第1章
The Digital Currency Revolution: From Ancient Tokens to Modern Crypto
In a dimly lit hotel off the Vegas strip, the Tropicana's decades-old carpet reeks of stale cigarettes as I navigate through Money20/20 Conference attendees. Middle-aged men in Bill Gates attire mingle with Zuckerberg-styled tech bros-old finance colliding with Bitcoin evangelism. Among the flashy booths and tech demos, I spot a modest stand where an Irish entrepreneur sells "airtime"-phone credit that has become an unofficial currency in Zimbabwe. When users text codes as payments instead of adding minutes, he winks apologetically when I ask if this qualifies as money.
This wink perfectly captures the essence of tokens-those almost-but-not-quite money objects that have existed alongside "real" currency throughout human history. What's fascinating is that tokens aren't just a Bitcoin-era invention; they've been with us since Neolithic times when clay shapes represented commodities like grain and livestock. Even in ancient Athens, tokens facilitated democratic processes from voting to jury payments.
Today, tokens are experiencing an unprecedented renaissance across digital platforms. From Twitch "Bits" to NFTs to programmable smart contracts, these digital tokens are transforming how we understand value, ownership, and trust. Elon Musk regularly tweets about them, major corporations are investing billions, and even traditional art auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's have embraced the token economy. As we'll discover, these digital representations of value reveal profound truths about what money actually is-and what it might become in our increasingly virtual world.
第2章
A Bit of Cheer: Tokens as Disguised Wages
In 2012, I campaigned against zero-hours contracts at my university where, following the financial crash, adjuncts like me earned monthly what tenured colleagues made daily. Some universities were even paying temporary staff with gift cards and vouchers-transforming wages into what sociologist Viviana Zelizer called "a bit of cheer," ritualizing money as gifts rather than payment due.
Amazon Gift Cards have become a common payment form for adjunct lecturers, foreign remittances, and online work by influencers, streamers, and cam models. They're tax-free, highly liquid, and can be redeemed for virtually anything. In countries with unstable currencies, being paid in "Amazon dollars" benefits both parties. Workers find workarounds through gift card exchanges and resale forums, sometimes trading them above face value.
Amazon even pays non-US/non-Indian Mechanical Turk workers exclusively in Amazon Gift Cards-essentially "scrip," a wage token redeemable only through the employer. This practice, once outlawed by "Truck Acts" (repealed in the UK in 1986), has returned in the gig economy where platforms control token valuation and redemption terms.
Twitch's "Bits" exemplify this system perfectly. Viewers purchase Bits ($1.40 for 100) to "cheer" streamers, who receive 70% while Amazon takes 30%. For platforms, these tokens capture value and circumvent employment contracts and financial regulations. For workers like ASMR streamer Foxenkin, they provide income for marginalized work-she'll lick a binaural microphone for ten minutes in exchange for 5,000 Bits ($50 after Amazon's cut).
But Bits do more than represent monetary value-they communicate emotions, signal status, and influence streamer behavior. They're framed not as transactions but as "chat messages" with enhanced clout. This dynamic resembles The Hunger Games, where gifts from wealthy viewers become coded messages, reinforcing certain behaviors while punishing others.
Streamers like Amouranth (who performs in hot tubs, does ASMR, and "just chatting" content) use token systems to gamify viewer interaction. Donations trigger specific actions: five subscriptions spins a wheel, ten gets your name written on her body, twenty prompts squats. On adult platforms like Chaturbate, tokens connect directly to teledildonic devices that physically stimulate performers-money that literally reaches across space to touch the streamer.
These tokens create lingering connections between viewers and performers, transforming what might be transactional into something that feels communal and festive. They exist in a liminal space between currency and communication, allowing performers to monetize typically non-market activities like chatting and forming relationships. They're neither quite money nor merely messages, hovering at the boundary between payment, donation, gift, and bribe.
Amazon wish lists reveal this ambiguous economy. Streamers carefully curate these lists with items ranging from performance costumes to streaming equipment to home decor that suggests authentic glimpses into their lives. The lists blur Goffman's front-stage and backstage, mixing performance props with personal items. Notably absent are basic necessities-the business of turning "flammable underwear into cash or groceries happens backstage."
Tokens like Bits operate at economic boundaries, blurring distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate work. They're used in contexts that skirt regulations-from student union bars without proper licenses to Buddhist temples without restaurant permits to live sex shows where paying directly would be illegal. They mark the transition points where markets blend "from white to grey, and from grey to black."
