NFTs Are Digital Garbage — The Emperor’s Virtual Clothes

Who’s gonna tell everyone that 99% of NFTs are a waste of time?

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are everywhere. It’s nearly impossible to scroll through Facebook, Twitter or Medium without coming across a new blog post or video about all the wild ways that creators can use NFTs to fundamentally revolutionize the world of art.

For the most part, NFTs are being sold as an incredible new way for content creators to monetize their work. International headlines depict the NFT landscape as being a daring frontier of content creation, with artists like Beeple selling an NFT for $69 million or a picture of a rock going for $1.3 million.

Armies of tech writers and crypto enthusiasts are rushing to assert that NFTs are worth their weight in gold. Eugene Wei, a former product leader at Amazon & Hulu penned a whopping 20,000 word essay titled Status as a Service that presents NFTs as the ultimate combination of social capital, entertainment, and utility.

To simplify Wei’s main argument into a single sentence: NFTs are valuable because we are “status seeking monkeys” that are constantly searching for ways to maximize our social capital — NFTs allow us to display an immutably unique token of said social capital all while playing into our innate…