Factually! with Adam Conover - What is Crypto Art, and Why? with Everest Pipkin

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

It had to happen eventually: We’re doing an episode about crypto. This week artist and technologist Everest Pipkin joins Adam to discuss Bitcoin, the blockchain, and the dire costs of crypto art, not only on our environment, but on the art community itself. Find Everest Pipkin’s art at https://everest-pipkin.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And you know, there's an old saying on Wall Street that when even your shoeshine boy has given you stock tips, it might be time to get out of the market. Things might be getting a little overheated and weird. Well, you know, I think we might be in another one of those stages of capitalism right now, because I don't know if you've noticed, I certainly have, over the last couple months, seemingly everyone in my life has started talking about crypto. People can't get enough of it. I got friends buying, selling, and trading crypto, and they don't even know what the hell it is. The ones who aren't getting into it have Crypto FOMO, and my grandma just called me to ask how she could buy Dogecoin. Okay. I admit I made that up. She's

dead, but the point stands and people have been asking me what my take is. So let's get into it. Let's talk about crypto. I guarantee if you are sick of the topic, we are going to talk about it in ways that you will not expect. But first we must get through the contractually obligated beginning of our crypto episode in which I must try to explain what crypto is. So here we go. I'm going to give it a shot. Cryptocurrencies are digital money or digital assets, supposedly, that are secured by cryptography. The cryptography means that they can't be copied like most digital files. Instead, only one person can own them at a time.

And the record of that ownership is kept on a special type of distributed ledger called a blockchain that stores information about transactions across many computers. And finally, the blockchain is decentralized so that no single user or group can have control. Now, I hope you followed all that, but if you didn't, don't worry about it, because in my opinion, people get way too hung up on the technical details of cryptocurrencies instead of asking other questions. Questions like, why is this something that we would want? Like literally, what is the usefulness of having tradable digital assets that are decentralized that only one person can own at a time? What are they actually good for?

And the thing is, I'm not sure there's a good answer to that question. Right now, the most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, you can't use it to buy much. I mean, there's a couple companies that accept it as a publicity stunt, but almost nobody is actually using Bitcoins to buy anything from these companies because the price of Bitcoin fluctuates so wildly that most people are just inclined to hold on. In fact, if people were to sell their Bitcoins to buy stuff, the value of Bitcoin would plummet. So everyone who holds Bitcoin is currently incentivized just to keep holding on to it. to it. And while there's a lot of people who are spilling a lot of ink writing about all the super futuristic, awesome things we'll be able to do with all of our distributed cryptocurrencies once they're all fully up and running, nobody seems to actually be doing those things with

them yet. All of these uses seem to be entirely theoretical at this point. And it seems pretty certain that at least some of the people who are writing about how amazing cryptocurrencies are, are doing that just in order to get other people to buy cryptocurrencies to make the price go up. Either way, the meteoric rise in the price of Bitcoin and other crypto doesn't seem to have much to do with its utility because so far you can't use these cryptocurrencies to do much of anything. But look, maybe that's okay, right? Hey, why not let people make a little money? The value goes up, they buy and sell, people get rich. Why not, right? Well, here's the problem. Crypto is not just a harmless or even relatively harmless speculative bubble because cryptocurrencies have a massive and massively negative environmental impact. See, cryptocurrencies need computer power to function. To be a part of a

crypto network, your computer has to solve complex mathematical cryptographic puzzles. These puzzles are how the cryptocurrency network prevents other people from editing the blockchain fraudulently. That's the entire point of the blockchain. But over time, the puzzles are designed to get more and more complex. And that means that computers have to burn more and more energy to solve them. They have to stay plugged in for longer. They have to run hotter at higher speeds. They require more computers in order to get the work done. And since the puzzles are designed to get more complex over time, in the words of one writer, the system is designed to literally be anti-efficient. It is, in fact, designed to waste energy. But just how bad is the impact of

all that wasted energy? Oh, very bad. A single Bitcoin transaction takes the same energy as 680,000 Visa transactions or 51,000 hours of YouTube. And right now, if Bitcoin were a country, it would consume more energy than all of Argentina. It would literally be in the top 30 of energy consumption for any country on earth. So what all this means is that at the very moment in human history that we need to reduce our emissions as a species as much as possible in order to preserve life on earth and stop catastrophic climate collapse, we have simultaneously invented a magical new way to produce emissions that serves seemingly no purpose. I mean, the value of Bitcoin has gone up. Sure, a lot of people have gotten rich, but we already have other things that go up. You know what I

mean? Like the stock market. We didn't need to invent a new way to have rich people get richer. We already had things that do that. Now, here's the thing. I feel bad. I really do for poo-pooing crypto this much because it is an exciting new technology that is very, very cool. It is designed in an ingenious way. But if we are going to burn this much energy, we need to find a better use for it than rich people just getting richer using super magical digital bucks. Does that make sense? Well, recently, a new use for crypto has popped up and it has taken the world by storm. It is called the NFT or the non fungible token. These are tokens that can be bought and sold on the blockchain that represent other digital assets, most commonly artworks. And proponents claim that this is a way that artists can sell

their digital art in the same way they would sell physical art and that this will support artists and usher in a new age of art on the internet. And let me just say that this concept has been extremely controversial, to say the least. And to help me get into it and talk about cryptocurrency, NFTs, digital art, and what this entire new frontier means for the future of the planet and the way we consume art itself, my guest today is Everest Pipkin. They're a digital artist and technologist, and their writing about NFTs has been incredibly influential and passed around more than almost any other. And it's certainly informed the way I think about this topic. So I'm so excited for you to hear this interview. Please welcome Everest Pipkin. Everest, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. So tell me a little bit, just so we get a sense of all the different kinds of work you do.

Tell me a little bit about yourself and the kind of work that you do do. Well, I work in a lot of mediums, but I call myself an artist. I think that's a fair approximation of what I produce. Already you're having to defend yourself. No, but I really do think I can say I'm an artist. I feel justified. You've exhibited many places. You're an artist.

I think I'm comfortable in saying that. Thank you. Yeah, I am an artist. I work in software and games, and I make drawings and books, and I write. So when I'm like, ah, you know, I've kind of sunk all this stuff into studio practice. It isn't entirely my humility speaking as much as it is just like, ah, that's a good enough banner as any. But in general, I would say that the

unifying structure for a lot of my work is that I'm interested in sort of large data on the internet as well as kind of the ways in which data is always just people, always just sort of the echoes and memories and information of people which has been processed and repackaged in ways that can both be extremely beautiful, right? When you look at sort of like histories of the creative commons or the public domain and like all of this capacity of human knowledge and the ways that that surfaces through the internet, as well as deeply damaging in the way that like personal data gets recycled into harmful technologies and the ways it sort of gets used for capitalist gain and all of the other sort of problems with being alive in the 21st century.