Amazon, Twitch's owner, functions essentially as a bank without a financial license. It has its own payments processor, credit lines, loans, credit cards, store cards, in-store payments, merchant services, and experiments with special currencies. The purchase price of Bits ($1.40 per 100) differs from their redemption value ($1.00), with Amazon pocketing the difference. This asymmetry extends to cash-out mechanisms-viewers enjoy frictionless purchasing while streamers face complex redemption processes with fees.
Despite Amazon's attempts to capture value within closed ecosystems, tokens remain mutable, with value constantly leaking from platforms into other streams. The early promise of frictionless digital micropayments envisioned by technologists failed to anticipate how platforms would insert themselves to take "a slice of the cash applause, a bit of the cheer."
第3章
Money Talks, Tokens Track: The Surveillance Economy of Payments
Moving to rural Ireland during COVID-19 lockdowns, I encounter the sticky materiality of cash when paying a taxi driver who sanitizes my change before handing it back. The soggy five-euro note haunts my wallet for weeks, reminding me of Sartre's essay on stickiness-how it reverses possession, making the possessor possessed. This quality of money to carry traces connects to historical exchange systems like the Kula of Papua New Guinea, where shells gained value through their circulation history.
Tokens have functioned as recording devices since 7500 BC, when Mesopotamian clay shapes tracked grain and metal quantities. These early tokens were "stored memory" of physical assets. Later iterations like goldsmith receipts and warehouse tokens represented claims on stored valuables. Paper money evolved from non-transferable debt instruments naming specific individuals to fully transferable bearer notes. By the 1920s, stores were using color-coded customer classification systems to visually sort clients by credit risk, creating systems that predicted future behavior based on past transactions.
Venmo transforms payments into social expressions by requiring users to attach memos to transactions. While amounts remain private, the app's public feed (until June 2021) displayed transaction parties, dates, and explanatory messages-creating a voyeuristic window into others' financial lives. I became addicted to "Venmo stalking," collecting cryptic messages like "heat miser" or "everyone eats, even Bonnie" and imagining the social stories behind them.
Artist Hang Do Thi Duc's project "Public by Default" demonstrated how much personal information could be extracted from Venmo's API, reconstructing detailed profiles of strangers including couples, food vendors, and even drug dealers. Researchers discovered they could identify AA members, gambling addicts, and romantic affairs through transaction patterns.
This shift represents a fundamental change in payment business models-from generating revenue through transaction fees to monetizing transactional data. As with my Amazon purchase history that suddenly revealed my pregnancy through specific product orders, payment data creates profiles that can be used for targeted advertising, inventory management, and risk analysis.
Credit has always been social, as evidenced by my experience getting a loan from a Credit Union manager who "knew my mammy." But as communities expanded beyond local relationships, formal credit scoring emerged. Lewis Tappan, bankrupted in the Panic of 1837, established the Mercantile Agency in 1841 to quantify merchant creditworthiness through detailed information collection.
By the 1870s, credit surveillance expanded from merchants to consumers, evolving from simple blacklisting to complex ranking systems. This marked the dawn of surveillance capitalism-gathering and monetizing private data. Today's AI-driven credit systems like Zest AI claim to analyze up to 10,000 data points per customer, including social media activity, browsing behavior, and even friend networks. Despite claims of objectivity, these systems perpetuate historical biases.
Transactional surveillance concerns predate modern anxieties about data privacy. The 1990s Cypherpunk forum worried about government access to payment histories, with founder Timothy May warning that "a government-run cashless society will be worse than Orwell's worst." Today, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) threaten to create "money with memory" where nothing is forgotten. Both governments and platforms push for cashless societies, though with different motives-platforms want transactional data and fees, while states pursue national security and tax compliance.
Cash remains the last blind spot in a world of transactional surveillance. Physical money has been used for political resistance-like artist Cildo Meireles printing anti-imperialist messages on Brazilian banknotes during the military dictatorship. During COVID, governments worldwide discouraged cash use, which journalist Brett Scott calls part of the ongoing "cold war against cash"-pushing people from anonymous physical tender to traceable digital tokens.
