'm seeing a lot of "let's wait and see" and give it a chance. Um, anyone who thinks we need to wait and see hasn't been reading the news for the past 5 or 10 years. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism was published in 2019, and the alarm bells about privacy have been ringing loudly for years. The studies of Bitcoin's devastating impact on the environment have been around since crypto hit the scene. We would be naive, at best, to pretend we don't know server farms are melting the ice cap. We know that Bitcoin is used by child sex traffickers and arms dealers. I'm going to say it and p- a few people off, but this is where being an art flake isn't cute anymore. Pull your head out of the sand and read a newspaper or a book about this stuff. Most of the articles and books are several years old already. We don't have a lot of time to wait and see. And we can't pretend we don't know.
It seems to me that the only way to be an authentic human creator is to remain outside the blockchain and to keep our creative output in real time and print, monetized in classical ways that aren’t part of the cryptocurrency mass surveillance apparatus.
When I asked an economist friend about NFTs, they explained them as items exchanged in a cannibalistic alternative economy. (It strikes me that in *any* economy, the marketing of poetry, whether as NFTs or as poems in a book or magazine, is going to run into a demand problem.) The larger structural problem with NFTs, this economist explained, is that exchanging them cannibalizes traditional currencies that society depends upon. Every transaction that uses cryptocurrencies instead of, say, US dollars, or Euros, or JPYen--apart from the egregious environmental by-costs--devalues that traditional currency. As people become more aware of cryptocurrencies, many are tempted to invest in them. But most NFTs fail to hold their value beyond their initial sale: their novelty *is* their value. And every dollar that a person moves into crypto devalues the dollar as a currency. Cryptocurrencies are, by nature, agents of social destabilization.
Thank you for raising the issue of what, exactly, writers can gain from this, from an economic standpoint. Let's all do the math. How much time will we spend creating NFT's, and how much will we earn from them? Morals aside, if that is even possible, is this actually a realistic answer to the question of how writers can be paid? I mean, people like us aren't going to pay for a poem what a few millionaires have paid for an NFT of Kim Kardashian's ass. I hate to be crude, but that's where were at, and I refuse to sell out my values (for example, I oppose arms dealing and child sex trafficking enabled by cryptos) for a handful of pennies. Some of the people on this thread are kidding themselves about the profit potential and rationalizing some morally dubious positions.
I write for my own enjoyment and to (I hope) reach readers. NFTs don’t help with the first. Right now, they don’t help with the second. Maybe that will change in the future. But even if it does, like several others commented, it’s not worth the environmental costs.
I misread the line "a big inflection point for humanity" as "a big infection point for humanity". You can guess what I feel about this :) - and yes, humanity is doomed, the question is when.A grandson has been playing with NFTs (graphics and cartoons), yes an 18 year-old... the lure of quick cash. I don't think he lost anything, but he didn't gain anything either, except the pleasure of watching the older generation go uh? ... as a novel and short story writer, I'll wait and see how somebody sticks an 80K document in an NFT.
I think cryptocurrency and NFTs can be beneficial in certain realms. Like it's been great for those with unstable governments or economies. During Argentine's inflation, many Argentines have converted their pesos to cryptocurrency, then into a stabler foreign currency (maybe USD, CAD, GBP, or EU) then converting the currency back to ARS when they want to make a purchase so their total doesn't deplete over night. Residents from Russia or Afghanistan use them (sometimes for justly illegal or extralegal things) but also for unjustly illegal things, like maybe books written in Ukrainian or English. The US government could become more unstable now, so maybe I'll bite in NFTs or crypto when/if that effects me. Certain situations, too, make it useful, like if someone is in an abusive relationship. Generally, most often when people promote NFTs, they are scams or just wastes, but it could be interesting if the process were easier.