So that is probably the unifying structure for my work, even though it exists in many mediums. It tends to be centered in or around that practice. it tends to be centered in or around that practice. So let's talk about the piece that first brought you to my attention that I found really fascinating. You wrote a really wonderful and I have to say influential essay on this. Would you summarize it for us?

Yeah, I might even make an attempt at summarizing Bitcoin, although we'll see how that goes. Let's do it. I want to hear you do it. It is maybe important to know the history of cryptocurrency, although dense is not very long, to understand kind of like how we've arrived here with NFTs and like what this means for the art market. You said, you know, in our last little bit of that conversation that so many of the problems with internet spaces are problems of abundance and i actually disagree although it's a useful segue i feel like very rarely are there problems with abundance um what there are problems with are wealth and sometimes

abundance gets turned into capital right where you have kind of um large-scale possibility right that then gets weaponized um sometimes by people who desperately need need it right like sometimes it does work in the favor of um gaining capital for people who don't have it but generally it is the abundance gets turned into wealth by like large tech companies, which is maybe the problem of the internet less so than material being widely available, but rather material being widely available to those who can pay or that people are paying to access that material in other ways,

whether that is with their private information, whether that is with their viewing habits, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. NFTs and Bitcoin probably fall into that camp in some ways. So Bitcoin. Here's yet another piece of media attempting to explain Bitcoin. I'll try to keep it brief. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. It started in 2009.

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. It started in 2009. It unifies two existing technological proofspinning a lot of Bitcoin, Ethereum, other proof-of-work coins, which is what most NFTs are traded with. Proof-of-work is this idea that... Hmm. Originally, proof-of-work was invented more or less as a disincentivized spam. So the idea behind a proof of work system is if I am sending an email or something, like I'm typing, typing, typing, I hit send, my computer needs to do just a tiny little bit of

work to prove to the recipient of that email um that i am a human being sending that email um there are not very many proof of work email services left but this is a thing that was proposed in like the 90s um because spam was a problem where you would have these spam networks that would send you know one email, but millions of emails to all sorts of inboxes. And so to disincentivize automatically, like having, you know, a bot or, you know, piece of code that's just sort of running spam applications, you have your computer solve problem every time you send an email or every time you do whatever task. It's sort of like a captcha for your computer, but it happens so quietly in the background

in this original idea of proof of work that you, the human, wouldn't even notice it was happening. It was just like, you know, solve a little tiny puzzle. But if you send a million emails, which your computer could do without very much problem, right? Like you just write a program, it sends a million emails off, no big deal. Every time it like sends that email,

it has to solve that little puzzle. And because each of those puzzles costs, you know, like maybe a tiny bit of electricity, right? It's a little bit of computational power. It might actually brick your computer if you tried to send a million emails into a proof of work email server. Again-

At the very least it would be costly. You'd maybe be spending more money in electricity, which would make you want to send less of those emails. Yeah. So it sort of disincentivizes spam. It's like, you know, the stick rather than the carrot is the kind of way that proof of work was

originally proposed. Basically nobody did much with this idea for a better part of two decades. Until 2009, when it was this idea of proof of work was married with this other idea, the blockchain, which is a piece of technology that basically is a quote-unquote immutable ledger that lets you write histories of transactions into it. So it's a little more complicated than that.

Like people have to kind of get together and decide what is and isn't the truth and the ledger and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But basically it's a way to keep, it's a long receipt that keeps track of everything that's ever been on it. And it is a way to kind of like verify that a transaction actually happened in the past

is because it's on this letter, a ledger, it's anonymous. It doesn't say who did what and who verified it, unlike, you know, a bank, but it is like public and it is there. And theoretically, it's very, very hard to tamper with. So you have these two technologies, they merge into this thing called Bitcoin. And what Bitcoin does is it is a currency. At first, it is like almost a mathematical proof, like it's like a theoretical currency.

It is technically worth value, but it's only worth value on a market that doesn't exist yet. And the way you make Bitcoin is by solving those little proof of work puzzles, that type of thing that was originally made to disincentivize spam bots. And every time you correctly solve one of those puzzles, you write that you solved it into the blockchain ledger and you get the reward of a Bitcoin, which is essentially the reward for the block that you've just put to the blockchain. I think at first, Bitcoin mining Bitcoin, which is what that process is called, you know, solving a little puzzle and writing it to the blockchain was, you know, it wouldn't even make your laptop hot, right? Like it was that type of like very low level capture puzzle. Yeah.

But because Bitcoin is tied to, its worth is tied to the difficulty in constructing it, the more Bitcoins there are in the system and the more people use Bitcoins, the more competitors you have who are competing for those individual blocks in the blockchain. So the more computers you have that are trying to solve the problems in that proof of work system, the harder it gets to solve those problems. And then the price goes up and then more people join the network and then the problems get harder to solve and then more people join the network and then the price just keeps going up. And so now you have this wild, wild, wild situation where I don't even know what the price of Bitcoin is today. Let's find out Bitcoin price.

I haven't looked in a while. One Bitcoin, which again in 2009 was not even real money. Like I think by 2010, it might have been a tenth of a cent somewhere in there, not even real money. Like I think by 2010, it might've been a 10th of a cent somewhere in there, maybe even a cent, you know, by the end of 2010. Now one Bitcoin is worth $63,537.44. And this is down a bit from where it's been in the past. Yeah, so this is a meteoric rise um yeah in price yes those original bitcoins that were minted have the value has gone up astronomically yes if

you still have access to your bitcoin um yes there are many many stories of people like uh you know putting a hard drive into recycling and then being like, oh no, my Bitcoin wallet. No. My only key to my Coinbase account. My understanding though, if I can ask, is that part of the point is, by design, these problems that needed to be solved got more difficult and more difficult. And part of the point of that

was to have the value increase over time to, or to actually put it a more basic way, to have scarcity of the Bitcoins increase over time, to make it harder and harder to mint new ones in order to sort of drive the value up, to like create the original engine by which these would become more valuable. But as a result, it necessarily means that it takes more and more processing power in order to create them. So it's like, yeah, it's like inherently trading energy use for value in a way. Yes. So yes and no. The the rate of new bitcoins is stable

