[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.

[TaylorAlexander]

Thanks! Well it’s good to point out that automation isn’t a silver bullet and humans systems need to change too. But yeah I do think that we can really improve things if we dispense with the idea of work for survival, and we achieve it in part by actually making things cheaper through automation (as opposed to wealth redistribution which becomes a source of endless fighting).

[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.