Postmodernism and NFTS

The Transformation of Ownership

In his forward-looking book The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard makes a claim that as technology proliferates under capitalism, a transformation occurs to knowledge itself. Since under capitalism, all things that are not productive are seen as useless or threatening, if something doesn’t have an exchange-value it becomes outmoded. If something isn’t making you money or causing innovation, then what purpose can it serve? Art can’t simply be beautiful expressions of humanity, it now has to be a collector's item that accrues interest so that people make money off the “investment” of owning a painting. Likewise, knowledge itself is transformed by the capitalist system to become information through technology. He predicted that as computers become increasingly mainstream, anything that is not transformable to a computer will be trimmed off. In this process knowledge will be changed from something that is useful in of itself to a commodity. We can see this as the transformation of knowledge into information.

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its “use-value” (The Postmodern Condition, p. 4–5).

Lyotard predicts 3 things that occur when knowledge is transformed into information. First, he says that knowledge will no longer be transferred from one mind to another. Historically, the way you learned information is by being trained by someone who knows the information already. In the age of technology, I can simply look things up independent of this training process. In effect, the information becomes decontextualized as simply another thing to know. Second, he predicts that nation-states will fight over information similar to how they historically fought over land and raw resources. In combination with this, he says the markets will treat information as initial conditions for a decision-making algorithm. Finally, he predicts that information will further perpetuate the innovation cycle that exists under capitalism. In the past, things were innovative to improve people’s material condition, but now innovation exists only for the sake of further innovation. The first iPhone was innovative, but now with iPhone 13 not much has changed. The only reason the system perpetuates this pseudo-innovation is to exploit as much capital as it can. These three transformations occur so that the capitalist system makes more money. Knowledge is transformed under technological capitalism as a means of performance enhancement to sell more product for higher profit.

It was more the desire for wealth than the desire for knowledge that initially forced upon technology the imperative of performance improvement and product realization. The “organic” connection between technology and profit proceeded its union with science. Technology became important to contemporary knowledge only through the mediation of a generalized spirit of performativity (The Postmodern Condition, p. 45).

But what does any of this have to do with NFTs? From Lyotard we can get a general hermeneutic to view transformation of something under technological capitalism. The hermeneutic will follow this general outline:

1. The thing will be changed from being an end in itself to a means for generating capital.
2. The thing will be decontextualized and removed from its previous method of transfer to its minimal form.
3. The thing will become a commodity that nation-states and multinational companies seek to exploit.
4. The thing will be perpetuated for the sake of being perpetuated.
5. The whole process can be seen as one big “get rich” scheme.

So what is the thing that is being transformed under technological capitalism? The first thing you may suspect would be digital art. It is true that NFTs began as a way for artists to copyright their digital work and now are seen as a quick way to make a few bucks. However, I believe the effect is deeper than that. When you consider what makes an NFT valuable, it is not the piece associated with the token, it is the token itself. If there was no token, then the digital media would be translatable into other media. The token itself makes the art piece unique and marketable. So the thing of value isn’t the art, it’s the ownership of the token. We can see then that ownership is the primary target here. We can follow the hermeneutic to see how technological capitalism is beginning to transform what “ownership” is through the lens of NFTs.

1. Ownership no longer exists for its own purposes, but for the means of generating capital. This is actually not as controversial as one would believe. The underlying theory in capitalism is that you sell that which you own. However, the difference between owning a traditional art piece as opposed to an NFT isn’t the certification of legitimacy ensuring resale value; the difference is that the ownership of NFTs is exclusively for the purpose of generating capital. There is no utility in owning NFTs. Their primary function isn’t to be owned and used, it’s to be resold. (There is also an interesting discussion about how subscription services delegitimize the concept of permanent ownership that is out of the scope of this conversation).
2. Ownership has been decontextualized and removed from its previous method of transfer to its minimal form. Ownership used to mean that you purchase an item for the purpose of every day utility. The value of the item would be associated with its production cost and utility. This is being transformed as revealed by the generation of NFTs. Many NFTs are clearly programmatically generated by some algorithm that produces the item and a blockchain that evaluates these as being worth unreasonable amounts of money. There is no context to determine the value of owning these items and there is no one creating these items. Ownership has no context for what is being owned, and it is being transferred from one algorithm to another. Nothing is actually happening.
3. Obviously wherever power and capital are possible, nations and companies jump on the opportunity. Just like the colonialist powers rushed to claim as much new land as possible, companies are running to grab as many NFTs as they can. Ownership here is not so much transformed, but exposed to be what it always has been. The only reason companies want to own anything is for pure capital gain.
4. Ownership as commodity is being perpetuated by the cyclical NFT system. Because things like BoredApes have high market caps driven by customer appeal and can be easily programmatically created, as long as the cycle gains enough traction it can perpetuate itself. Things don’t truly change for the purpose of human flourishing, they travel in circles to generate more capital. Ownership for the sake of improving something about your life is transformed into ownership for the sake of profit.
5. Ownership is now becoming about how much you can make off the item rather than owning the object. NFTs are a get rich quick scheme if any have ever existed. The reason you buy something isn’t to own it, it’s to flip it.

So is this a problem? If it is, can we do anything about it? I think it is quite problematic that we are no longer thinking about things as items useful for improving your life, but rather status symbols designed to be flipped. Obviously this issue is much deeper than NFTs, they are just the zeitgeist currently. Status symbols for the purpose of flipping have been around for much longer. The more capitalism alienates humanity from everything around us so that we become pure consumers that serve the system, the more hours we spend working so that we can buy unnecessary items, the less human we become. The pursuit of money for the sake of having money is evil and perpetuates suffering in this world.

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains (1 Timothy 6:10).

Capitalism is at base a system designed to dehumanize people into piggy banks waiting to be exploited. People are suffering everywhere, and rather than using our vast resources to alleviate the material conditions of the oppressed, we are being trapped in a cyclical process of alienation.

I don’t know if there is a solution. Lyotard’s discussion of narrative knowledge later in the book is honestly not that motivating. I don’t see it as anyone’s salvation. The function of technological capitalism is to hyper-accelerate this process outside the scope of human intervention. There would have to be large-scale shift in culture away from consumerism at minimum. People will have to realize the absurdity of ownership as commodity and then decide to reject the current paradigm. Seems very unlikely. With the integration of NFTs into Meta spaces, it seems to me that ownership as commodity (and the delegitimization of ownership through subscription models), it seems that only divine intervention can stop things.

Also, yes I checked, and it does exist: Lyotard NFTs.