um however when you have the value the value is tied to the basically the energy use the difficulty of the puzzles is tied to the value of the bitcoin um and so even though you're making i think it's like a new bitcoin every 10 minutes, that is basically the rate at which the printing press operates. Every Bitcoin miner is competing to get that Bitcoin. So because it is now incredibly valuable and there are and those proof of work puzzles are difficult. and those proof-of-work puzzles are difficult, and you have thousands, millions of Bitcoin miners trying to compete for the next block, which is worth, again, $63,000,

you have essentially all of those CPUs are just running at full speed, trying to solve that puzzle first. And so what you have is uh an entire network of bitcoin mining machines competing um with electrical energy with you know the high very computationally expensive and um therefore electrically expensive devices who are competing to get that next bitcoin out of the blockchain, which is why this is a problem. It's very, it's possible, you know, if the price crashed,

right, like you could see a slight reduction in that energy usage. However, generally, when there's a dip in prices with something like Bitcoin or Ethereum, which is historically, both of them have only gone up. But that actually means more people join the network because all of a sudden it is even more competitive. Like there are theoretically like it's a little bit cheaper to compete for these things. So more people go online and try to compete for the next block because it might go back up. Part of the reason that there's so much competition about this type of thing is that most cryptocurrencies actually do operate on what i'm i want to be careful with this language because i think people get a little confused about you know the difference between a ponzi scheme and a pyramid scheme um but but almost all cryptocurrency is like a classical pyramid scheme in that the value of the Bitcoin or the Ethereum that you are holding today is partly because more people are joining the network all the time and competing for these coins and driving up their cost.

coins and driving up their cost. So that like assumption of, ah, you know, it is fine to jump into this network when it takes a little dip, I'll compete for the coin, it'll go back up is because people are kind of constantly joining on. And those people are having to compete for Bitcoin or Ethereum at an ever more costly, both computationally and financially, but also the underpinning of all of this is ecologically costly. So it's not a Ponzi scheme by design, which is like, okay, there's nothing in the center of this. Let's push that on to ever new members of an organization. But it is a pyramid scheme because the people who joined first are, uh, benefited when new people join on.

Um, and that kind of rise of a currency, uh, depends on new people joining it. So all of this is a problem because of course, energy usage, um, and a proof of work system.

I, I, they are so wasteful. I really can't over exaggerexaggerate. I think you can say, oh yeah, computers running at full speed, but the level of energy usage of the Bitcoin mining network or the Ethereum mining network is wild, comparable to a country. is wild like comparable to a country um yeah so it when new computers are joining this network um when you have something that is exactly tied into energy into you know energy being turned into value just for the act of burning it um what you end up with is a system that basically says that um sunk ecological cost right like this ecological cost of tomorrow which is basically all of it burning carbon emissions for no other reason than to generate coins is doing, um, creates value today is a really dire financial system, um, to end up there. And that's kind of where we are right now. I mean, yeah, there's an extent to

which you can look at a lot of human activities as turning energy stored fossil fuel into something else for economic value. Not all things work this way, but a lot of things do. You know, we take energy and we burn it and we create something. But usually, at least a lot of the time, that's like a useful thing. It's like a physical object that you can use to do something with or someone can maybe eat or something along those lines. In the case of cryptocurrencies, it's simply to create a store of value when we have other stores of value. We already have fiat currency, other forms of currency, diamonds. We have many things that people value. This one happens to be decentralized and digital, but I think it's

at the very least debatable whether that massive energy cost is worth creating, okay, here's a decentralized digital currency. And it certainly, there has not been like an immensely valuable use case for this technology other than making a small number of people very rich. There's a couple, I've read about a couple of cases where people in countries with very insecure currencies, very highly fluctuating currencies will like use Bitcoin as an exchange medium. That's useful, but it's not like an incredible manna from heaven that's like changing the world on, you know, to a commensurate level with its environmental cost. So I would agree with you that this is wasteful generally.

It's sort of existentially dreadful, to be honest. I think about it too hard and I just fall into a little bit of despair because, yeah, to your point, I mean, not all human cultures, but certainly mine exists in a pretty wasteful consumerist, like, yeah, let's, you know, tomorrow's a problem for tomorrow kind of state of mind. But again, things like this generally do have actionable use case. It's like, okay, I need to go visit my family. I'm going to drive my car. Yes, this is a problem, but it's going to get me from here to there, which is still troubled, right? Like those are systems that we absolutely need to address, break down. Like this country needs public transit, like in a tangible way. We need alternate energy programs. Like all of this is true. But to see that same impulse sunk into more or less just propping up wealth gain is really a

bummer. I think the only analog that is even comparable is probably the stock market or future speculation. And I think you can think about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general as future speculation on the proof. So because Ethereum or Bitcoin are operating on this proof of work idea, it's basically future speculation on energy scarcity in the future. And because energy scarcity is like tied to ecological devastation, also like the future of stability of humanity. It's really a bummer. There are other proofs which we'll talk about,

but almost all NFTs operate on Ethereum, which is not Bitcoin. It's a similar proof of work currency that's a little younger and has a slightly different algorithm and blockchain at its core, but operates on the same principle, more or less. NFTs because that was a wonderful primer on cryptocurrency. But we got to take a really quick break while I read some ads that also contribute to the gradual warming of the planet and future ecological devastation. Probably. I don't know. Maybe some of them do. Some of the products probably do. Some of them maybe don't. I don't know. Listen and decide for yourself which ones are contributing to future ecological collapse. We'll be right back with more Everest Pipkin. Okay, we're back with Everest Pipkin. and wonderfully explained why cryptocurrencies are basically trading off the promise of future ecological calamity in order to create value today. Tell me about NFTs, non-fungible tokens,

and art and how these things connect. Yeah. So NFTs are a sort of new development. There have been versions of this idea almost as long as cryptocurrencies have been around. But the first time they really made their way to a quote-unquote market was probably with CryptoKitties in 2017. Um, an NFT is an idea, a non-fungible token, an NFT, um, basically attaches a piece of art to the receipt in the blockchain, um, that says like, ah, you know, you own this thing. So as opposed to a Bitcoin, it's like, uh, you've, you've solved this captcha, you now get this reward. Um, it's kind of storing this this captcha, you now get this reward. It's kind of storing this other piece of information in this blockchain. The reason they're called so a Bitcoin or a piece of Ethereum or an ETH, an Ether, a piece of cryptocurrency, a coin is fungible in the same way a dollar is fungible.

