[ninthcat]

A copy of digital art has (to an approximation) no value because it is infinitely reproducible. But an hour of an artist's time has value due to scarcity. The obvious answer — that the article doesn't mention for some reason — is that artists make money from commissions, not from selling copies of the art.

[TaylorAlexander]

Actually what we have found I think with the internet is that some things have value no matter how many copies you make. Computers can copy digital things at essentially no cost, and some digital things have great value. So we have a way to copy value for free. We can do a lot with that if we really try. For example, wikipedia has produced incalculable value but the users don't generally pay anything for it.

My personal economic theory is that we should try to maximize this effect. Make as much value as we can digital and try to make all digital value as free as we can make it. This should in theory create huge value in the world at very low cost. So to me, even if NFTs could prevent copying, it would be going in entirely the wrong direction. The whole desire to lock down digital goods in the first place seems like the biggest economic foot gun I can think of.

[meheleventyone]

On the whole I agree with you but the problem as ever is people wanting to be compensated for the work they do. They need to eat after all.

I totally understand artists jumping on NFTs as a potential meal ticket.

It's this paradox of seeing tremendous value in something but at the same time not seeing monetary value in it.

[TaylorAlexander]

> They need to eat after all.

Honestly when I look at the whole equation: we have machines which can produce value for free, but because people need to eat we keep trying to shut the free value machine down...

The obvious solution is that we should make food free. We should automate the hell out of the systems that produce our food, and we should make all of that automation open source so that all extraneous costs can be worked out. I think if we did that, food would be so genuinely cheap to produce we could give it away.

So that's what I am trying to do. I am working on a farming robot, thinking about machines which can produce high volumes of free hot meals from basic ingredients (like the Sikhs do in India[1], but automated), and trying to understand crowd funded engineering to pay for it all.

Like, the idea that we could produce way more value for free and we're stopping that from really happening because people need food? I think we can solve that. We just have to look at things differently.

And we can do the same with rent, and shoes, and clothes. I think the upside is so incredibly high it is worth doing it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdoJroKUwu0

[meheleventyone]

As I understand it we don't even have to change farming to achieve that. We have abundant food for the current population size. It's distribution and the global economic system that make it extremely unequally available.

[TaylorAlexander]

I think automation and open source can help drive prices down further, but it’s true that all of this can be achieved without that. The Sikhs have been doing it for hundreds of years.

[meheleventyone]

Yeah sorry I didn't mean to be down on your idea which I think is pretty great in it's potential to improve things for people equitably.

[kibwen]

We live in a world of post-scarcity when it comes to displaying pixels on a screen. Markets don't make any sense at all in post-scarcity contexts, but we've spent the past few centuries structuring our entire world around markets, and we have so little imagination that people have trouble imagining any different model. The era of selling a single digital illustration to many people is ending. Artists can adapt to a post-scarcity of pixels by making money through patrons and commissions, rather than through trying to awkwardly and wastefully shoehorn scarcity back into the system by NFTs.

[meheleventyone]

Oh yeah I don't think NFTs are a good idea on any axis.

Although as a game developer my medium is much more expensive to develop in than can bear the weight of patronage or commissions.

[kibwen]

Indeed, this is not to say this will not disrupt artists or influence the art they create. I do know of developers that make a living via patrons (Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress) and plenty of legendary games that have been "commissioned" via Kickstarter (e.g. Undertale, Hollow Knight (neither of which had any prior fame to carry them)), but that's not to say that these models will necessarily work for whatever game you yourself are developing.

[meheleventyone]

Right but they're exceptions in the case of DF and Kickstarters are run waaaaay below the actual cost of production for lots of reasons. If all games were funded that way you'd have a tiny number of games made.

[grvdrm]

Could we instead think of this as two different types of marketplaces?

The first covers physically scarce high value items. The second covers more easily reproducible lower-value items. The first is the market where people transact to make the compensation they need. The second is, instead, almost a social network. It helps create economic value by enabling broader exchange of assets while also decoupling those assets from compensation needs of the artists. It boosts/hurts the artists profile.

Maybe in the first you are selling a painting that took months and can attract a high price whereas the second is where as an artist you distribute scribbles. You aren’t worried about making money from those when you mint NFTs from them.

Not at all familiar with art market and if this is how things work today but curious if this is a logical take.

[casi18]

nfts dont prevent copying, the content is easily accessible by anyone with standards for doing so.

hence why us crypto people find the "but you can right click save" as pretty funny. yes, you can! its freely available to everyone.

"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive, and that tension doesn't go away"- Stuart Brand, wrote this in whole earth catalog in the 70s. we're still learning what this means.

> "wikipedia has produced incalculable value but the users don't generally pay anything for it."

and it is built on the back of free labour, and unquestionable authority. (ever tried to edit something that a wiki editor disagrees with- banned).

I think its better we find ways to pay people. if paying artists and musicians looks like nfts ,so be it. better than what we had before. The ceo of spotify is worth $5billion. The musicians get fractions of cents.

The musicians on https://zora.co/ and https://beta.catalog.works/ are getting paid decently, and are distributing the work to the whole world for free at the same time. Sounds great to me.

[TaylorAlexander]

> I think its better we find ways to pay people.

Even if we find ways to pay people, a world where everything is open source would make life cheaper for artists. Their car would be cheaper to repair, medical treatment would be cheaper. Really we need to cost down the economy no matter what other things we do.

[casi18]

I agree, cryptocurrencies and nfts are built on FOSS and CO-OP philosophy, thats what it is all about. But I also dont think we should continue sacrificing artists and musicians for a vision of a star-trek post-scarcity world that doesnt exist (yet/ever?).

I think a lot of the backlash against nfts(and crypto in general) is that people have an abusive relationship to money, it is a point of pain and stress in everyones lives. So the idea of bringing that financialization and tokenization into more of our lives feels wrong. But the problem is we are already suffering under the system that does exists, with other people profiting off it. Doesn't it make sense to build systems for collective ownership, for supporting public goods, and for paying people for the work (art,music,foss) they do. Maybe it wont work. maybe it will be co-opted by others. Maybe it will be better. Cant we at least try without a hysterical group calling us scammers and thieves in a new anti-nft article every single day. because they read some other bad take and made assumptions about "the kind of people involved".

It doesnt go unnoticed that the critics seem to be offering nothing more than "we can already pay for art". Great. Such a useful response. Thats going shift power in the world. Keep things as they are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy6VMDXB2SQ

[tonyedgecombe]

>A copy of digital art has (to an approximation) no value because it is infinitely reproducible.

Just like software.