Q: What's up with lit mags & web 3.0?
Exciting future or...digitally enchained hellscape from which there is no escape?
Welcome to our weekend conversation!
This past week I was alerted to an announcement from Atticus Review. The magazine will be transitioning to the use of blockchain and will be reconfigured “as an NFT marketplace.”
This transition won’t happen overnight, but our goal is to slowly build a curated collection of NFTs—works for our readership to enjoy, admire, reread over and over again, and own. That’s right, own. Atticus readers will have the opportunity to purchase the poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and multimedia pieces that we publish as minted NFTs. We think NFTs can (and will) revolutionize the way digital creative arts and letters are exchanged, and that they can ultimately benefit the writer, the publisher, and the reader.
A good many of you might be scratching your heads. Words like “blockchain,” “NFTs,” “minting,” and “web3” are not familiar, the concepts not necessarily easy to grasp. For those of us who are not tech-savvy, it can be daunting indeed.
I find it all daunting too. Yet I also think we have a responsibility to try and make as much sense of this as we can. Many writers are rightly concerned about the integration of AI into writing and publishing. Plagiarism, over-saturation of the market, the replacement of human labor, not to mention the technology’s water and energy consumption, are all very real concerns.
What about other kinds of emergent technology? What do we understand about it? What are its benefits to writers and publishers? What are the risks?
The Atticus Review Editors go on to explain,
Better Rights Management
With blockchain technology, writers have at their disposal a better way to preserve the rights to their work. That’s because, at its core, an NFT is simply a contract representing an asset. NFTs verify ownership. They represent that something is unique, irreplaceable (Non-Fungible), and also stamped in time.
NFTs aren’t just contracts, however. They’re smart contracts. An NFT can execute a series of rules when a sale happens. For instance, the NFT smart contract can send a certain percentage of a sale to one person (like the author), and another percentage of a sale to another person (like the publisher). It can do this automatically, with no corporate intermediaries (banks, third-party businesses like Amazon) taking a cut.
Not only can these contracts do that on the first sale, but there can be additional rules in place to do that for any subsequent sale. So a poem, story, or essay NFT could be resold and that NFT’s royalties would be automatically distributed according to the terms of its contract.
What the duck does all this mean?
Let’s break down some terms.
NFT is a non-fungible token. (“Fungible” simply means interchangeable.) So a token that is non-fungible means it is the only one of its kind. An NFT is a digital asset which can be bought, sold and traded online.
An NFT marketplace is the space where these transactions occur. Think of an old-school market where people are selling, buying and trading goods. Only, you know, in cyberspace.
Minting an NFT is simply the process of creating one of these digital assets.
Cryptocurrency is something most of you are already familiar with. It is a type of digital dough. It uses cryptography (codes) to secure financial transactions. Important to note is that cryptocurrency is not the same as NFTs and is not the same as blockchain, though people often clump all these things together.
Blockchain is commonly referred to as “a decentralized ledger.” I find this definition laughably unhelpful. Easier for me to grasp is a giant open-access spreadsheet. All crypto transactions are recorded here; everyone has access; crypto users can verify ownership of assets.
Smart contracts are agreements that happen automatically on the blockchain, when certain conditions are met. They are irreversible and cannot be altered.
Digital ID is all the personal data about you. The use of blockchain does not require a digital ID. Instead, users have a Self-sovereign Identity. This SSI allows you to manage and control what personal data is shared publicly.
Tokenization is the conversion of tangible assets into digital ones. This also includes personal data, which may be tokenized on the blockchain.
Web 3.0 is the looming hellscape we are all about to find ourselves in.
Just kidding! Everything is fine!
Anyhoo. That is a primer. Now let’s go back specifically to NFTs.
Tim Green, along with fellow Rattle Editor Katie Dozier, were generous enough to sit down with me a few months ago and explain their highly positive experiences with NFTs.
I had not quite realized how polarizing NFTs were until, shortly after posting this video, I got a string of angry emails from readers. Several people unsubscribed from this newsletter. More than one reader accused me of promoting “the scam of NFTs.”
Are NFTs actually a scam? Certainly they are controversial.
In Poetry NFTs Are Having a Moment, Alissa Greenberg explains,
NFTs are digital files that exist on a blockchain, which is an electronic, public record designed to be accessible to all but with no single user possessing the computing power to change it. To mint most NFTs, a user must first obtain a small amount of a cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin or Tezos. That currency, filling out some online forms, and a few mouse clicks are all it takes for a new NFT to be born.
In [Rattle Editor Tim] Green’s view, NFTs can provide not only an alternative income stream but also a source of communal support and an opportunity for more dialogue about the finances of surviving as a poet.
…Still, cryptocurrency critic Molly White’s predictions for arts NFTs are not so rosy. The technology is prone to bugs, hacks, and scams, and cryptocurrency presents a high technical barrier to entry. She has also seen many artists try to use NFT marketplaces to solve structural problems in their fields, such as financial insecurity. But most of the time “blockchain doesn’t really fix anything: It’s a different way of doing the same thing,” she says. The result is a “strictly worse version of the thing you had already.”
A worse version of the thing we had already. That does not sound good.
What do you think?
Many of you reading this might be excited and eager to explore new possibilities in the digital realm. Others of you might want to adopt more of a wait-and-see approach before casting a judgment.
Still others of you might feel like taking your smart phone and stomping it into a million pieces, then hurling those pieces into garbage disposal, taking them out, and stomping on them again, then moving to a remote island full of flowers, lambs and medicinal herbs. If so, can I come with you?
In all seriousness, my own view is that this technology is still relatively nascent and much remains to be seen. I do not think NFTs are inherently a scam. Nor do I think the use of blockchain is inherently alarming. The same goes for our entire new techno-digital infrastructure—web 3.0, digital ID’s, self-sovereign identities, Internet of Bodies, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, digital twins, smart contracts, cryptocurrency, etc etc.
The concerns lie in how the technology is applied. More to the point—Who uses it? And for what purpose? Who wields power in this new landscape? How might that power wind up concentrated, as power tends to become?
Other concerns include how will we live away from this world, if we wish to? Will living away from it even be possible? As more institutions of finance, health, and now literary magazines, transition to “life on the ledger,” will we all be corralled into a new digitally mediated hyper-surveilled cyberlife, whether we like it or not?
Big questions, for a big inflection point for humanity.
What does it mean for lit mags?
What does it mean for all of us?
You tell me.
Does this lit mag’s embrace of blockchain and NFT’s intrigue and excite you?
Do you feel daunted by these technological terms?
Do you feel writers have a responsibility to learn about all of this?
Should editors shy away from these tools?
Is it possible to avoid these technological developments?
Is humanity…doomed?
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.
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.