So you can have, yeah, you can divide up your Bitcoin. You can divide up your dollar. A dollar turns into cents. You can have 0.0001 Bitcoin and spend that. That is the way most people spend Bitcoins because, again, they're worth $63,000. So you're probably not going to drop a single Bitcoin on anything anytime soon. Instead, you're going to operate at these kind of percentages. An NFT, a non-fungible token, is something that can't be split up. So that is really the only

difference between it and a dollar figure is that it is kind of stuck as one thing and it has the value that's ascribed to it and you can't cut it in half and send half that value here and half that value somewhere else. The way that NFTs work in kind of blockchain space is really not that different than how they work in an art market in general and how art sales work in an art market. Because, you know, if you are somebody who, if you're somebody who's new to the idea of the auction house and the contemporary art market or blue chip galleries, right, this terminology or even the way that art fairs operate. um there are artists who are working today as well as historical artists who have big names you might recognize from like the history of painting or whatever whose work are traded um as aesthetic objects but as well as um wealth stores and this is because they have different tax laws um because you can store them offshore because you can put them in a warehouse and they'll appreciate. You can create your own foundation that's a 5013C and then donate them and get a tax write off.

Exactly. So there is and there has been for a long time a relationship between the hyper wealthy and art investment. This is not news, but, you know, it certainly exists. and art investment. This is not news, but it certainly exists. The way that this works in its most predatory sense is that for young or up-and-coming artists, there is a capacity for their work to get sort of bought at very cheap prices, stored for five or ten years, flipped at auction at Christie's or something, and then that investor who bought that work out of an art fair, out of a studio sale, has made theoretically a large sum of money on this work, trading on an artist's name, and that artist hasn't seen that work for ten years.

If their work doesn't appreciate any value that work might disappear like it doesn't you know if it becomes worthless to sell or store like it just might kind of go away um and that is a way in which physical artwork has been used historically this is not the way all artwork gets used right yeah obviously lots of people buy work because they like it lots of people buy work because they like it. Lots of people buy work because it looks good in their house or a friend made it or they just think it's beautiful. And this is also true of people who work in that blue chip world who have names that are sellable in that kind of capacity.

Sometimes their work just goes to someone's home because it is a beautiful painting. But when you are working with galleries who are trying to sell you as an investment, there is always a little bit of that like, yeah, well, there's the money value here first and also isn't a nice picture. Yeah, well, and that's driven by the priorities

of the wealthy themselves. I mean, I've covered this on my show, Adam Ruins, everything. We did a whole episode about art and the art market. But I mean, at its worst, this is like the10 million, but oh, if I buy these paintings and I can, very simple example of this is you buy a bunch of paintings, they increase in value. And then you, as I said, donate them to a museum with your own name on it. And then you get a write-off for the value that they were valued at 10 years later,

at the value that you have pumped up because you've bought so much of this artist. So you get a tax write-off much, much greater than the original value. And that is like there's there's a lot of other different versions of that. But like at its core, this is wealthy folks manipulating money using these objects that they are able to, you know, portray and sort of turn into large value stores. It's just sort of like once you have a lot of money sitting around, you just kind of start doing this because it makes sense. And it's like very quickly divorced from what any artist or or I would say most artists and most art enjoyers, patrons, customers or I don't know, art appreciators, the public, the art going public, you know, thinks of these things. And it really distorts the art world in a really strange way.

It makes it sort of revolve around these, you know, the investment choices of very wealthy people who are mostly just trying to make and save money it's very weird it's yeah it's very weird um it is not exactly a new problem but it's not so you know it is sort of uh i would say i mean let me back up uh art has always had a relationship with power right um art has always worked as a kind of soft power generally for the wealthy or powerful um not universally but like there are certainly artists that have not aligned themselves with those powers. But it is something that has existed for a very long time, whether or not kind of art markets that look like our marks we have now, which has existed historically. You see this with patronage systems.

You see this, like, it goes way back. So I don't want to be like... You see the fucking pyramids, you know. Yeah, I don't want to be like oh this is a problem of capitalism because um you know artists who are often in you know coming from situations some artists come from great wealth but many don't um you, many artists are coming from positions of poverty or are at least like living frugal lifestyles. Regardless, employ a lot of social capital, a lot of soft power themselves. And I think part of the way in which artists have survived is selling that social capital to, you know, a high bidder.

And sometimes that results in, you know, relationships of power and coolness, right? Between the wealthy and practicing artists. Sometimes it results in just like straight up relationships of like monetary gain um for both of those participants but often more so for like the wealthy investor than the person who's selling stuff out of their studio um but i don't want to be like this is a new problem it's certainly not a new problem to nfts um it's not even a new problem to like blue chip galleries it's something that uh i am very much hoping uh culturally we get to begin to deconstruct as we move into spaces like with universal basic income and with actual social services where you're not put in these impossible situations of like being able to

exist in comfort or at all versus uh but under like the wing of um often like uh wealthy people who are generally uh using their money in all sorts of miserable ways. So I do want to preface all that because I think it can be quite hard to be an artist and it can be quite hard to be an artist who's looking at all of your available options and being like, there isn't a single one of these that guarantees me health insurance and my principles. So I do recognize. Yeah, there's no opt out of this system.

Yeah, I do recognize like that's the system we're all trapped in and it's a bad one. However, NFTs have brought that system into digital space. So, you know, historically, all of this has operated on the idea of the original, right? So this painting, this print, this material object at the auction house is useful to the auction house, is useful to the patron, and was, I guess, originally once useful to the artist. You know, partly because of its aesthetic qualities, you know, maybe because it's like a masterpiece, but mostly because it is like the quote-unquote original, right? It is something that was touched by this artist. It has like the aura of being created

out of the ephemera of the studio, da-da-da. And that has cultural capital and capital-capital attached to it. Digital art, digital files, historically had a weird relationship to the idea of the original. I'd still say they have a weird relationship, but it's hard to attach an original to a file.

