Everything is a remix.
TW: NFTs and crypto ramblings
A little dig into one man’s perspective that got me thinking about the technology rush phenomenons (such as BTC craze, NFTs, virtual land boom) and of longevity in the context of internet technologies.
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash
Glitch CEO Anil Dash blogged about how and why (in support of artists selling their artworks easily) he and Kevin McCoy put together a technology called monetized graphics they used to sell Quantum, the first known NFT during a live demo back in 2014. Been following him for years and did not know about his involvement in this until recently. Read the demo explainer here.
This is how you explain your hackathon project demo, duly noted. Watch the demo video here.
On a separate note, I personally found the concept of exchanging artistic objects on a blockchain interesting and fair, especially to creators and artists who would rightfully be benefiting from this technology/art intersection when I stumbled upon CryptoKitties for the first time in 2018. CryptoKitties was the reason I bought my only particles of ETH, even. Did not know what happened around the NFT space after that at all, but things seem to be going down, not so surprisingly.
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash
As things usually go, I stumbled upon Anil’s article on the current state of NFTs in The Atlantic titled “NFTs Weren’t Supposed to End Like This”. Read the article here.
Some interesting lines from the article include:
“when someone buys an NFT, they’re not buying the actual digital artwork; they’re buying a link to it”
and
“they still depend on the old-fashioned pre-blockchain internet, where an artwork would suddenly vanish if someone forgot to renew a domain name”. Found this MVP tool to check the validity of NFTs btw, check out here.
Thinking back on how the people I know personally who are interested in blockchain-based technologies are either altcoin enthusiasts/short-term traders, altcoin/NFT builders, crypto exchange builders, hodlers/long-term investors, or the very rare actual use-case builders. It appears almost as if they are moving the ecosystem for the sake of moving, and for the short-term gains, mostly.
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash
Then I found another, more recent, post by Anil, published on his own blog titled: “On “inventing NFTs” and how we don’t have any good way to talk about tech”. There he talks about the responses he got since he published the earlier The Atlantic article. Read the post here.
I loved this sentence from the post above: “Everything is a remix”. Accounting for the fact that his product Glitch lets people play around different technologies using the remixing functionality, it was funny and also rang true to me.
This is also the first time I thought bad of technology opportunists.