NFTs and the real world

The whole concept of NFTs is still amazing to me. Mostly because every time I have to explain it to someone with zero knowledge of the concept, it's the same conversation that goes from interest to bewilderment to just giving up while feeling both too old and also woried for the future of humankind. It usually goes something like this:

So NFTs are kinda like cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and stuff, you know? But it's not money, it's for pictures that people buy and collect. Not like picture pictures, like JPEG pictures.
But I mean, can you hang it on the wall?
Well, I mean you could print it and hang it, but the thing you buy is the digital one.
But you own the only copy then?
No, anyone could save a copy that's identical to yours. But you actually own it because that's written down in the blockchain.
That makes no sense
I know right? And they go for a ton of money. Like hundreds of thousands of dollars a lot of the time.
Wait, what?
Yeah, that's what makes it insane. I think it's mostly art investors who buy it, like they'd buy a Picasso and then stick it in a vault like it was a bunch of gold bars.
So I could just draw something and make money?
Possibly. But the ones that do the best are these sets that are computer generated to have a bunch of variations. Like, there's this one with monkeys...

Which is the point where most people zone out. The whole thing already sounds like sci-fi satire mocking consumerism, throwing in computer generated monkeys is just a step too far for most people.

In fact, there may be an idea for a story in there, and some good questions. How about: are NFTs proof that we're living in a simulation, and this is the latest wrinkle that our overseer algorithm (what some people mistankely call "God") has thrown us to see how we behave, but since it's too preposterous to exist, it will just screw up the run, society will collapse soon and we will get reset to the beginning, and have no idea that it even happened.

Or: culture is actually a sentient being, and it's decided to get revenge for all the awful slash-fic stories we have created, so now it's getting back at us by making crossovers of random real-life entities, and NFTs are what you get when you put Beanie babies and Bernie Madoff in a blender.

NFTs are a disaster. They're bad for the enviroment, provide no real value to society whatsoever, and the artistic value of the actual pieces combined is about equivalent to the Emoji Movie.

It's a bubble that will inevitably burst and leave a bunch of crypto-bro investors separated from a bunch of money. But for now sadly it seems to be still chugging along, and you can't look at a developer job board without tripping over a dozen listings for companies "in the Web3 space" "creating value for investors" by "innovating on the blockchain" and such similar buzzword bullshit.

Right, that's enough of that. Here's some Singing Loins.

Internet finds

Antiqvitas Nova is some wonderully strange medival-inspired art