And this is because files are cheap to copy. Unlike a factory object, even, which you can make a duplication, but it still requires almost as much material infrastructure as the first one to make itself. And certainly, unlike

a painting, which takes an incredible amount of human effort to copy, and even then it's going to be different, a digital file you just like hit ctrl c ctrl v and you've got two um and that thing that like um duplicatability of uh digital space is like one of its like fundamentally uh fundamentally unique features and nft is trying to solve that quote-unquote problem but for me i feel like that is so profoundly not a problem like it is the it's the best thing we've got um in digital space it's all we have going for us uh is the is the infinite replicability yeah so there are lots of ways to

try to restrict the copying of files lots of people have tried this um copyright uh dcma region blocking and region restriction it all tries to do this thing tying it to particular platforms if you've ever bought a video game uh for your playstation and then had to buy it again on your pc like that is a restriction on where the file can live how it can move around how you can copy it this type of thing exists streaming services do this a lot right where you can't get the file they're streaming it to you it's on their server somewhere. So there's lots of people who've tried to solve the best part of the internet. But, you know, generally, because it is going to generate wealth for the person who's trying

to solve it, or like they have incentive to keep it from being copied over, this is advising piracy or just keeping you from having photoshop on two computers or whatever it is um so nfts are not exactly that they are not actually restricting the file they are instead positing that the file is not the original unless you are the owner, which is a weird kind of backwards way of looking at this. So an NFT can be anything. An unfungible token is just like a line basically in the blockchain that says, it's like a receipt. So it says, I am the owner of this thing. And that is all the NFT is.

It was bought for this much money and I can't split it up into, you know, various other bits of money. I own this thing. And an NFT can be attached to anything. It can be attached to a car. It could be attached to a plant.

It could be attached to this podcast. Jack Dorsey's first an is a famous example from a couple weeks ago yep um but the primary way these things are being used is being attached to pieces of artwork you can't uh restrict the way a file moves with an nft so even though like an nft might be attached to a gif for instance and say like ah okay um i have purchased this gift for one ethereum an expensive gift uh and it is mine now someone else can just go to the website and download that gif like they have it on their computer they have it on their hard drives yeah there's two however what an nft says is any copy

of this file that's owned by anyone but me, the person whose name is stored in the blockchain attached to this receipt, doesn't actually have an original of this thing. Those things, yeah, they've got them, they've got pictures, but they aren't the real thing, even though the file is functionally identical to this thing. So it's sort of like aura squashing, right? It's like, okay, I have the one that was signed by the artist, even though it's a very goofy idea in digital space. However, the reason that this is functional or useful is that you can resell this receipt. So if I own the receipt that says I own the picture,

I can go back to a NFT marketplace and I can list that for sale in the same way that, you know, an art investor might've gone to a studio sale, picked up an artwork, you know, at discount. And then 10 years later, taking it to a Christie's auction. I can do the same thing with an NFT that is attached to this gift, even though hundreds of other people might have this image, doesn't matter, not the original, they can't sell it. I have the receipt. And what I'm actually selling is not the GIF. I'm selling the receipt that says I paid money for this GIF.

You're selling the token. Yeah. I'm selling the token. And then that can get resold into the market and it enters these things into those spaces. Because most NFTs are traded on Ethereum, every time one of these things into those spaces because most nfts are traded on ethereum every time one of these things sells both when it's created in the first place when it's stored to the blockchain in the first time and then every time it changes hands it also has an outsized ecological cost a pretty large one that's somewhere between days and uh years of average uh electrical cost for like a u.s citizen so wow it's it's pretty massive

there are nft markets that use other proofs than proof of work um which don't have that same ecological footprint attached but they still do have all of the kind of problems of resale of originality of the token of um artwork being abstracted into wealth. Yeah, so. Yeah, I mean, there's so many, there's so much to talk about here. We're already deep into this interview and there's so much I want to ask you about this. I mean, how do you feel?

Okay, so the environmental piece we've talked about quite a bit, that the way these networks are currently structured and specifically the way the most popular networks for trading NFTs are currently structured is like has baked in massive ecological costs. That's almost like part of the premise of how these things work. Keep saying they're going to they're going to move to a different model that doesn't have such a large ecological cost. But we're kind of in a, you know, we'll believe it when we see it kind of state with that because they've been they've been saying that for a little while. I've been saying that almost for the whole time that Ethereum has been a currency and it is yet to happen. So we will see. I just went on the Ethereum Reddit the other day and they were like, we're going to do it. We're going to move to proof us.

And I hope they do. It seems like it would be a good move. But as it is currently, we are not in that place. And it's a little bit like saying like, I don't know, it's a little bit like, well, why don't I just keep burning oil? Someone will figure out how to suck that carbon out of the atmosphere eventually. People are working on it. You know, it's wishful thinking. It's positive thinking at best and wishful thinking at worst. I mean, I think at worst, it's actually willful manipulation, right? So I have moved from a place of being like, oh, well, Ethereum, I don't know if they're ever going to do it.

But like, wouldn't it be good to a place of like they know people know exactly what they're doing which is if they move to proof of stake or to a different proof probably there's a huge market crash uh because i i think i mean i could be wrong but at this point i pretty much believe that a lot of these currencies are actually held up by energy scarcity, right? Like that is part of their business. They are good investments in the first place. And if you move off of your energy intensive platform, suddenly what you're left with is a platform that has to build value on pre-existing buy-in. And I think Ethereum is very scared to do that.

It's scared. It's the second largest cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is never going to move to proof of stake. They don't even talk about it. They don't even pretend. And at this point, it has been so many years of Ethereum being like, we're going to do it.

We're going to move. And these little sort of technical steps. And I'm not certain if they will or if they believe that the currency will survive the transition in the same way it is now, even if they eventually do it. Because part of the point, I don't want to get back too much

into the cryptocurrency piece of it, but part of the point is that if it's very expensive to mine these things, then that pegs their value to at the very least the cost of mining them. And if they perpetually get harder to mine, i.e. more energy intensive, i.e. more wasteful, then the value goes up. So it's sort of in everyone's interest to keep that cost very high, because then if you if you are already sitting on a whole bunch of Ethereum, Bitcoin, whatever, you want it to be expensive for other people to the price of the electricity that went into it, which is not the full price of the ecological devastation it's going to have on and is currently having on environments around people who don't have access to the wealth gained by cryptocurrency um those outside costs are placed on individuals that it doesn't even go into the cost of electricity usually um but that cost of electricity that was burned to create that coin is kind of embedded in that coin and um my i yeah so i know, at worst, it's not to gain social license to continue operating by saying that they're moving in this direction while in reality they know very well that, you know, the current system is what keeps them valuable. And I think there's a range of,

there's a range of actors who have different beliefs. I know there are people with the good faith belief. Yes. Okay. We're going to move over and maybe those people are right. Hopefully they are. But also there's a lot of people who are advancing this argument in bad faith, it seems. But let's talk about the ownership piece of it. Just a little bit more about what the concept of ownership is. Like with a very traditional art object, you know, a painting, if I own it, if it's in my house, we have an original in our current house. My partner is an artist. We have one of her friends, you know, she, they traded a piece of art. It's in our house. No one, unless someone breaks into our house, they can't get it.