Just get a "little bit of cryptocurrency"??? Bitcoin? Have these editors read anything about Bitcoin and its many nefarious uses. What about those of us who don't want to buy the currency used worldwide by arms dealers and child sex traffickers. For real? And what about the environmental disaster Bitcoin causes? Typical literary types. (I'm a writer) Heads up their a*** when it comes to the real world. Sorry, but this is disgusting, or disgustingly naive, if I'm to be at all charitable. You know, just buy in. I see the AWP is having a panel on "how to use AI creatively in the classroom." Way for the literary establishment to miss the big picture and the future ramifications or, heck, just roll over and play dead. I get what they're trying to do, but asking writers to buy Bitcoin to create an NFT of their work is not the answer. And if they think their data will be secure as they create NFTs of their work, they are sadly mistaken.
I find it hard to contend that digital remakes of previously tangible art objects ever redounds to the benefit of the artists themselves. No matter the complexity of the jargon that develops around any given process of creating permanent and "ownable" digital products, the base reality still is that we're burning the limited natural resources on an already-overexploited planet to build and maintain the illusion of a technological "revolution" whose products are mainly worse versions of already existing products. It's a joke.
The neoliberal ideology that would have each of us turned into little industrial nodes is an insidious partner concept with silicon valley's anarcho-Libertarian wish-casting about post-government "utopias." Peter Thiel isn't inviting us to his island, Elon won't take us to Mars, but they sure can wreck a lot of shit convincing people they *might.* It's a cui bono situation that has had the same answer for the last 35 years: technocratic elites happy to frack our social, political, and creative realities into bits while we smile dumbly into our selfie-machines ready to get in on the ground level of the next big thing.
In a former life, I worked for a consultancy that worked with many blockchain clients. Beyond the clients in our portfolio, I was also tasked with doing extensive market research into art market NFTs. While some projects seemed to be built by clever, well-meaning people with interesting ideas, the vast majority of blockchain projects were cynical cash grabs. In addition, even the best-designed chains with thoughtful user interfaces were still clunky, dysfunctional, and wasteful. At best, I saw artist-driven marketplaces that operated as circular economies where artists traded works amongst themselves without deriving any meaningful income unless they lived in a developing country and were able to take advantage of exchange rates on fiat currencies. (There’s a bigger discussion to be had about how these technologies are pretty broadly inaccessible outside of the upper and upper middle classes in the global south.) Basically, these platforms became glorified zine swaps. Artists deserve better financial compensation for their labor as well as better legal protections for their intellectual property, but blockchain ain’t it.
Thank you for your thoughtful and informed comment. "Glorified zine swaps" that exclude those who won't pay (Bitcoin of all things) to play is spot-on.
well said
agreed
I was excited by Tim Green and Katie Doziers espousal of minting poetry NFTs and so I minted a few myself. It was a pretty steep learning curve and the only "sale' I made was to a friend and fellow poet. Part of the minting is deciding how many copies are available for sale, and I think the initial interest was for "collectors" to purchase these works, as they started to purchase digital art NFTs. But now I'm kind of soured on the the whole enterprise in that it is taking me more energy to stay on top of the NFT world which is taking me away from the normal poetry world. Obviously, anyone embarking on a cutting-edge process experiences this and one has to evaluate where and how one wants to spend their time and energy. I still have two feet firmly in the non-NFT poetry world and that's where I want to stay until the poetry world goes to majority NFT or substantial NFT. Advantages: you can purchase individual poems, the work is digital so there is no problem with real world storage, you can get paid, the poems can have an art component (digital image) along with text. Disadvantages - you need to be familiar with blockchain tech (less complex than it sounds) and set up multiple accounts, depending on what you're minting, including an account that accepts/converts crypto. If you're a young poet, given that at least part of the future is crypto, it is likely worth the learning curve. If you're a web literate old dude like me, I'm not sure it is. I suppose there are moral issues as well given that crypto is used and was developed, to avoid government detection, which means it is the venue of choice for criminals and those who want to hide payment for nefarious transactions.
Thank you for your very thoughtful commentary, which is probably more useful than my screed, which amounted to the same thing. The featured editors are painfully naive and perhaps understating how limited the reach of these NFT's will be.