David Chaum, the grandfather of Bitcoin that few have heard of, argued in 1995 Congressional hearings that privacy concerns would grow with the internet, requiring digital tokens with cash-like anonymity. His DigiCash system used public and private keys to enable anonymous transactions-innovations that would later appear in Bitcoin. While Bitcoin emerged in 2008 using similar cryptographic principles, it proved less anonymous than intended since the public blockchain made transaction histories traceable.
Electronic payments have become increasingly difficult to opt out of, with digital cash transitioning from merely convenient to socially expected. Obfuscation offers resistance through techniques designed to hide meaningful data in noise-from loyalty card swapping to confusing consumer profiles. Money burning offers a more radical approach to erasing financial records. Jonathan Harris, who came to money burning after personal bankruptcy in 2007, describes the practice as a ritual of disenchantment-breaking the taboo around currency to question its power.
第4章
Programmable Butter: The Rise of Smart Tokens
In early 1980s Ireland, EU agricultural policy created a surplus "butter mountain" while welfare recipients struggled financially. The government issued butter vouchers to welfare recipients, ostensibly for purchasing butter at reduced prices. These vouchers came with strict instructions limiting their use to butter purchases. However, what people remember most is how these restrictions were routinely circumvented-local shopkeepers accepted them for bread, sardines, eggs, cigarettes, and even alcohol. This gap between official policy and street-level practice exemplifies what James C. Scott called the "weapons of the weak"-subtle forms of resistance through which ordinary people navigate systems of control.
While money naturally flows freely, tokens function as restrictive instruments that "reduce liquidity by blocking, earmarking and funding it in various ways," according to anthropologist Mary Douglas. Unlike general-purpose money, tokens are typically limited to specific goods, services, or recipients. They represent restriction and control rather than freedom. Yet paradoxically, tokens often find paths through cracks in legitimate economies, becoming just liquid enough to create alternative exchange routes when normal channels are closed.
Smart tokens encode restrictions directly into their design, unlike earlier analog tokens that could be repurposed through social negotiation. Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" illustrates this shift-when Gilead rises to power, women's Compucard accounts are instantly frozen, while later they use paper tokens with pictures of purchasable items. Modern programmable tokens like SNAP cards enable authorities to "identify, track, and take action" against unapproved uses, eliminating the flexibility that once existed with paper tokens.
Early programmable money concepts include Edward de Bono's 1994 "IBM dollar" proposal-corporate-issued "target currencies" purchasable at discounts and redeemable for specific products. De Bono envisioned airlines, supermarkets, and even governments issuing tokens for particular economic zones or goods. Today's programmable money fuses reputation, authentication, and AI to create tokens with memory that can make decisions about users based on their values and behaviors-from environmental compliance to welfare conditions to geographic restrictions.
Unlike cash, tokens often link to identity. Historical examples include Foundling Tokens-unique keepsakes that helped mothers reclaim children from 18th-century London orphanages. Modern programmable tokens eliminate the separation between identity and bearer. The World Food Programme's iris-scanning payment system for refugees connects biometric data to bank accounts, while Worldcoin combines iris scans with digital currency for potential Universal Basic Income distribution.
Who controls programmable money? Hayek argued for private currencies to limit state power, while economist Hyman Minsky suggested private innovations eventually become absorbed by the state. China's experience with QQ tokens illustrates this pattern-when the gaming company Tencent's virtual currency threatened the Yuan, the People's Bank of China intervened. Similarly, when Facebook announced its Libra digital currency in 2019, it positioned itself as a "super-app" comparable to WeChat Pay or Alipay. Facebook's potential revenue models included harvesting transaction data, remittance fees, and most significantly, providing "identity-as-a-service."
The fundamental question is who will create programmable tokens and identities: accountable governments, profit-driven corporations, or decentralized systems controlled by users. Facebook's Libra attempted to exploit regulatory limbo by performing bank-like functions without banking licenses. The company openly stated its intent to "shape a regulatory environment" rather than conform to it. This concentration of power over data, identity, and money has been called "Silicon Valley Feudalism"-another road to serfdom.
第5章
Money, but Let's Make It Social: Reimagining Value Exchange
In a former colonial bank building in Dublin, I met hacker Jaromil (Denis Roio), who believed the 2008 financial crash had "broken the taboo on money," revealing its constructed nature. While struggling to understand monetary systems through activist meetings and Bitcoin's whitepaper, I confronted the fundamental problems with money: as a means of exchange that edges out friendship, as a store of value enabling obscene inequality, and as a unit of account that commodifies everything it touches.
