| Hey, it's Mark. Name a moment in recent history that still resonates with you. Odds are there will be an NFT for that, if there isn't one already. A new venture will turn historic events into digital (and sometimes physical) memorabilia. The startup, Wenew, is from the founder of the influential music publication Pitchfork and Mike Winkelmann, the most famous digital artist more commonly known as Beeple. Wenew's stock-in-trade will be non-fungible tokens, a software format that uses a similar technique as Bitcoin to guarantee the authenticity of a file. Their first NFT will capture Andy Murray's Wimbledon-winning tennis run in 2013. Some legitimate artists have used NFTs in ways that could be reasonably construed as art. Beeple is one of them. A collection of his art sold in March for $69.3 million, the world's most-expensive NFT auction. Largely, though, NFTs have become machinery for commercializing nostalgia. Twitter Inc. co-founder Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet for $2.9 million. Nyan Cat, a decade-old internet meme, went for $590,000. Last week, Mattel Inc. said it was designing a set of digital Hot Wheels cars to auction as NFTs, and CNN will use the format to sell clips of historic news broadcasts. Nostalgia is part of the human condition, and the instinct to monetize it is a common byproduct. A savvy collector could make a career out of reselling Barbies or mint condition Babe Ruth cards. And enterprising brands have long sought to manufacture simulacrums of collector items in the form of Beanie Babies or Three's Company trading cards. But over the last couple of decades, the nostalgia business has expanded into an economy of its own. Sony Group Corp.'s Spider-Man movie in 2002, starring Tobey MaGuire, was perhaps the first thread in an ever-expanding web of blockbuster comic book-inspired franchises, film sequels and remakes that prey on people's memories of their childhoods. It seems like every indie rock band is making an '80s-themed album. Wall Street is still trying to wrap its head around the resurgence of dusty retail stocks like AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. and GameStop Corp. And at last week's video game mega-event, E3, the most-hyped games were new or reimagined entries in decades-old franchises, including Advance Wars, Halo, Metroid and the Legend of Zelda. It takes a long time to remake a movie or game, though. NFTs facilitate a sort of fast-nostalgia business model. Most of the source material is already digitized, and it's only a matter of converting the file into an NFT, announcing an auction and, to sweeten the offer, sometimes deleting the original from the web. The modern John Ritter trading card is CryptoCrisp "flavored" Pringles. Don't have a soft spot for cylindrical potato chip containers? You could also get NFTs from Bratz, Charmin, Pizza Hut or Taco Bell. The nostalgia economy is flourishing thanks to some strange effects in the real, and real-ish, economies. Millennials, now reaching the golden years of nostalgia, are spending more today than before the pandemic, and a lot of that money is going to things (both real and virtual). They have disposable income—maybe not enough to afford a house but certainly enough to amass a small fortune in Pokémon cards. And the Napster generation is the first with a soft spot for digital trinkets. In the real-ish economy, cryptocurrencies have created a mass of wealth for those who bought in early, many of whom happen to be millennials. The crypto-rich, who go by names like Flying Falcon and Metakovan, drive up the prices of NFTs using quasi-money to buy quasi-art. These are also the headline-making deals that push NFTs deeper into the mainstream and onto the PowerPoints presented to management at Mattel. A passage from the 2015 book "Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism," written when NFTs were essentially just an idea at a hackathon, succinctly captures the current moment: "In retrospect, all of this is very strange." —Mark Milian | 
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