I've been honestly compelled to write about my thoughts on the whole NFT craze, the NFTbro community, and why I think NFTs are honestly just a shitty thing all together. So before I get into the nitty gritty of some of my experiences and thoughts I think this one news article is worth sharing that I think will make a lot of people smile here: Wikipedia Editors decide that NFTs won't be classified as art.

This is a sentiment that personally I agree with. But I think that there's also more to how I feel about the whole predicament with NFTs as a whole, between here and what I've discussed with a few people on here, through friends, and elsewhere on the internet I can tell you why I won't get into them.

The thing is, I considered getting into them if I'm being truthful. The only thing I ever did was make an Opensea account to see what the craze was about but when I saw the uploading page, I stopped myself and realized that I had no fucking clue what I was getting into. So I did some research on what these things were actually about and well, there was more going against them than there were for them. I chose not to do anything with it needless to say I abandoned that said account after not finding anyway to delete it and removing any association it had with me, changing the password to something that I would never be able to remember and never accessed it again.

Why I did consider them is because I'm always looking for ways to expand my platforms for art, but when I really dived into what they were about and how you had to put value onto whatever it was you were uploading using crypto I thought to myself that something wasn't right with the whole thing. Surely enough, as I was going through what they were about I stumbled across this one video by Cat Graffam explaining why NFTs are a bad thing. If you don't have the time to watch the video, it pretty much is a good summary to how NFTs fall into that category of rich people putting value on something as absurd as a banana being taped onto a wall, a very common problem in the realm of fine arts, but its more naked than that. That video led to my overall decision to have no involvement with them and this was before I became well aware of Keeanu Reeve's stance.

In my mind, making an account in of itself I feel like was a dirty little sin to even go that far, I never uploaded anything personally nor will I have any intent to, but in hindsight I was close to falling into a rabbit hole. But I digress that I wasn't totally out of that same pit yet because of how many people kept messaging me over instagram to make NFT's for them, leading me to litterally put a disclaimer on my instagram account telling people I won't get involved with them.

Here and there I also saw a few NFT projects surfacing, one time I recall on the PixelJoint discord that someone brought up a project where basically someone was making an NFT based pokemon game and emailing people to make art for him based on old memes. I actually commented on the project saying that this was a lawsuit waiting to happen and it led to a debate between a creator who was claiming that the lawsuit would never come to fruition which, if you know how nintendo reacted to Super Maria Sisters when that came out they went down hard on them. Said creator also tried to argue with me that comedy hinges on how people react, which is only a half truth because good comedy should at least make you think about why you are laughing at a joke to begin with. I don't really know if he decided to take the last say after I told him that his sense of humor sucked, but I walked away not really giving a shit because I realized he had no clue what the fuck he was going on about.

The ironic thing is, in a decision that I never expected leading me to take sides with the Big-N in a legal matter Nintendo actually went after a NFT project with a cease and desist order. Which pretty much throws that one guy's argument out of the water about how an NFT project could never get touched by lawyers. But... That's the thing that struck me the most. NFTBros genuinely have no clue what they are talking about or why they are supporting NFTs to begin with. They have no grasp on reality to a point where it's a highly absurd.

I've seen more arguments that made more sense opposing them, most NFTbros that I actually debated with try to justify their support for them by attempting to actually use the very arguments that are against them. One time I even pointed out to an NFTbro that eventually the bubble was going to pop on the whole thing and then pointed out how that most people don't even know where that money was going to. He had more faith that he was going to be rich from it even when the bubble did pop which I found ironic because he was using a decentralized currency and putting his faith in that more than anything else.

So, where am I going with this story? Why would I share my experiences concerning the whole thing itself and the people I discussed with?

In short, the reason why I'm against NFTs is because you're not owning the product you obtain as much as you are the data that coincides with it. No one who supports NFTs knows what they are getting into with that and it's where the line between reality and absurdity becomes so clear where if you know someone supports them, they don't know what they believe in. Think of it like a combination of an Ed Edd n' Eddy like scam, a pyramid scheme, and a cult mindset put into a blender and then you get this mad internet culture that acts like these things are going to be the next big thing. (They aren't)

I would like to make clear that I'm not against Cryptocurrency in of itself. That is something I'm more or less neutral on. However, NFTs are an outright scam because you're basically buying code that tells you that you bought an image. Well, whoop de do. You got a string of code and that's all you really own out of it when everyone else can just copy and paste an image or save an mp3 file from it.

Put aside the environmental concerns more than anything else and look at it from a business perspective. Ask yourself if this is a practical way to profit from your skill set as an artist more than anything else? That's the major question you should be asking yourself more than anything else because if you are investing in Crypto and/or Art, the answer you might find yourself getting is "no". And personally I feel that a couple years down the line both the Crypto world and the Art world can go in better directions than what we are seeing with these things.

I say this as a digital artist more so than anything else I think for most of us on here we can all agree that NFT's are not the only way to prove ownership over digital art. NFTbros seriously believe that it is. But we all know that's bullshit because if you've been doing art commissions for years on end and know how to sign your work off, and have the actual reciepts and written documents to prove who actually owns the piece, then you know who made it and who it belongs to. I can only beg those who know this to urge people to not get into these things for those who don't know what an NFT is or why it's more of a risk to get into them with zero to no benefits you will reap from them.

NFTs are not art. They lack the necessary merit and integrity to even be called as such. Even if art is subjective it needs to have those two things in order for it to be art and if you take the time to look at a genuine piece of work that has any soul into it, it can take you into it's own world. Without those two things it's just a superficial husk.