Early Bitcoin advocates like Jaromil envisioned money as a "commons" where power could be decentralized from banks to everyday people through peer-to-peer networks. This concept of commons-shared resources managed collectively beyond state or market-draws from medieval land-sharing practices and Elinor Ostrom's work on successful resource-sharing communities.
The digital commons movement of the late 1990s saw internet commentators celebrating Wikipedia, open-source software, and resource-sharing platforms as harbingers of a new economic model. Bitcoin initially appeared to extend this vision to money itself through its decentralized ledger system. However, the ideological junction where "free culture meets free market" created ambiguity about whether these systems were truly anti-capitalist or simply refined capitalism.
By the time I attended Money20/20 years later, Bitcoin had transformed from a countercultural force to a mainstream financial instrument embraced by banks. The pattern repeats with each new technology-Web3, DeFi-promising decentralization but often merely replacing one middleman with another. This mirrors earlier "mutualist" movements that sought to engineer markets for collective good through alternative currencies, blending socialist ideals with market mechanisms in ways that prefigured Silicon Valley's hybrid ideology.
Despite Bitcoin's radical promise of peer-to-peer exchange without banks or states, the "peers" in its network aren't individual people but nodes of computational power. New intermediaries quickly emerged, from wallets to clearing houses to mining operations. The "we" in Bitcoin became concentrated in those with mining power and social capital-predominantly white, male, and tech-savvy. While promising economic disruption, these systems often perpetuated business as usual in terms of power and inclusion.
What if we removed money's "store of value" function entirely? In hunter-gatherer societies, meat wasn't preserved but shared-"I store meat in the belly of my brother"-creating social bonds as insurance against future need.
Silvio Gesell proposed "demurrage"-a tax on hoarding money that would cause currency to "rot" like other commodities. His "Freigeld" would age over time: "Our goods rot, decay, break, rust; our tokens should do the same." Users would avoid the tax by spending or lending money, keeping it circulating. Unlike Bitcoin, which is deflationary and encourages hoarding (the infamous pizza bought with 10,000 bitcoins in 2010 is worth $500 million in 2022), Gesell saw money hoarding as creating unfair advantage.
What if we designed money to account for externalities-costs borne by individuals, environments, or communities not directly involved in transactions? Richard Douthwaite, a British economist who settled in Ireland, proposed energy-backed currency units that would function like railway bonds, financing community-operated energy infrastructure with promises to pay bearers in kWh once mature.
In 2013, Payu Harris, an Oglala Sioux Tribe member and amateur bitcoin miner, envisioned cryptocurrency as a path to indigenous sovereignty. His project MazaCoin aimed to free Native communities from dependence on federal funding by creating their own monetary system to build internal markets and protect indigenous resources. Despite initial media attention, MazaCoin faltered after an altcoin market downturn and exchange theft. The story echoes how colonial settlers misunderstood wampum shells, treating them as simple currency when they were actually part of a complex gift economy used for storytelling, bonding, and commemoration-then mass-producing them to "buy" land that was never meant to be sold.
第6章
Eat the Rich: Financial Rebellion and Its Contradictions
Day trading surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, driven by several factors: fee-free mobile trading apps like Robinhood (which profit from user data rather than fees), financial influencers dispensing investment advice across social media platforms, and economic desperation. Millennials and Gen Z, facing precarious employment and debt with few legitimate paths to financial security, began "YOLOing" rent money in hopes of winning enough for a down payment amid growing economic uncertainty.
The 2021 GameStop short squeeze emerged from Reddit's r/wallstreetbets forum, where users coordinated to buy and hold GameStop stock that hedge funds had heavily shorted. Led by "Roaring Kitty" (Keith Gill), retail investors drove GameStop shares from under $3 to $483, forcing hedge funds into a "short squeeze" until Robinhood controversially halted trading. This phenomenon revealed how memes could be hedged like commodities, with stock values driven by hype rather than fundamentals. Finance apps functioned as social media, and the space between gambling and investing narrowed dramatically.
Enric Duran, sometimes called "the Catalan Robin Hood," executed a different kind of financial exploit. Between 2005-2008, he defrauded Spanish banks of 492,000 through 68 small loans across 39 financial institutions, exploiting system loopholes and time lags in central registration. Unlike the individualistic GameStop traders, Duran redirected all funds to cooperative movements in Catalonia. His civil disobedience against banks coincided with the 2008 financial crisis, giving his actions new resonance as Spanish citizens shouldered private debt burdens while he refused repayment.
