![]() That was a problem when Russia-backed trolls spread social media propaganda around the 2016 U.S. The companies’ disclosures are wildly flawed and insufficient, but I’d still say that it’s better than what we had before: zero visibility into what ads were circulating to billions of people. In the last few years, Facebook, Google and Twitter created searchable databases of ads running on their websites and offered some ability to analyze them. We should grumble about what hasn’t changed, but we shouldn’t ignore what has. ![]() But let me give two examples of tech companies actually becoming more transparent and effective. And it felt as if America’s policymakers were moving at a snail’s pace to resolve whether and how laws should change to make tech companies more accountable, effective and fair.Īll true. Yes, elected officials and technology chief executives went around in verbal circles. Tech journalists’ reaction to the 4,000th congressional hearing into the power of Big Tech on Thursday was mostly. But there is progress if you squint a little. It often feels as if policy debates about technology are a hamster wheel going nowhere. Are they pointless Beanie Babies for rich tech bros who are ruining the planet with all the energy required to create the digital tokens? Not entirely, no. So, are NFTs a bubble inflated by unusual financial conditions and our brains turning to goo in the pandemic? Definitely. A complicated and expensive train may not be the best solution for global warming and our car addiction. Likewise, cryptocurrencies are probably not an effective fix for unaffordable housing. Sorry to be a broken record, but technology is not magic. That said, NFTs will probably not fix the broken economics of streaming music or tear down the power structures of the journalism and art worlds. Basically, everyone should listen to the wise and measured Anil Dash, a veteran of the tech industry who accidentally helped invent the concept behind NFTs and is both furious about the hucksters swarming them and believes that there’s a there there. Run screaming from anyone who has a definitive answer either way. There is promise in letting creators rely less on middlemen including social media companies, art dealers and streaming music companies. NFTs and the related concept of the blockchain hold the promise to, in part, give people ways to make their work more valuable by creating scarcity. But the internet has not really fulfilled the promise of enabling the masses to make a good living from what they love. With sites like YouTube and TikTok, anyone now has the power to make music, a piece of writing, entertainment or another creative work and be noticed. The purported big idea behind NFTs, as Kevin and Charlie Warzel, my colleague in Opinion, each explained this week, is to tackle a problem that the internet created. The trouble is that hyperbole and greed often make it hard to sort the glimmers of promise from the horse manure. And behind most novel ideas is often the possibility of something useful. In life, most things are neither glorious revolutions nor doom. We would all benefit from more breath and less breathlessness. Mostly, my beef about NFTs is how people, particularly those who live and breathe technology, talk about them and other emerging companies or concepts including the blockchain, the audio chatroom Clubhouse and ultra fast trains.Īlmost immediately, people sort themselves into camps to declare that THIS WILL CHANGE THE WORLD or it’s TOTAL CODSWALLOP THAT WILL RUIN EVERYTHING. Perhaps you find this confusing or silly. (For more, check out this delightful explanation from the Verge.) The records of ownership are maintained on a blockchain. When someone buys an NFT, what they’re effectively getting is the knowledge of owning an official version of a cat with a Pop-Tart body, a song, a video clip of a basketball dunk or another virtual thing. As with other emerging technologies, there is a good idea in there somewhere if we slow down and resist the hype.Īllow me to explain to normal humans what’s happening: NFTs are essentially a way to transform a digital good that can be endlessly copied into something one of a kind. And it’s probably not an entirely absurd bubble, either. I have some straight talk: The proliferation of NFTs will probably not be the world-changing revolution that its proponents claim. This is part of the mania of the moment in NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, and they are an example of people rushing to judgment about basically anything new and novel. (For charity!) Someone paid $69 million for a digital file of a collage that anyone can view online. On Thursday, my colleague Kevin Roose sold a crypto token of a newspaper column for more than half a million dollars. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays. This article is part of the On Tech newsletter.
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