In End-Stage Capitalism, NFT Owns You!

I.

Other than money, art is the only phenomenon in modern capitalist society whose use value is a product of collective imagination. This is a tension we can – and should – exploit. Money’s imagined value lashes us to a life of doldrum, of giving away the bulk of our time, stressing our bodies into ruin and boring our minds into sludge. All in the futile hope that if we do it intensely enough, we will achieve some transcendent level of freedom. It is a fool’s errand. That freedom is illusory, as the breakdowns and misery of so many celebrities show – not that most of us will ever know their level of wealth.

II.

Art, at least in the abstract, is a negation of this freedom-through-bondage. When we create, unfettered from regard for accumulation, our bodies and minds both enter a state of freedom that is impossible and unacceptable to capital. For the “work” we put into art allows us, in however limited a capacity, to transform the world around us. This transformation happens on terms that are organically ours, as opposed to the terms of a boss or employer or whomever arrogates themselves to “own.” Not work as employment; work as ontological vocation.

This is in some ways an expression of the historic separation that class society (in general) and capitalism (in particular) has achieved between the worker and their labor. Whereas for most of human history – most notably in conditions of primitive communism – we applied the full range of our creativity to the task before us out of necessity and for sake of survival, capitalism has – as Marx famously put it – robbed labor of its charm. When we work “at work,” we labor in mindless tasks to make someone else rich. When we work on art – writing a story, painting a picture, composing a song – we labor for our own enjoyment and enrichment.

III.

These dichotomies, between art and work, liberated labor and wage-enslaved, are rarely so cut-and-dry. And complications are only increased by the marketization of art. “Conceptual” experiments that sought to explode the inequities and commodification of “the art world” fifty years ago (frequently allied with some form of communist, feminist, or anarchist worldview) have today been successfully commodified themselves. Ask any record label executive or Big Five publisher and they will likely spin a convincing yarn about their love for human creativity and the subversive, but inevitably with an eye toward getting them into as wide a market as possible and thus sterilizing them of the subversion that made these gestures so magnetic to begin with. Nonetheless, a tension remains. If it did not then the suits wouldn’t go to such lengths to dress themselves in something other than a suit.

IV.

The NFT is the latest attempt to resolve the contradiction between art and capital, and decidedly in capital’s favor. This isn’t exactly news. Most of us can feel it in our bones even if we don’t have the language to articulate it. The icy ache of dystopia that we’ve learned to live with over the past several years intensified when we learned what a “non-fungible token” was. The last spark of hope that might have remained of the internet’s radical democratic potentials was extinguished, and we knew that the wonder of art and human creativity was about to dim significantly. Those who say otherwise should be viewed with suspicion and disdain. By dint of their existence, they deserve a punch in the throat.  

V.

Say what you will about the bourgeoisies of 16th and 17th century Europe, at least they had something to physically show for their opulence. As John Berger argued in his Ways of Seeing, the boom in oil painting and portraits coincided with the rise in mercantile capitalism for a reason. The nouveau riche who had made their fortunes through pillaging (and/or selling what had been pillaged) were able to flaunt their wealth by commissioning master oil painters to capture it. The inclusion of their vast estates, their magnificent rooms, their many possessions, was eminently intentional.

Normally these works hung in their homes, and later, stately art museums. To experience them, to be pulled into the world and aura intended by artist and patron, one had to physically go to where the painting hung. The age of mechanical reproduction exploded this kind of imaginative hoarding. Photography allowed us to see a painting in a different place from where it was hung. Now, with NFTs, the work of art hangs literally nowhere. Yet these online artworks are fast outstripping the projected monetary value of the entire traditional art market. Art’s auratic quality, described by Walter Benjamin as half-replaced by the potential democracy of “artistic production for all,” is once again replaced by the centrality not of who makes but who owns.

VI.

The 5000 some-odd scribblings and graphic designs of Beeple sold for $69 million. The juvenile trollishness of these images doesn’t matter, nor does their complete lack of artistic merit or their shallow pretense of transgression. What matters is that someone bought them; and for an amount of money most of us cannot fathom. The profound talents and passions that informed classical oil painting, the radical and sometimes revelatory visions of modernism, the live hope that our creativity and labor (through art or otherwise) might transform the world around us; these are diminished to a degree that they may as well be absent. And finally, the notion that the price of art has anything to do with its ability to be truly great is admitted as a lie. There is no utility – spiritual or otherwise – at play in the trillions of dollars embodied in NFTs and cryptocurrency. Rather it is the hope that someone, anyone, will always be prepared to pay more than you did for your Bitcoin, your Ethereum, your fucking Dogecoin. Once again, the principle of ownership is what keeps everything afloat.

VII.

This is not just to bash NFTs or cryptocurrency (deserved though that is). Nor is it to focus exclusively on “art as art” or “art as the market deems it.” It is not just what the rise of NFT and crypto do to art, but what they represent in the ongoing degradation of the labor process. Several decades ago, financialization was lauded as a way out of the post-war bust, boosting profitability through deregulation and unhinging it from the tyranny of labor unions. It established a kind of real/unreal buffer, a fiction between labor and capital, a layer of mediation that allowed the rich to get richer at a rate that could outstrip labor’s real productivity at a rate never seen before. In other words, an amplification and acceleration of the rate of exploitation.

At root there still remained the physical work, the commodities manufactured and services performed. But they were now more atomized, more propounded by speculation that dwarfed their mere exchange value. Combined with basic wage stagnation, it has led to a level of global wealth inequality that is utterly unprecedented.