The Robin Hood Minor Asset Management Cooperative emerged in 2013 as a hedge fund for everyday workers, requiring only a 30 buy-in rather than the typical half-million. Using an algorithm called "The Parasite," it mimicked Wall Street's most successful trading funds. Half the profits returned to shareholders while the other half funded "commonfare"-social centers, basic income for community workers, and interest-free student loans.
Despite the revolutionary rhetoric, the project existed in an uncomfortable space between art, finance, and potential scam. This ambiguity eventually led to resignations, including managing director Jan Ritsema who criticized the group's "commercial approach" and alleged hiding of poor investment returns. Like the GameStop phenomenon, Robin Hood blurred the line between eating the rich and becoming them.
第7章
Trust in the Code: The Promise and Peril of Algorithmic Governance
Money fundamentally operates on trust-trust in government-issued tokens and trust that others will accept them. Modern cryptocurrency advocates believe code can replace this messy human trust. During Irish bank strikes in the 1960-70s, local businesses acted as banks, demonstrating community resilience but also revealing hidden dangers, as the author's father carried a gun when transporting cash. This challenges romanticized views of "moral economies," showing how community trust often operates alongside practical risk management.
Bitcoin emerged during a crisis of institutional trust, offering a "trustless" system requiring no faith in banks or other people-only in code. The whitepaper introduced two innovations: an electronic payment protocol and the blockchain, a shared, timestamped database serving as a public ledger. In 2014, Ethereum expanded blockchain capabilities with "smart contracts" that could execute various functions automatically, leading to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) for governance without human intermediaries.
The technological foundations of Bitcoin emerged from two influential 1990s mailing lists: Cypherpunk and Extropian. The Cypherpunk list, founded by Tim May, John Gilmore, and Eric Hughes in 1992, was an anarchist forum exploring cryptography as both a privacy tool and foundation for trustless cooperation. Meanwhile, the Extropian list focused on transhumanism-using technology to transcend human limitations through everything from cryonics to digital economies.
For Bitcoin's founders, government represented both coercive force and bureaucratic inefficiency. They envisioned replacing politics with technological solutions: "anarchy" not as chaos but as "rules without rulers." The Cypherpunks grappled with the problem of trust in a trustless world, finding a solution in blockchain technology. Leslie Lamport's Byzantine Generals Problem-how to reach consensus without established trust-was finally solved through blockchain's combination of public key encryption, blind signatures, and proof-of-work.
The Extropians dreamed of building sovereign communities free from terrestrial law-whether on platforms in the open sea or eventually in outer space. These "Free Oceana" designs featured floating barges and submerged pods, reminiscent of anarchist experiments like Warren's Utopia. Unlike colonization, these plans represented a retreat-not just from physical limitations but from the burden of care and responsibility for others. Their version of freedom meant having no kin, no social obligations.
Blockchains LLC's Painted Rock proposal envisioned a city of 36,000 residents in Nevada's desert featuring blockchain-managed utilities, citizen data, and governance. Despite initial support from Nevada's governor, the proposal faced resistance from local government concerned about the company's plan to build governance "from scratch" with minimal oversight.
Futarchy, or "Idea Futures," emerged from Extropian and Cypherpunk discussions as "decision markets applied to government." Economist Robin Hanson proposed this system where tokens function as both bets and votes, with market mechanisms determining policy implementation. In Hanson's view, traditional discourse suffers because people "massage evidence, suppress criticism, and just plain lie," while markets incentivize truth-telling since "you put your money where your mouth is."
The DAO hack of June 2016 became a defining moment for Ethereum's "code is law" philosophy. When the hacker drained $50 million worth of ether by exploiting a recursive calling vulnerability, the community faced a fundamental question: if code was truly law, then was the technically feasible exploit legitimate? After heated debates, the majority voted to hard fork the blockchain, effectively erasing the hack. The incident revealed that despite blockchain's promise to replace human governance with protocols, messy human politics remained essential.
第8章
Outside of Borders: Tokens and the Global Flow of Value
Ibrahim Mahama's art installation "Outside of Borders" from the 2015 Venice Biennale featured 300 repurposed jute sacks covering gallery walls. These sacks, originally used for transporting cocoa and coal in Ghana, represent colonial extraction and global trade routes. The rough cloth, patched with regional fabrics and bearing institutional markings, traces commodity movements across borders.
