Magic Beans

What follows is intended as a framework to understand how the properties of NFTs might make them particularly useful—or useless—in our own daily lives. NFTs are special, I believe, for two reasons: they correlate to our own unique traits as biological organisms, and they allow us to turn nearly any good into an investment with resale value.

An NFT may not be worth much as a jpeg, but it is worth quite a bit more as social capital, as a demarcation of tribal identity, a wink that rewards the viewer for decoding its meaning—not even for anything it says, necessarily, but for signaling that the viewer is “in the know,” operating in the same cultural code.

But we shouldn’t think of NFTs as tokenized digital content itself. A core insight is that NFTs are much better understood as encapsulating intellectual property rights to the assets they describe.