It's under glass. So in that sense, we own it, right? We also have a couple of prints, which other people have copies of, but ours ours we've got a little one out of a hundred thing on the bottom and there's a signature and so we own that in that sense maybe the artist has an original back in their flat file in their studio but we've got they made us a promise that they're only going to issue 100 of these and we have one of those physically as well um so that i think everybody understands when When I own an NFT, okay, the thing that I actually have control over, the thing that I can say no one else can get at this thing is the ability to sell a token that's on the blockchain, not the original piece, as you said. And the token

points to a piece of digital art. and i know that one of the ways it does this is literally just a url it's like i own a little token on the blockchain that says the piece of art that exists at http colon slash slash www nft art.com slash everest pipkin or whatever it is never but yeah never okay um everest pipkinkin's polar opposite slash art dot HTML. I own that. Right. But now and that means I can resell it. OK, if other people believe that that means I own the piece of art, then maybe I can resell it. But there's still a lot of problems with that. Like, what if that Web site goes down? Like no Web site. I mean, I've been on the internet long enough to know

that websites do not last if i published a piece of digital art when i was 20 it would not still be on the web today um so it's like if it's a very odd thing to to frame as ownership of the artwork you can say you own the token but it's a tenuous connection between the token and the art, even under the best of circumstances. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a couple of things there. One of those things is ownership is always a social contract.

Even ownership of like, I own this print. It's like, okay, yeah, you own this print because it's in your house. But like, why do you own your house? You're like, oh, well, I live in the state of California and we have laws in the book, but that you go down far enough. And like, ownership is a tenuous idea that is held up by social contracts, which are sort of like, put upon like government regulation, which is really just a social contract. Absolutely granted it. And you could use that argument to, I could imagine that argument saying, well, how are NFTs any different then, right?

It's a different form of social contract. It's a digital social contract. Yes. Where were you going? I think this is in some ways true, right? So like the idea of owning an NFT, it really only works because other people think that owning an NFT is a thing that's real.

They are functional only within the social contract of the NFT marketplace. So, or, you know, other places that sort of, owning an NFT is a thing that's real. They are functional only within the social contract of the NFT marketplace. So, or, you know, other places that sort of validate their existence, which includes Christie's. So yes, like people, they are only functional insofar as like other people agree that in fact, writing your name on a blockchain ledger saying that i own this thing is in fact you owning that thing which is tenuous but you know fine uh i'll grant it but yes in fact what you have written down is really not the object itself so much as uh the receipt of ownership the token um that's stored in that space uh a lot of those websites a lot of links have already gone down you know nfts as like a

popular explosion i mean it's probably been less than a year of these things actually in the news although they've probably been around in digital art spaces for four years now. Those links, that type of like, oh, yeah, I'm going to sell an NFT to this website that's just sort of like a wrapper to this URL. Like those are already disappearing. So, you know, that that's happening. There's people who have already bought NFfts and the art that they bought is nowhere to be found yes absolutely okay um however the thing that remains to be seen is whether that token is still valuable and my guess would be probably the URL that's attached having disappeared might not affect the price of the NFT

or might not in this totally make it useless, which is kind of a bummer. But because the thing that is being sold on the marketplace is not the artwork, sometimes they're attached to like, you know, the artwork is like, shows up as a pretty picture when you buy the thing. And you're like, yeah, and you can download the link or you download the file

and you get like access to whatever. And maybe you have a file on your hard drive now. It can be uploaded, whatever that is. However, the thing that you're selling is not the file. The thing that you're selling is your name in the blockchain.

And I am not convinced that that file being offline or that link being dead or the art being irrecoverable irrecoverable um means that you can't still sell your token which is pretty dire it's probably i don't know maybe this is good news. If somebody listening is an NFT investor, get out. Don't do it. But I am not convinced that it being, they're already so distanced from the work that they are theoretically trying to represent or being attached to. and they already have the value of payment in them, payment in Ethereum, a currency, which is, you know, rapidly appreciating, that it's possible that with or without the artwork, that is still a valuable receipt,

which kind of sucks. Why do you feel that it sucks? I mean, I can see someone casting that positively, but it also is like a zombie. It's maybe positive if you're like a market investor. As an artist, I think it's kind of a bummer. You know, I think there are legitimately artists who are making NFTs because they need the money. And there are artists who are making NFTs because they need the money. And there are artists who are making NFTs because they are interested in entering a social space where they have collectors and where

there are other people making art and where, you know, that material like finds homes where they feel like their work is being appreciated. I kind of, I personally think they're being taken advantage of either sometimes financially, but more just socially, right. In the same way that like artists who, uh, sell work out of their studios to financial investors are also kind of being taken advantage of, but willfully so, often for short-term gain. And to see that so immediately illustrated that in fact it has less to do with the work that you thought found a collector or a home and everything to do with like the trials of market is potentially a real bummer. Yeah. Like the nice, the, the, the nice form, the form of art buying that we all want to support

is the kind where, you know, an artist creates a work that's an expression of their self and their heart. And, you know, is that pure artistic expression? And then I, as the appreciator, as the fan, purchase it in order to support the person. And because I get something out of it, you know, I buy records on vinyl currently because I listen to them on Apple Music first. And if I really love the record

I'm like I want this in my fucking house I want it big I want to listen to it in that special environment and then I have it in my house right I also buy old video game cartridges because it's you know I can play them on an emulator but no I want the I want the silicon from the 80s and it's in my house and I can put it in a machine and I can do a thing with it. But and so I can understand why, you know, people are sort of thinking, oh, well, if there's a digital artist who works that way, I can buy their gift and then I'll have it. But what is the advantage of the NFT to the artist or to the buyer? Right. Because like if I say I find that artist on the NFT version of Bandcamp and I buy the

