Every day, Silicon Valley finds new ways to repackage things that already exist. Recent examples of this include totally-not-buses, taxi services, and even taxes. Now, they’ve set their sights on art. For those unaware, Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, are essentially the hip new cryptocurrency, assigning a digital value to art through metadata – be it a static image, a JPEG, a piece of music, or so on. This means that even though anyone could view or consume this piece, you have a Special Tokenized Version of it that only you can claim ownership to.
If this seems like it produces no inherent value to society, that’s where you’re wrong: it produces no inherent value and it destroys the environment! It turns out that in order to give these NFTs an assigned value, we run into the crypto standard of “Proof of Work” where in order to give value to a cryptocurrency, you need to prove that a certain amount of energy was spent in its creation. And by “certain amount”, I mean that highly valued NFTs can literally use up years of personal energy use per token. Sometimes, artists use this power to give additional value to works of great prestige. Other times, a copy of the “Scumbag Steve” meme from before 2010 sells for $57,000. Already, experts are warning they’re going to create a massive bubble.
Last week, much of the Internet was thrown into a state of agony as their favorite creators began to sell NFTs. Everyone from Gorillaz to “Salad Fingers” creator David Firth, Pepe the Frog Creator Matt Furie, and artist/activist collective Pussy Riot is cashing in. Well, I’m happy to say that the nightmare is not yet over. We at The Evening Look have decided to get on this train before it derails and offer our own NFT series! We’re introducing a variety of NFT-encoded greatest hits from The Evening Look’s extremely prestigious run. For example, any peasant can simply view our piece about cyberbullying Italians over Columbus apologia, but YOU, the presumed techbro simpleton (who’s also a leftist somehow), can own an exclusive PDF of it. The world is yours, my friend! For all we know, our piece on an Ice Cube Twitter rant could become our Kerouac scroll.
While these longform articles minted into meaningless kitsch might sound great, we’ve decided to go the extra step by combining NFTs with the definitive leftist experience: we’ve also minted our Tweets into NFT. If you want an already-dated Copium meme with Sergei Kelley’s face on it, it’s time to break out the big bag. Most of the products in this line consist of dunks on Sergei and the Morning Watch crowd at large, which if you follow us regularly should register as a plus. We don’t see the need to diversify our portfolio when our portfolio is all bangers.
The value doesn’t stop there! Not only are these images encoded with arbitrary metadata that makes them exclusive, but each NFT is also encoded with the exact DNA sequence of every member of the Evening Look’s staff. This means that if we weren’t already bad enough at hiding our identities, buyers will now be able to try and match our DNA with every student on campus to find matches. Alternatively, you could just cut out the middleman and clone us. Neither of these solutions would help you that much in actually identifying us, unless you have the resources to do that. But hey, if you have the money to spend on NFT’s, who knows what kinds of bizarre, morally bankrupt investments you can dream up!
To offset the environmental damage that we’ll be creating, we’ve also announced a charity sponsor. We pledge that 15% of our income from these tokens will go to MSU’s new college, the L. Squirrel School of Posting, because we believe that’s finally time that we share our talents with the world. In the meantime, we expect nothing less than a full sweep on these NFTs. Good luck at the auction house! The tokens may be worthless in two weeks, but good posting lasts forever.
– The Evening Look Team
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