'for the record . . . I don't want to return to normal as it was . . . NORMAL was broken . . . I want something better . . . can we build it please?' - mervyn syna.
what would this look like? horsemouth does not know (that would be up to you).
he suspects something like communise the housing. establish widely distributed warehouses where people can go and get whatever commodities they want. establish a rota to do the street cleaning. start growing food. he then remarked to a friend (myk Z) that they had been early adopters of the notion of communising the housing and so should be used to it.
in other conversations (well typed exchanges on facebook) another friend (chloe) became interested in the notion of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in art.
'anyone else finding NFT art a really depressing concept? instead of looking for ways to take 'payment' for art outside the capitalist matrix, let's employ a really dirty way to get filthy rich.'
'...this was my reaction to just the one article I’ve read in Time. It’s almost like as we are on the brink of stepping outside of the capitalist matrix here come the capitalists to hyper monetise the up till now free creative digital arena.'
horsemouth mentioned that his friend ben had been writing about 'this sort of thing' for a while. high prices for art (as an item to store looted value in) have been around for a long time but, as chloe noted when an NFTed digital work of art had just sold for $60 million 'I knew we were in trouble.'
horsemouth has not thought about such things for a while (hey he's a lazy old mule).
in way NFTs function as a unique, un-manipulatable way of establishing provenance and ownership of digital art items (that were previously easily duplicatable and thus effectively free). but they also function as an advert for blockchain technology as well, providing the 'halo effect' of art and creativity on a damaging resource hungry technology. artists want to get paid, they want to make their art, they need to eat and they want the validation that only money can bring.
'there’s a real split at the moment,' says chloe, 'between those genuinely looking to an alternative way and those getting sucked in by the supremacist capitalist bull crap of ‘you should have this because you deserve it’. The environmental impact alone should be putting people off when you consider how much we all know about how fucked we are as a species, but no ‘get rich quick’ wins every time.'
ben makes a critique of beller.
ok something has come up (work meeting). horsemouth will return to this later when he's read the beller article properly.
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hmm 'interesting' work meeting.
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