NFT of the art and I get a gift and I get the NFT token. Well, I'm happy to get the gift. I've now got a file on my hard drive. I can put it in my folder collection, the same way I used to collect MP3s. I can put it in my little digital art collection. But all the nft is is the ability to resell it later that's literally all it is and I don't collect the records because I want to resell them later I can if I don't like the record I'll take haul it down

to amoeba and I'll get half what I paid for it and I'll buy some more records but that's not that's not like my main reason but that is like the only as far as I can tell, that's the only reason to buy an NFT is because you might be able to resell it later. And so all it appears to be doing is turning the art into like a fine an instrument of finance, a financialized token, a way for to create a speculative bubble market. That's I speculative bubble market. Am I wrong? I don't think you're wrong. As far as I can tell, that is the advantage. Unfortunately, I think it is complicated. And when I say advantage, I do mean, quote unquote, advantage to some, advantage to those who maybe want to make market speculative purchases. I do think this is partly because the art world has already operated in this way, where it is a little bit obsessed with the idea of the original, of the auction house. auction house, most NFT markets are operating partly on gas fees, partly on artist fees,

but also partly on actually having stake in cryptocurrency. And so it is like a system that is kind of self-perpetuating because of course, NFTs lend value to cryptocurrencies as well. They like go back and forth and NFT,, a thriving NFT market, pushes cryptocurrencies prices up, which pushes NFT markets prices up. And so because everything is trading in this sort of extra legal currency, investment and auction and resale is kind of happening on both fronts, which is quite different than something like Bandcamp, right? Which takes, you know, a percentage of every sale to sort of basically go back into their operating costs and keep the website up, which is a very different proposition. I think it's really important to remember that commerce is not capitalism, right? The commerce is something that people have had for a long time, well before capitalism. It will probably outlive capitalism. Like our capacity to make things say, I want to trade this to you for

something of value to me, whether that is currency, which I can trade for other goods, or whether that is simply the goods itself, is probably something that we'll keep as a society for a while, my guess would be, we'll see. But capitalism, which, you know, abstracts commerce into this set of investment and auction protocols, which, you know, extract value out of labor in a myriad of invisible ways is something that I just, I don't know, the art market doesn't need more. We have so much. Well, you're describing, this is helping me a lot because, I mean, what you're describing is that NFTs are, and the NFT market that we've seen blow up

in the last couple months is reproducing the worst characteristics of the, quote, old-fashioned art market. Like the, I mean, you know, those headlines in the New York Times when, you know, a Beeple piece sold for $69 million in cryptocurrency or whatever. And then found out a couple of days later, Oh,

it was actually purchased by a big NFT fund that has a vested interest in getting a headline in the New York times that says that NFTs are selling for a lot because the fund that purchased it is an investment vehicle for more NFTs. So it's that kind of same self-dealing that we were talking about, you know, in the classical art market. And it entirely makes sense that this would happen because you've got all these cryptocurrency billionaires who are sitting around on their, you know, their, their 1000 Bitcoins or whatever that

are worth tons and tons of money. And they can't really do anything out of it, do anything with, that are worth tons and tons of money. And they can't really do anything out of it, do anything with it. They don't want to cash out or maybe they can't cash out. So, oh, let's create a crypto asset that we can buy that's like right next to money, but it's not quite money.

It's a different store of value, which is very, very similar to a billionaire buying a hundred paintings and keeping them in a warehouse and then reselling them 10 years later. And, you know, so it's this effort to quote, solve the problem of abundance. You know, I'm not, I'm not an art historian. I'm not a, you know, I, my, you know, a time in the philosophy of art was like very short studying this a little bit in college, but I understand that like, you know,

what is art in the age of reproduction has been like a big question, right? Like what the fuck is this? Now that you can photocopy Da Vinci, what is art now? And to me, it sounds like what you're saying is that we shouldn't just keep trying to prop up the original.

Instead, it's like an opportunity to create a way of thinking about and a community about around art that is like more sustainable and better like reproduction could be embraced it's as you said a lot earlier uh the infinite reproducibility of digital art could be its greatest asset not like a problem that you want to solve by creating by like tying it to a cryptocurrency. Yeah.

Is that making any sense? I mean, I think you pretty much summed it up. The thing that's like different about a photocopy and a digital file, of course, is like when you photocopy an original, there is still an original and then there's a copy. When you copy a digital file, you just have two of the file. Like when I talk about abundance in a digital space,

that's what I'm talking about. Like you have the capacity to share the same thing, the unoriginal, you get to share the original with millions of people. If you want to, they all have firsthand access to the thing. They're not seeing a poor copy in a book or like, you know, seeing a picture of a picture and it doesn't capture it. Right. They're having a firsthand experience because like that is all the digital space that has going for it in some ways. It's not enough. I mean, there are- We all have the original. Yeah. That's wonderful.

It's wonderful. There are so many problems with digital files, storage, with energy costs, with like cost of hardware, with access digital space. There are so many problems about the internet we need to solve. But one of them that we really don't need to solve is that you can copy files cheaply and freely and that they are still they still work on multiple computers and that multiple people can

have a first-hand experience of the thing that you've made it rules like it is the thing that as a digital artist you have and as you know it's your strongest asset and to see that sort of traded away or reduced or um willfully sold simply for a shot at auction is um it's really heartbreaking and i yeah i hope that as a community, as a scene, digital artwork can take a look at itself and recognize that, in fact, it doesn't have to be this way. That we can still walk it back. That is a really wonderful vision. If you were able to put yourself 10 years into the future, let artists working in digital spaces are able to, you know, survive. What do you think that looks like? Like, what is a healthy relationship between artists and art appreciators, art enjoyers, that results in artists being able to live and doesn't, you know, empower the worst actors in our society?

Per usual, I think the answer for this type of thing is not a technological solution. What this looks like is long, boring work in regulatory structure, in government, in social systems, in government, in social systems, where technology becomes, you know, like more embedded in public sphere and like social programs writ large. I think about sort of the movements towards universal basic income, actual healthcare, universal care for people in the u.s um like disinvestment of government funds from policing and violence and warfare and putting that towards public infrastructure um i feel like i mean personally i think that proof of work currency should be illegal like straight up i don't think that this is something that um legally should be functional uh i many you know

i feel like some anarchists could probably get on my case about this uh i certainly like spend a lot of my time in like decentralized communities who would be like, what are you talking about? Yeah. But you want the state to ban? Yeah, I get it. centralized social program that has enough power, power that is theoretically granted by the people who live in the country that, you know, have put that government into a position of power, that it can, in fact, regulate things like currencies, which do incredible amounts of health and economic damages to people who don't have access to Bitcoin mining rigs, you know, as well as fun things like

internet infrastructure projects, you know, like actually letting people access those communities in the first place, which, you know, much of this country still isn't online. Like there are so many ways in which the tech the basically unregulated tech industry um tech giants uh have taken advantage of this space and there's no reason that there shouldn't be any laws around like ways in which um value is gained from personal data, ways in which your personal biometric data is aggregated and sold, ways in which non-governmental currencies can be created and traded. um yeah all of these things are are all of this as well as things like universal basic income rent coverage programs um actual functioning income taxes like all of this stuff is stuff that we can achieve through social work through governmental work um through regulatory work and very very little of it is a shiny tech futurist solution. But that is because, of course, none of this asks for a shiny tech futurist solution. regulated um and has no governmental eyes on it in the u.s um around like well for the most part around doing human harm yeah um and we can fix that like that's that's a thing that you can do

um and i i hope when i think about know, a future that might let us like still, you know, use internet spaces and not be constantly surveilled and not be, you know, like living in scarcity and having to enter parasitic markets to make rent is one where we have a better marriage of like social programs and the technology through which we live our social lives. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a very good answer. You're like, I'm like, hey, so how do we make sure that artists can live lives where they don't starve to death? And you're like, well, what if we create a world where nobody can starve to death and then we don't have to worry about artists so much? I mean, it's the only answer.