Tokens transform physical assets into liquid value that can circulate freely. Throughout history, tokens have represented claims on distant assets-from Mesopotamian grain tokens stored in clay balls to Yap islands' immovable rai stones whose ownership transferred through oral ledgers. Even when a massive rai stone sank to the ocean floor, it continued to function in transactions because everyone agreed it still existed somewhere. This mirrors modern financial systems: the Federal Reserve moves gold between governments without physically relocating it, just as art collectors trade works stored in tax-free ports.
Blockchain technology enables fine art to be fractionally owned and traded like company shares. Maecenas, described by its CFO Jerome Croisier as "like a Nasdaq for fine art," demonstrated this by tokenizing 31% of Andy Warhol's "14 Small Electric Chairs," valued at $5.6 million. Similarly, Signum bank auctioned 4,000 tokens representing shares in Picasso's "Fillette au beret" at 1,000 francs each. Unlike NFTs, these tokens represent legal ownership in physical assets-even if investors never see or touch their fraction of a painting stored in a distant free port.
After Brexit, LA dealer Stefan Simchowitz argued that art functions as "an alternative currency that hedges against inflation and currency depreciation." Art investment offers portfolio diversification since art markets don't always follow broader economic trends-evidenced by increased art sales during the pandemic despite gallery struggles. "High Net Worth Individuals" increasingly invest in "passion assets" like fine art, though often divorced from actual pleasure.
Free ports are high-security warehouses in offshore enclaves where wealthy collectors and art funds store valuable works tax-free. These extraterritorial spaces allow artworks to remain "in transit" indefinitely, avoiding duties while potentially serving as collateral for loans. Artist Hito Steyerl sees free ports as emblematic of art's transformation from public good to financial instrument, with the Geneva free port alone reportedly housing 1.2 million works, including 1,000 Picassos.
Tokens can represent shares, memberships, or codified representations of real-world objects. But what happens when physical assets are damaged or destroyed? During Bretton Woods (1944-1971), currencies were backed by gold, but since then, monetary tokens have been decoupled from real-world referents. In financialization, physical assets and their tokens begin to separate-value no longer resides in possessing the good but in possessing the token.
Unlike artists who publicly deny the market while profiting from it, Mahama reinvests his profits into community projects. In 2019, he acquired an abandoned grain silo in Ghana (formerly the "Gold Coast") to create the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, transforming it into exhibition space and educational facilities. Mahama calls this practice "resurrection"-embodying an anti-free port logic based on returning things to their rightful place.
第9章
A Celestial Cyberdimension: NFTs and Digital Ownership
The Ethereal Summit in New York (May 2018) featured a blockchain art auction hosted by Codex and RARE art platform. While most crypto-art NFTs sold for $3,000-$10,000, the final lot-a "Celestial Cyber Dimension" cryptokitty designed by Guile Gaspar-sold for $140,000. Unlike most NFTs, this piece included both a digital token and a custom hardware wallet containing the private key and a Tamagotchi-style animation.
The cryptokitty phenomenon combines gacha gaming, procedural art, and collectibles, using Ethereum blockchain to create digital scarcity. Players can run smart contracts to acquire, breed, and trade virtual cats with unique "cattributes" determined by genetic algorithms. By 2021, NFTs exploded alongside cryptocurrency investments, with Nyan Cat selling for $590,000 and Beeple's artwork fetching $69 million as the third-most-expensive artwork ever auctioned.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web with one-way hyperlinks, prioritizing openness and flexibility. Ironically, in 2021, he auctioned the source code as an NFT for $3.9 million. His contemporary Ted Nelson had developed Xanadu, an alternative system with two-way links and micropayments that would have enabled content creators to receive "nibs" when others linked to their work.
Before NFTs, digital art markets experimented with artificial scarcity through watermarks, controlled distribution, and display restrictions. Mt Gox began as a trading portal for virtual Magic cards, while 4chan users joked about "rare Pepe memes" locked in safes. Walter Benjamin's concept of "aura"-an artwork's unique presence in time and space-has been challenged both by digital reproduction and by Eastern philosophical traditions that see no fundamental distinction between originals and copies.
