The big thing If you run in some of the techier tech circles or religiously read techcrunch dot com, it’s likely you have seen an awful lot about NFTs this week. If you truly want to know what they are, there are plenty of good primers on them across the web that popped up in the past few days. My colleague Megan wrote a good one, but the gist is that these thing change what it means for something to “exist” online. Creators can send out official copies of a digital creation that they’ve minted on the blockchain and the fact that they’re officially recognized them bestows a different value on them than files — that can be copied willy nilly — otherwise would. In the past month, hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed into non-fungible tokens across a variety of platforms. Folks in the tech community spent the week theorizing how NFTs could completely upend creator networks and shift artists away from platforms like Spotify and towards NFT-centric marketplaces that value their work in a way that benefits the creator more directly. Do you need to pay a lot of attention to this tech right now? Probably not yet, but there certainly seems to be a big future for the tech down the road. Here’s an interesting bit from Megan’s story that touches on the artistic impact of NFTs: Ameer Carter, an artist that is also known as Sirsu, got into NFTs last summer thanks to a friend, he told TechCrunch. Pretty much immediately, he said, he realized the transformative nature of the technology. "We literally have creative immortality," he told me he realized at the time. But the art world has historically been inhospitable to Black folks and people of color, and especially in the world of NFTs, Carter said. The traditional art scene, Carter said, is elitist. And while Carter himself is a classically trained artist, he hasn't been able to make his way into the traditional art world, he said. "And it's not because of lack of trying," he said. Carter said he's had a number of conversations with art curators who all love his work, but they've told him it's not "something that they could build a whole curriculum around and intellectualize," he said. What NFTs do is enable artists like Carter to create and share their art in a way that hadn't previously been afforded to them. The most salient bit is that the blockchain’s effects are indeed transformative and platforms building on this opportunity probably going to be huge (eventually), but the tech is also likely going to get pretty watered down over the next few months and years and turn into something that’s more user-friendly — something that modern day blockchain acolytes will probably loathe. Decentralized networks are fundamentally radical, likely far too radical for internet users that have grown coddled by the protections of central platform governance and the conveniences they afford. I listened to a Clubhouse chat this week where the speakers waxed on decentralized networked states that could grow to be recognized by the UN. That’s pretty radical. What we’re seeing today might be a step vaguely in that direction, but that’s not anywhere we’re headed in the short-term. Expect to see the blockchain onramp get simpler, more boring and less confusing as it becomes a part of the websites and apps you enjoy. It likely won’t replace everything, but there’s good reason to think it could still be ubiquitous, one day. | 
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