When it comes to, I love talking to you because you know, you're an artist who is doing work that is, you know, trying as best as you can to not exist within this incredibly predatory system,

or at least that's not your focus when you're doing the work, right? And it reminds me that, my God, there's so many artists out there who are doing the same thing, you know, that so much press has been spent on Beeple and the other folks who are, you know, or just, you know, the market piece of it, right?

Talking to you reminds me that's not what it's about. That's not what fundamentally, that's not what I enjoy about it. That's not why artists do it. And to the extent that I am an artist in my own right, that's not why I do it. Yet I exist within that system as well. And I know what I want, you know, if someone were to say to me, hey, I just want to see some fucking comedy and I don't want to get involved in entertainment industry bullshit too much. I could tell them what to do and I could tell them where to go. Uh, I could say, go to this show in Los Angeles once

the show starts again. And this is a really cool place and it's like the real shit. And there is not a lot of all this. There's not a lot of capitalism happening at this particular location. Go, go to this. You'll enjoy. Uh, if me, looking to have that same experience with art, what do you recommend? And what sort of mindset do you try to encourage in folks to have that kind of experience? Yeah. So there are so many people making things that are, you know, at the fringes of like an art world or who are trying to push back against sort of like um walled garden software ecosystems or trying to make or use non-proprietary software or trying to make or use um non like tech giant social spaces i spend a lot of my life uh over on mastodon um specifically um on a fork of mastodon called hometown which is maintained by darius kazemi um which is like basically all centered around running a tiny

little social media network for your friends um spaces like that on the internet of which there are so many uh where people manage to make communities both in opposition to tech giants like twitter um or just sort of within the shelves of tech giants um which is off so often the case where people manage to use the system to build a community of value and care um purely through their own effort, through moderation, through community guidelines, even within the auspices of like a miserable capitalistic system in which we are often, for the most part, trapped. Those bring me a lot of hope. I spend a lot of time looking for work on itch.io. If you are somebody who's interested in small independent games um both you know things

that there's stuff on there that you maybe could get on like your switch or on steam um but there's a lot of stuff on that platform that is absolutely you know um not not available in other spaces uh that it's been uploaded slapdash that's been you know it has real like punk rock aesthetic lots of small games lots of tabletop games lots of experimental poetry lots of small digital artworks which may or may not be interactive talk about alternatives to an nft market it's not a bad I also am very fond of NeoCities, which is a community of kind of like small home pages on the internet, as well as just like really cheap or sometimes free, depending on how many files you need hosting. It's looking to emulate GeoCities, right? Old school, like the hometown vibes from our homepage vibes from the late 90s, early 2000s. But NeoCity is a sort of a modern version of that. If you're somebody who's like never made a website, but kind of wants to learn how to like write something down in HTML,

like there's a web editor, you can just go make a website for free and like put a homepage on the internet and like write some stuff and blog and you can blog go make a website for free and like put a homepage on the internet and like write some stuff and blog. And you can blog on your own website instead of having to use like a big external, you know, you don't have to send a newsletter out and just like make a blog and hand code it. And there are lots and lots of people who are doing this kind of thing, who are just hand-making websites, like with HTML, with CSS, just being like, yeah, like I'm just going to write it by hand. The whole, the internet was set up to do this in the first place it still works um and all of those spaces i think host a lot of that type of um just like you know places where

individuals uh can gather and build community outside of like um the auspices of algorithm uh and as well as you know a myriad of cool small software projects and myriad of game creation tools um uh all all sorts of resources and uh like just niche shit that exists for the act of like, yeah, joyful digital creation of which there is still plenty despite how miserable it can feel to be online most of the time. I know, but,

and it does feel miserable on the internet most of the time. But then when I engage with that kind of work, like again, the reason I wanted to have you on the show is after reading your piece and clicking around your work, I was like, oh yeah, this world exists, right? People doing original, intimate, you know, independent work on the internet on, you know, on this scale, on a community scale is, is really wonderful. And like, God,

it's a breath of fresh air. It's like opening a window on the internet. And, you know, I think that stuff is going to continue to exist no matter how, no matter how bad capitalism gets, no matter how much capitalism tries to take over. You know, there's always a couple of green shoots poking through and i think it kind of shows the way forward for us hopefully yeah it's all it's all there um i think we started the very beginning of this call talking about nostalgia and youtube and i said something like it it's all just under the surface but it's kind of like buried by algorithmic browsing um and i would say that's true of the internet writ large you know it is still made by people for the internet writ large. It is still made by people

for the most part, right? It is still made by individuals who are putting up websites and editing Wikipedia and putting together weird little projects, maintaining repos. But it is hard to remember that because our attention is so thoroughly cycled back to large tech companies who have a pretty good stranglehold on it. But it is all still there. It is why the internet functions. It's why it's a fascinating space. It's why it feels valuable to me often is because you only have to dig a little bit farther until you stumble on a whole world, you know, constructed out of community or an individual that is just under the surface. why did we invent NFTs? What are we doing?

To remember that you really only have to look a little bit under to find. Yeah. Yeah. That, that thing that felt meaningful about it in the first place. Well, I can't thank you enough for coming on to talk to us about it. Ever.

It's been wonderful. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. yeah i really appreciate it well thank you once again to everest pipkin for coming on the show if you want to check out their incredible digital art go to everest hyphen pipkin.com that's everest hyphen pipkin.com if you want to buy the books written by any of our incredible guests, head to FactuallyPod.com. You'll be supporting both the show and your local bookstore when you do so. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Andrew Carson, Andrew WK for our theme song,

the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I record this very episode on. You can find me online at adamconover.net or at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media. If you have a comment or a question about the show, please email me at factually at adamconover.net. I'd love to hear from you. Until next week, thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week on Factually.