NFTs monetize not just art but social capital and exclusivity. Friends with Benefits tokenized "prestige, vibes, bragging rights, membership with the in-crowd"-people bought in hoping to belong and profit. Similarly, Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs functioned as both speculative assets and access tokens to exclusive communities. Created by Yuga Labs (valued at $4 billion), these deliberately crude ape cartoons embraced their anti-art status-the joke being that people would still "ape in" despite their obvious stupidity.
Most NFTs don't store actual image files on the blockchain due to size limitations-they're merely metadata pointers to files stored elsewhere on the internet. Buyers purchase "a 256-character string that contains a link" rather than true ownership, with no rights to prevent others from viewing or copying the associated image. Many NFT collectors discovered this reality when their purchased works disappeared or changed, leaving only a token pointing to nothing.
The "Disaster Girl" meme-showing a four-year-old Zoe Roth smiling as a building burns behind her-sold as an NFT for $485,000 in 2021, allowing Roth to pay off her student debt. This exemplifies how NFTs appeal to financially precarious millennials and Gen Z who, facing unstable employment, climate crisis, and crushing debt, see speculative digital assets as their only shot at financial security. However, despite headline-grabbing sales, the median NFT sold for only about $100 at the market's peak-often less than the "gas fees" required to mint and sell them.
第10章
"When You Live in a Shithole, There's Always the Metaverse"
Vadim joins a Zoom call from his parents' house in Waterford, Ireland, wearing a black hooded sweatshirt with "more-dunkey" printed on it. His bedroom wall displays colorful drawings, with shelves of collectible figurines-Pucky Babies and Sonny Angels-that he eagerly shows off. For Vadim, the thrill lies in the gamble of blind boxes, the uncertainty of what he might get. Unlike financial speculators, Vadim values his digital items for their sentimental worth and prestige within gaming communities, not their potential resale value.
Play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity transform gaming into work, where players gather NFT creatures to earn tradeable tokens. As entry costs soared to $1,500, a feudal system emerged with "managers" renting assets to "scholars" who work for a percentage cut. This continues a long tradition of virtual economies-from early MUDs to massive MMOs like Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft, where virtual goods worth over $100 billion annually exist as mere "rows in a spreadsheet" controlled by game developers.
Thirteen-year-old Will plays games like Fortnite where "no-skins" players (those who don't invest in cosmetic upgrades) are looked down upon. Though officially "cosmetic only," these digital items serve crucial social functions-Will saved for a virtual neck tattoo to prevent experienced players from targeting him as an easy kill. Like medieval jetons royaux, rare skins and emotes function as status symbols that signal belonging and experience.
Decentraland offers virtual land parcels as NFTs for an average of $13,000 each, with 90,000 plots available denominated in MANA cryptocurrency. Most stand empty-"unreal estate"-though Sotheby's has built a virtual gallery, Atari constructed a retro gaming casino, and law firms prepare to arbitrate future property disputes. The author wanders through this digital space, noting its resemblance to Las Vegas-"brilliantly clear sky, glaring stonework, the sense of being in a giant, never-ending outdoor mall."
The metaverse isn't new-Second Life pioneered virtual economies in 2003 with its Linden dollars exchangeable for US dollars. Users built homes, businesses, and careers as designers and property developers. But this freedom brought regulatory challenges when gambling and banking emerged within the platform. Second Life was revolutionary in granting intellectual property rights to creators, unlike other games where companies claimed ownership of all user-created content.
Today, Meta (formerly Facebook) pushes its vision of the metaverse through Horizon Worlds and Oculus headsets, with marketing that suggests virtual reality as escape from a disappointing physical world. The "phygital" economy is booming-Adidas made $22 million in hours selling digital clothing, while Gucci's virtual bags sometimes cost more than physical ones.
Despite promises of interoperability between virtual worlds, the current metaverse consists of siloed islands where assets can't transfer between platforms. Some proponents hope the metaverse might eventually benefit the environment by shifting consumption from physical to virtual goods, especially as climate change threatens to create "deadly heat zones." But this optimism ignores the environmental impact of virtual worlds themselves-in 2006, the average Second Life avatar consumed more electricity than the average Brazilian, while data centers now surpass air traffic in carbon emissions.
By late 2022, Meta's metaverse vision was already faltering, with 11,000 layoffs and internal memos begging employees to "fall in love with Horizon Worlds." Far from being an escape from reality, the metaverse increasingly resembles just another "shithole"-perhaps revealing that no amount of technological innovation can truly separate us from the material conditions of our existence.
