If you wanted to know about NFTs, where they came from, what they’re being used for and especially why they are harmful but were afraid to ask, this is the video for you.
At almost two and a half hours it’s a long sit, but that’s because Dan Olson takes the time to set the context in which NFTs arouse. To understand NFTs you have to understand Bitcoin and all the other electronic currencies that were inspired by it, not to mention the dreaded blockchain and the whole spectre of ‘web3’ technology. As important, Olson understand that just knowing the technological context isn’t enough and therefore starts with the real driving force behind Bitcoin and NFTs: the 2008 recession.
Because in 2008 the world economy crashed and while it may superfically look like the world has recovered since, the truth is it wrecked the opportunities of an entire generation. The idea that if you get the right education, go on to get a good job you can have a good, stable career the way your parents could in the sixties had been undermined for decades of course, but the 2008 recession made it official. The ladder had been pulled up and the normal ways of bettering yourself are no longer available. Even people lucky enough to graduate and start a middle class career are finding life precarious; you may be temporarily affluent but are you secure the way your parents were secure in their careers? And it’s not just careers that are insecure: something as basic as owning your own house is increasingly out of reach of all but the most upper of middle class people. Be it London, new York or Amsterdam, it’s hard to find a house when investors routinely overbid you. The average housing price here in Amsterdam is now 10,000 euros/square metre, which means my own appartment of 48 square metres is worth half a million euros. It’s absurd.
All of which means is that life is as unstable as it has ever been since the 1930ties for the vast majority of people even in rich countries, the gap between the rich and the rest of us as great as it ever has been while ever attempt to level this gap has been smashed. We’ve seen how the establishment in the UK reacted when Jeremy Corbyn almost won the 2017 elections, which led to the Labour right smashing their own party while the entire press conspired to put Johnson in Number 10. When regular politics are no longer allowed and regular ways to have a stable career and life are equally smashed, that leads to people looking for alternatives. In politics, this lead to Trump and Brexit. Similarly, if people cannot get rich conventionally, they’ll seek out other ways of doing so. There’s a huge market of precarious, affluent middle class people ripe for exploitation.
Which brings me to Albania. A former ‘protectorate’ of fascist Italy, after liberation at the end of the Second World War it became a communist dictatorship ruled by Enver Hoxha. Hoxha was a Stalinist so orthodox that he broke with the Warsaw Pact for being too soft. Under his leadership Albania was so closed a country it made North Korea seem positively welcoming. The collapse of communism all over Eastern Europe also reached Albania and in the early nineties it became a normal democratic, capitalist state. Now if you know your recent European history, you know that all these countries that had lived under communism for almost half a century were incredibly vulnerable to capitalist exploitation and were plundered on an unprecedented scale by their own ex-communist elites and western advicers. Albania was worse than most and its economy became dominated by pyramid and ponzi schemes, with millions of people investing their savings in them. When it all collapsed in 1997 it led to civil war.
As Dan Olson argues here, all electronic currencies are pyramid schemes, people buying them to sell to a bigger fool and NFTs even more so. There’s a ready made market for them, of those precarious middle class, usually tech adjecent people who want to find a way to get rich or die trying. Which is worrying. It’s not just the godawful realities of bitcoin and NFTs, it’s that once it all burst, once all these people, already primed by Trump and Qanon, lose their shit, they’ll lose their shit and what will that mean for America?
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