People are looking for Community in all sorts of spaces. Crypto/NFT communities are just one example. What's unfortunate is the rep associated with the type of people engaged... also, it should go without saying, the energy use is disturbing and that needs to get worked out ASAP.
I agree with you Gary about the energy it takes to get involved in NFT poetry does not seem worth it to me. People that were involved in crypto before the recent years had a much easier time of onboarding because they didn't have to give their personal information in order to get involved in cryptocurrency. Now the government is involved so you have to give your social security and so forth. I also minted a few NFTs a couple of years ago, but I still haven't figured out how to buy cryptocurrency without disclosing personal information to these companies.
This sounds like just another opportunity for enshitification. - No charge for using this technology…until you must use it then well soak you!
"Enshitification." Great word.
Are you familiar with Cory Doctorow's writing on enshittification? https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/#more-6255 All of this discussion is important; it feels like a freight train of change is coming before we get a chance to decide whether it will help us or destroy us. It all feels exploitative to me. The authors create the work and a host of clever, manipulative entities get to capitalize on it.
Yes this is where I first read the word. Sad that it fits so much of what is here or is coming. For me the writing on the wall really became legible when Google dropped their corporate motto of “Don’t be Evil”
And do you have directions to your island?
haha, yeah it's pretty common in the crypto realm
Such a great word! Wish I had come up with that one.
Screw Atticus Review.
Your comments have made me wonder: how will the journal handle work from writers who have published there in the past? I had a story appear there a few years ago. What if we do not consent to participating in the NFT marketplace? I will have to look into this further.
Please let us know what you find out.
Everything is changing. To remain relevant, we must change, too, or find another line of work.
But, as many are asking, is remaining relevant enough of a reason to destroy the icecap and give our endorsement to cryptos that enable terrible atrocities all over the world? Rape. Genocides. Mercenary violence. If I have that false choice you have presented, I will give away my books and jump off a bridge. I intend to do neither of those two things. I will find other ways to be relevant. I fear your formula is predicated on the idea that writers need to follow the lead of people who do not have our interests at heart. We can actually make choices to defend what, to many of us, is sacred ground.
One of the aspects of poetry I value most is that it is not really part of the market economy. Years ago, Lewis Hyde wrote a book about how poetry was part of a gift economy. I recommend it: The Gift. NFTs are an attempt to remove literature from the gift economy and make it just another object of transaction. This is likely to fail for many reasons. The most important is, "Why in the world would I want a limited edition digital version of a typed piece of paper?" Investment? Really? I have a wonderful bridge to sell you. NFTs may be a way to market digital artworks, but I can't say I am a fan of those either. If you are a writer, consider for whom you write? Who do you want to be your readers? If you imagine some tech zillionaire sitting down at a shining desk crafted from lava and studded with diamonds to read your story or poem, then maybe NFTs are for you. Personally, I imagine a harried student or clerk on a lunch break pulling one of my books off a bookstore shelf and deciding that reading it might just give them some much-needed reflective pleasure. If that reader pulls the book off the internet, that's OK too. But, I am totally uninterested in someone treating my poems as their money-making scheme. Poetry and stories are gifts we give to each other; they're not a hustle.
Thank you for this, George! I couldn't agree more.
"Poetry and stories are gifts we give to each other; they're not a hustle."
Fabulous point, George. When anyone pauses for even an instant, they can see how ridiculous this is. This whole project sounds like a reversal of the Gutenberg Project. It's about making a sheet of paper with printed characters on it more difficult to obtain, more exclusive, more anti-democratic.
Keep in mind that purchasing an NFT does not prevent anyone else from looking at it or reading it. This is an often misunderstood aspect of NFTs. That millionaire, just like the harried student, can read a poem on an NFT. If the millionaire buys the NFT, the student can still read it - from the student's point of view, nothing has changed. The millionaire, on the other hand, can brag that he "owns" the NFT, and that by purchasing it he paid money to the creator of the NFT (i.e., the poet). For the millionaire, it's a "status thing," possibly coupled with a "philanthropy thing" since by purchasing it he is supporting the arts. This is similar to the millionaire purchasing a work of art, and then allowing a museum to display the art for free to the public, except that in the case of the NFT the millionaire has no choice - he or she cannot "hide" the NFT from others even if he or she wanted to.
