Finding meaning through...NFTs

Some days, I admit to feeling a “huh?” feeling when confronted with the latest NFT news item. Yesterday, it was the 14-year old who made $1M+ selling NFTs of variations of a cartoon Beluga whale - Belugies.?

Belugies.

I imagine my bewilderment is something akin to what an ol’ Chinese villager must have felt in 780 AD when confronted with a piece of paper that the bearer insisted had value, just because somewhere in a far-away storage unit, there was a mound of coins and items of value. “Really, this is legit. Sure we’re calling it flying money because it, literally, would fly if I let go. But legit, really”, she said. “Huh? Whatever,” he mumbled as he folded up his silks and marched off, looking for someone with something more tangible, like a small brass coin, or a chicken.

Not convinced about the symbolic nature of value? How do you think Cornbread, the first graffiti artist or tagger, feels about Banksy’s $25M shredded artwork?

And don’t make me break out the Cowry shells. I’d love to chat with an economic anthropologist (yes, that’s a real thing) to understand how the 15th century citizen distinguished between her commodity shells, her ornament shells and her investment-funding shells.

What I’m getting to is that historically, symbols have had meaning because we, and the communities we lived in, gave them meaning. I don’t want to get any radicals going after me for being radical…but a cryptocat is pretty much the same as xyz (imagine your most treasured religious symbol here - I’m thinking of the Hindu “Om”.) Gasp. Yes, these symbols were valuable because these were the communities that gave us a sense of meaning, or value. The bronze coins, the cowry shells, the hordes of cattle - sure they were concrete and could be held, but they had symbolic value because the community recognized their value as being much more than their true intrinsic worth.

I like NFTs that carry real information on them - that help make the connection between the “old” more “concrete” world, and the “new” ethereal world. When you take a 100 pages of deed data and turn it into a symbolic unique unit of ownership, you’ve made my life easier. I do need to hold on to that symbolic unique unit of ownership (and NFT, if you will), and it hopefully increases in value because of the underlying asset as well as the value it symbolizes becomes more scarce.?

So, you clearer now? No? Happy to chat!!