The NFT Good Place
Discover more from Quantumpoetic
Lately, with the discussion of NFTs vs. the environment, there have been two polarized views. One where it is burning the planet down. And another where the NFTs vs. environment story is a false narrative by the gatekeepers that are keeping the artists down. Or that the environmentalist critics are Chicken Little.
It seems like there are agendas behind all of the narratives.
It is reminding me a lot of the storyline in television show, The Good Place, where there is a man named Doug Forcett who mostly figures out how the Afterlife works and proceeds to live a virtuous life. Basically, life is a point system, or video game where your good works gains you points, and your sins detract from your point score.
Essentially, what we are talking about are multipolar traps. This essay, Meditations on Moloch is a good write up on this topic. As blockchain projects, decentralized finance, social token DAOs, and other decentralized organization structures emerge, incentive design and community are key.
Tim Ferriss also just released this podcast episode with Naval and Vitalik. This is a good primer on understanding the Ethereum ecosystem where most of these projects are currently built. The NFTs vs. environment conversation is, in many ways, a distraction, because there are so much potential in DeFi and other software systems in the space, and better energy generation methods are important regardless of the application. The price tags of NFT art from popular artists is also a distraction, because those are not sustainable across the whole market.
Incentive systems and user experience design to integrate into our existing systems as the Open Metaverse stack unfolds in a way that helps to build a new world where the tenets of the system are aligned in order to create a world of abundance where critical infrastructure is handled through automation, and we no longer need to create artificial scarcity to incentivize people to feed the artists.
I’m not sure exactly how this will work, but it seems that this should be the dream.