The environmental considerations are sufficient reason to have nothing to do with this stuff. It's also a good rule of thumb to have nothing to do with something you don't begin to understand.
I agree with you on both counts, Trish!
Crypto has always seemed like a ponzi scheme. I stay away from it. Thus anything that requires the use of crypto is suspect. We know that crypto is not traceable so widely used by criminals as well. The energy use for NFTs is also criminal when we have so many other places we need to expend energy for basic necessities for millions.
Hear, hear, Jeanne!
Man-of-Mixed-Feelings here. Tim Green has rarely been wrong about how tech capacity can be used to promote the practice of poetry. And I have often been wrong about how current innovations I am skeptical about have become ubiquitous (hello, internet!). And I also am aware that AI changes the whole landscape - especially for curator/editors trying to keep their heads above the flood of credible submissions they are sure to get of IA generated work.
All that said, Block Chain/NFT introduces several things that I think are incompatible with poetry/lit world. First, it is in incomparably gross producer of carbon. The server farms used to sustain even the currently modest use of block chain are substantial contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.
Secondly, poetry especially, has thrived outside of "the economy." Yes, some poets have found a way to monetize their work. But it, almost universally, is not good for their poetry. As soon as a poet "responds to the market," their work is necessarily corrupted. There are many examples of this but for an object lesson, look at almost all "Insta-poets." I dare you!
Finally, as one who has dabbled in NFT poetry creation (under the generous tutelage of Katie Dozier), I have found the process daunting and unproductive. I am a tech savvy guy and it has still been a bit of a challenge to learn the rules of the road. BUT more importantly, it is a fragmented marketplace. There are many social platforms that an artist has to curate to get any meaningful exposure for ones work. (Also, curating ones presence in the NFT space seems to involve spending $$ on others' NFTs to develop credibility among NFT poets.)
Yes, do we need the literary establishment to buy into our murder of the planet? I don't think so. It would be a sad day, indeed.
Good points Dick, hey, let's keep the circular economy that Martha described going by trading poetry NFTs. JK
I was really alarmed by what I saw from The Atticus Review. According to their about page, you're now required to get a crypto wallet in order to have work published with them. Additionally, blockchain technology is extremely energy intensive. Releasing all that CO2 into the atmosphere for something that is not a necessity for us to live . . . that is a sign to me that a magazine does not align with my values.
Guess I'm done with Atticus Review.
I'm seeing a lot of "let's wait and see" and give it a chance. Um, anyone who thinks we need to wait and see hasn't been reading the news for the past 5 or 10 years. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism was published in 2019, and the alarm bells about privacy have been ringing loudly for years. The studies of Bitcoin's devastating impact on the environment have been around since crypto hit the scene. We would be naive, at best, to pretend we don't know server farms are melting the ice cap. We know that Bitcoin is used by child sex traffickers and arms dealers. I'm going to say it and p- a few people off, but this is where being an art flake isn't cute anymore. Pull your head out of the sand and read a newspaper or a book about this stuff. Most of the articles and books are several years old already. We don't have a lot of time to wait and see. And we can't pretend we don't know.
It seems to me that the only way to be an authentic human creator is to remain outside the blockchain and to keep our creative output in real time and print, monetized in classical ways that aren’t part of the cryptocurrency mass surveillance apparatus.
When I asked an economist friend about NFTs, they explained them as items exchanged in a cannibalistic alternative economy. (It strikes me that in *any* economy, the marketing of poetry, whether as NFTs or as poems in a book or magazine, is going to run into a demand problem.) The larger structural problem with NFTs, this economist explained, is that exchanging them cannibalizes traditional currencies that society depends upon. Every transaction that uses cryptocurrencies instead of, say, US dollars, or Euros, or JPYen--apart from the egregious environmental by-costs--devalues that traditional currency. As people become more aware of cryptocurrencies, many are tempted to invest in them. But most NFTs fail to hold their value beyond their initial sale: their novelty *is* their value. And every dollar that a person moves into crypto devalues the dollar as a currency. Cryptocurrencies are, by nature, agents of social destabilization.
