Magic Beans
Metadata
Highlights
- Or to put it in less financial terms, a creative work is a creature of context, and it can’t really achieve a full expression of itself unless it can fully interact with its context. The job of an NFT is to create and embody this context.
- Hell, you aren’t even buying even an unstable pointer to a JPEG. Including something like a URL to the JPEG or an IPFS content identifier2 is simply a matter of artistic courtesy. Technically an NFT is simply a token representing an object. It is not required to point to it. The object need not even exist.
- The point of this legal science-fiction thought experiment is that copyright works in the somewhat promiscuous way it actually does because it’s a pragmatic way to enable creative collaboration. Every creative industry has various conventional mechanisms and practices allowing rights to works to be bought and sold, assigned, shared, used as security for financing and so on. Rights that are stripped of this social-legal character are much less valuable.
- Over a decade ago, when Web2 was new, we all talked a lot about “social objects.” In 2007, an early social networking entrepreneur Jyri Engeström popularized the basic notion of social objects, Hugh MacLeod wrote a thing about them, and I did too, in 2009. For a while there was talk of “object-centered sociality” and in consulting gigs I talked of “high-frequency social objects” (ie things like YouTube videos and early memes). NFTs clearly belong in that tradition. They are digital social objects. Except they are a lot wilder. They don’t live within particular platforms or walled gardens, and aren’t attached to a particular company’s technology or even a specific open standard.
- Creative works are social objects in the fullest sense — they exist in a nexus of social, cultural, and legal links to other people and things, and they are only valuable to the extent they can fully participate in their whole context. Rights regimes restrict known rights, but also create rights if they are well designed, driving generativity.
- To explore what an NFT is, I tried to imagine what the opposite of an NFT might be, while still remaining a digital object. An anti-NFT. If an NFT is socially promiscuous and vacuous, an anti-NFT ought to be a non-promiscuous and substantial digital social object.
title: Magic Beans
author: studio.ribbonfarm.com
url: https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/magic-beans
date: 2022-02-15
source: pocket
tags: media/articles
Magic Beans
Metadata
Highlights
- Or to put it in less financial terms, a creative work is a creature of context, and it can’t really achieve a full expression of itself unless it can fully interact with its context. The job of an NFT is to create and embody this context.
- Hell, you aren’t even buying even an unstable pointer to a JPEG. Including something like a URL to the JPEG or an IPFS content identifier2 is simply a matter of artistic courtesy. Technically an NFT is simply a token representing an object. It is not required to point to it. The object need not even exist.
- The point of this legal science-fiction thought experiment is that copyright works in the somewhat promiscuous way it actually does because it’s a pragmatic way to enable creative collaboration. Every creative industry has various conventional mechanisms and practices allowing rights to works to be bought and sold, assigned, shared, used as security for financing and so on. Rights that are stripped of this social-legal character are much less valuable.
- Over a decade ago, when Web2 was new, we all talked a lot about “social objects.” In 2007, an early social networking entrepreneur Jyri Engeström popularized the basic notion of social objects, Hugh MacLeod wrote a thing about them, and I did too, in 2009. For a while there was talk of “object-centered sociality” and in consulting gigs I talked of “high-frequency social objects” (ie things like YouTube videos and early memes). NFTs clearly belong in that tradition. They are digital social objects. Except they are a lot wilder. They don’t live within particular platforms or walled gardens, and aren’t attached to a particular company’s technology or even a specific open standard.
- Creative works are social objects in the fullest sense — they exist in a nexus of social, cultural, and legal links to other people and things, and they are only valuable to the extent they can fully participate in their whole context. Rights regimes restrict known rights, but also create rights if they are well designed, driving generativity.
- To explore what an NFT is, I tried to imagine what the opposite of an NFT might be, while still remaining a digital object. An anti-NFT. If an NFT is socially promiscuous and vacuous, an anti-NFT ought to be a non-promiscuous and substantial digital social object.
title: “Magic Beans”
author: “studio.ribbonfarm.com”
url: ”https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/magic-beans”
date: 2023-12-19
source: pocket
tags: media/articles
Magic Beans
Metadata
Highlights
- Or to put it in less financial terms, a creative work is a creature of context, and it can’t really achieve a full expression of itself unless it can fully interact with its context. The job of an NFT is to create and embody this context.
- Hell, you aren’t even buying even an unstable pointer to a JPEG. Including something like a URL to the JPEG or an IPFS content identifier2 is simply a matter of artistic courtesy. Technically an NFT is simply a token representing an object. It is not required to point to it. The object need not even exist.
- The point of this legal science-fiction thought experiment is that copyright works in the somewhat promiscuous way it actually does because it’s a pragmatic way to enable creative collaboration. Every creative industry has various conventional mechanisms and practices allowing rights to works to be bought and sold, assigned, shared, used as security for financing and so on. Rights that are stripped of this social-legal character are much less valuable.
- Over a decade ago, when Web2 was new, we all talked a lot about “social objects.” In 2007, an early social networking entrepreneur Jyri Engeström popularized the basic notion of social objects, Hugh MacLeod wrote a thing about them, and I did too, in 2009. For a while there was talk of “object-centered sociality” and in consulting gigs I talked of “high-frequency social objects” (ie things like YouTube videos and early memes). NFTs clearly belong in that tradition. They are digital social objects. Except they are a lot wilder. They don’t live within particular platforms or walled gardens, and aren’t attached to a particular company’s technology or even a specific open standard.
- Creative works are social objects in the fullest sense — they exist in a nexus of social, cultural, and legal links to other people and things, and they are only valuable to the extent they can fully participate in their whole context. Rights regimes restrict known rights, but also create rights if they are well designed, driving generativity.
- To explore what an NFT is, I tried to imagine what the opposite of an NFT might be, while still remaining a digital object. An anti-NFT. If an NFT is socially promiscuous and vacuous, an anti-NFT ought to be a non-promiscuous and substantial digital social object.