Forty years ago, Fredric Jameson wrote that financialization was in lockstep with the “postmodern moment.” The narrative uncoupling of labor from capital was one of many obfuscations that led to the breakdown of grand narratives. And yet, as Jameson insisted, this apparent absence of grand narrative ultimately served to keep safe very real power structures. NFTs and cryptocurrencies promise the same. There will never not be some form of labor at the root of value, but as in the crypto world value is increasingly equated with ownership or potential ownership, the downward pressures on human labor increase.

VIII.

This extreme pressure is easily understood looking at the rise of microwork. We are, by now, familiar with the ways in which algorithms have insinuated themselves into work. Anyone who has spent any amount of time driving rideshare or delivering food grasps the infuriating irrationality of it all. At the heart of the algorithm – including many used in cryptocurrency – is the microworker. Typically residing in a developing nation, these are people who literally train algorithm and artificial intelligence. Their work is tedious and unstable, normally jumping from short contract to short contract and paid by the task rather than the hour. Wage theft is rampant.

Normally, the microworker has little to no knowledge of what exactly they are helping train the algorithm for. It could be anything from an app that shows you cute cats to a surveillance drone to a cryptocurrency being used to buy an NFT of Elvis dying on the toilet. But for the microworker, their poorly paid task is down to point, click, repeat. The microworker has no contact with other microworkers, and it is difficult to conceive how they might organize collectively. According to Phil Jones, author of Work Without the Worker, they are “disempowered to a degree previously unseen in capitalist history.” And it is true. There is the most minimal amount of autonomy in what they do. They are almost entirely invisibilized behind the mythos of enchanted determinism. And yet they are literally designing our future.

IX.

Cryptocurrencies’ extreme volatility makes them a poor substitute for a social safety net. But here we are. Millions buy into crypto in the hopes of a ticket out of an increasingly precarious existence. With little of actual value keeping crypto solvent – merely astronomical levels of speculation – it is just a matter of time until this bubble bursts like every other in capitalism. And with that, another plank is added to the already robust and thriving fool’s populism of fascism. As Hamilton Nolan writes in a recent In These Times article:

The crypto-evangelist population skews heavily towards a sort of New Age libertarian, anti-government right wing-ism, and when they see their financial dreams evaporate, they will likely set their sights for revenge on the things they already despise. The broad effect will lead to a large number of newly angry, bitter, disillusioned, hopeless people who are too steeped in the culture wars to turn towards working class solidarity, and instead turn towards hate.

The frenetic, schizoid, mutually parasitic relationship between finance capital and fascism of a hundred years ago has found its 21st century equivalent.

X.

And then there is the ecological impact of NFTs and cryptocurrencies. This has already been given ample space elsewhere. Here it only bears mentioning that the widening of the gap between labor and profit mirrors the further widening of what Marx identified and John Bellamy Foster elaborated as the metabolic rift. And as the planet’s surface becomes progressively uninhabitable, it is the far-right that has been reaping the reward, insisting that scarce resources be reserved for the white and heteronormative. These are, as we have seen throughout the pandemic, a contingent of people who have no bones putting the Black, brown and poor to work for them even in the most dangerous conditions. A further knot in the entanglement between crypto and fascism.

XI.

In their 2015 book Inventing the Future, Srnicek and Williams suggest that there may be a potential in cryptocurrency and blockchain for something radically democratic, even liberatory. It is easy to sniff at now given the trajectory of the past seven years, but it is also worth pondering. They express an idea that should be – though too often isn’t – key to any serious modernist understand of liberation. The idea that technology, itself the product of collaborative human labor, can also be used to free us from labor, creating the conditions for the human imagination to flourish, to innovate and find still new ways to make life more relaxing, fulfilling, and transcendent.

With NFTs, the opposite is the case. Instead of the spiral traveling upward into a greater and ever more expansive realm of human freedom, the circle turns inward, ouroboros-like, cannibalizing itself. The non-existence of what is bought, the utter irrelevance of use value or artistic quality to price, the phantasmagorical transformation of labor into literally nothing but ownership itself, is a new stage in how capital lords technology over the human condition. The imagined value of money hems in the value and possibility of labor, and with it, human creativity.

XII.

At the 2021 Art Basel art fair in Miami Beach, at an exhibition in the swanky Sagamore Hotel, a brick from Frida Kahlo’s famed Casa Roja sat on display. The brick was up for sale... as an NFT. So reads the Kahlo estate’s website: “The physical brick and its NFT connect the foundation of the red house in the physical world with the metaverse in the digital world.” What exactly this means is difficult to parse, but what Kahlo’s family have told us is that they are aiming to “build” a version of Casa Roja for the Metaverse. Again, according to the website, the virtual house will serve as “an inclusive space where we can all celebrate the life of Frida Kahlo.”

No word on how much admission to this virtual “inclusive space” will be. And there will be a price of admission, even if the virtual space is advertised as free and open to the public. A simulation of artistic experience, no matter what its defenders might say, cannot deliver the same kind of creative or spiritual nourishment as previous modes of experience. The aura described be Benjamin is long gone, and the democratic potential of electronic reproduction stymied by the overdetermination of ownership. We cannot touch, feel, smell, or otherwise truly imbibe the place and atmosphere that shaped Kahlo’s visions. And when we cannot actually feel, touch, or experience, we cannot reshape the world that is producing that experience; neither on an individual nor a collective level. Art, even art created by a revolutionary communist militant, collapses in on itself, from something created into something consumed. When Guy Debord described a society that replaced life with its mere image, this is the quiet nightmare he was warning us of.

Alexander Billet is a writer, artist, and general layabout based in Los Angeles. His writing has been featured in Los Angeles Review of Books, Salvage, Jacobin, Real Life, Protean, Radical Art Review, and other publications. He is a founding member of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective and is a producer, with Drew Franzblau, of Locust Radio. More of his work can be found at To Whom It May Concern…