Google Glass was INEVITABLE.

VR company meetings were INEVITABLE.

The Metaverse™ was INEVITABLE.

NFTs were INEVITABLE.

Venture capital is driven by whatever brainworms have wriggled into credulous techbros that particular season.

I was learning 3D art and videogame design when NFTs became popular, I uploaded some renders I made for fun as art proyects to a NFT site, some idiot bought it for 1ETH, around 1000€, LOL

funny thing about the bourgeoisie. All through the 1800s most bourgeois economists were convinced that labor is the source of value in commodities. After all, that is what Adam Smith and David Ricardo thought. Then Marx comes along and takes that fact to its logical conclusion (while adding nuance that it was labor power and not labor, but I digress): Proletarian revolution and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of wage labor and the capitalist mode of production. The construction of socialism. So from that point onwards Capitalists began increasingly inventing and embracing subjective (i.e. useless, non-materialist, non-predictive) theories of value, in order to distance “mainstream” economics from Marxist conclusions. This, coupled with the creation of fictitious capital, leads to them huffing their own farts more often than not, especially during recurring economic crises. Hence, nonsense like NFTs.

Square Enix selling the rights to Deus Ex and Tomb Raider so they could leverage more capital for crypto investment will never not be funny to me.

Heads up, we have a genuine cryptopeddler (don’t say it’s about crypto, because the goalposts keep moving even as the peddler argues for NFTs and related grifts) in this thread, and the entire carnival barker routine is now in play, including “beat capitalism’s casino by doing a newer shinier capitalism casino” and messianic “this will change the world and revolutionize everything” speeches.

Did any real company lose money on it? It was free income for the IP holders.

the funniest thing about nft’s is the one nft guy i convinced ghosts are real because of the metaverse

people who buy into nfts will believe literally anything

Some are stupid enough to drink the coolaid but most actually realise that its stupid but want to cash out on the other stupids then duck out. But the thing is they also have to tell everyone else that its actually really cool and good to get that stupid in to buy the thing.

Square is the funniest example of drinking the coolaid though. I wonder what they’re even going to do now.

it was a money laundering scheme, just a techbro “innovation” that perfectly copied the role the fine art market plays in haute bourgeois society

No need to use the past tense here. I have a friend who is still slinging NFTs. I haven’t talked with him in years but I stalk him every now and then to check in on him. He invested in bitcoin early on and then dumped it before the pandemic. If he’d held on to it (and then dumped it at just the right time), he’d be a billionaire now. So I think he’s reluctant to let go of NFTs. His big break is just around the corner. And he’s also a millionaire and his parents are hedge fund managers so he wins either way, at least until the revolution comes.

Really puts into question the capitalist myth of the genius entrepreneur and the idea that these corporate types are rich because they are smart or deserving in some way.

More than that, it calls into question the very concept of economic rationality - that the market behaves rationally based on the rational business decisions of rational actors acting in their own rational self interests.

This is one of those moments where you realize these companies aren’t jumping on these trends things for us, but they’re doing it to placate an investor class that doesn’t know any better and wants them to be into the new, hot thing among these twitter brained friends.

there’s degrees to “falling for that shit” though. the cost of minting an NFT is literally negligible for the coca cola company, and the upside is enormous if it becomes an irrational market like bitcoin was. otoh, making a game centered around NFTs is sad as fuck, those people got screwed hard.

also, this is just my perception, but it could’ve been the other way around even. bitcoin became an irrational market because there was some purity to its conception: it was merely an unfeasible currency theory put into action, so libertarians could masturbate over it. as lousy as the theoretical pinnings of bitcoin are, there were no companies getting in on the action from the getgo. it wasn’t meant to be a casino, it just devolved into one. companies getting day one onto the NFT train just made it way more obvious that it was meant to extract profit from compulsive gamblers, and the unsightliness accelerated their demise. it was just too on the nose for most people.

It’s not that they didn’t know… It’s well…

There was a time when Russia had an Occultic Research Department, and America got one. Did anyone actually believe in Magick? Did anyone wanna take the chance to be the guy who laughed at magick only to see America brought to its knees by something “Close enough” to psychic spies? Well that situation, no matter how unlikely would be worth a demotion.

Eventually it became a contest to see which nation could get the other to overspend their budgets on healing crystals.

Allegedly the CIA got some real psychic shit involved with project Star Gate, but… ehh… can anyone other than the CIA get magick to work? No, so…

My point is, it’s not that they thought NFTs were this goldmine. They were worried about being left outside the gate if the hype paid off.

Ya gotta remember, these people do not know market trends, they do not know computers. They know “My great grandkid talks about this Video Game thing, maybe we should do a Nintendo? get Atari on the phone!”

I’m sure more of those companies were aware that it’s a shitty idea than you’re giving credit for. That doesn’t matter though, what matters is whether they can convince other people to pay for it before everyone else figures that out. Most marketing is about getting people to buy shit that they wouldn’t buy otherwise, this is no different.