Thank you for raising the issue of what, exactly, writers can gain from this, from an economic standpoint. Let's all do the math. How much time will we spend creating NFT's, and how much will we earn from them? Morals aside, if that is even possible, is this actually a realistic answer to the question of how writers can be paid? I mean, people like us aren't going to pay for a poem what a few millionaires have paid for an NFT of Kim Kardashian's ass. I hate to be crude, but that's where were at, and I refuse to sell out my values (for example, I oppose arms dealing and child sex trafficking enabled by cryptos) for a handful of pennies. Some of the people on this thread are kidding themselves about the profit potential and rationalizing some morally dubious positions.
I write for my own enjoyment and to (I hope) reach readers. NFTs don’t help with the first. Right now, they don’t help with the second. Maybe that will change in the future. But even if it does, like several others commented, it’s not worth the environmental costs.
I misread the line "a big inflection point for humanity" as "a big infection point for humanity". You can guess what I feel about this :) - and yes, humanity is doomed, the question is when.A grandson has been playing with NFTs (graphics and cartoons), yes an 18 year-old... the lure of quick cash. I don't think he lost anything, but he didn't gain anything either, except the pleasure of watching the older generation go uh? ... as a novel and short story writer, I'll wait and see how somebody sticks an 80K document in an NFT.
I think cryptocurrency and NFTs can be beneficial in certain realms. Like it's been great for those with unstable governments or economies. During Argentine's inflation, many Argentines have converted their pesos to cryptocurrency, then into a stabler foreign currency (maybe USD, CAD, GBP, or EU) then converting the currency back to ARS when they want to make a purchase so their total doesn't deplete over night. Residents from Russia or Afghanistan use them (sometimes for justly illegal or extralegal things) but also for unjustly illegal things, like maybe books written in Ukrainian or English. The US government could become more unstable now, so maybe I'll bite in NFTs or crypto when/if that effects me. Certain situations, too, make it useful, like if someone is in an abusive relationship. Generally, most often when people promote NFTs, they are scams or just wastes, but it could be interesting if the process were easier.
Just get a "little bit of cryptocurrency"??? Bitcoin? Have these editors read anything about Bitcoin and its many nefarious uses. What about those of us who don't want to buy the currency used worldwide by arms dealers and child sex traffickers. For real? And what about the environmental disaster Bitcoin causes? Typical literary types. (I'm a writer) Heads up their a*** when it comes to the real world. Sorry, but this is disgusting, or disgustingly naive, if I'm to be at all charitable. You know, just buy in. I see the AWP is having a panel on "how to use AI creatively in the classroom." Way for the literary establishment to miss the big picture and the future ramifications or, heck, just roll over and play dead. I get what they're trying to do, but asking writers to buy Bitcoin to create an NFT of their work is not the answer. And if they think their data will be secure as they create NFTs of their work, they are sadly mistaken.
I find it hard to contend that digital remakes of previously tangible art objects ever redounds to the benefit of the artists themselves. No matter the complexity of the jargon that develops around any given process of creating permanent and "ownable" digital products, the base reality still is that we're burning the limited natural resources on an already-overexploited planet to build and maintain the illusion of a technological "revolution" whose products are mainly worse versions of already existing products. It's a joke.
The neoliberal ideology that would have each of us turned into little industrial nodes is an insidious partner concept with silicon valley's anarcho-Libertarian wish-casting about post-government "utopias." Peter Thiel isn't inviting us to his island, Elon won't take us to Mars, but they sure can wreck a lot of shit convincing people they *might.* It's a cui bono situation that has had the same answer for the last 35 years: technocratic elites happy to frack our social, political, and creative realities into bits while we smile dumbly into our selfie-machines ready to get in on the ground level of the next big thing.