The Internet Is Just Investment Banking Now

Twitter has begun allowing its users to showcase NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, as profile pictures on their accounts. It’s the latest public victory for this form of … and, you know, there’s the problem. What the hell is an NFT anyway?

There are answers. Twitter calls NFTs “unique digital items, such as artwork, with proof of ownership that’s stored on a blockchain.” In marketing for the new feature, the company offered an even briefer take: “digital items that you own.” That promise, mated to a flood of interest and wealth in the cryptocurrency markets used to exchange them, has created an NFT gold rush over the past year. Last March, the artist known as Beeple sold an NFT at auction for $69.5 million. The digital sculptor Refik Anadol, one of the artists The Atlantic commissioned to imagine a COVID-19 memorial in 2020, has brought in millions selling editions of his studio’s work in NFT form. Jonathan Mann, who started writing a song every day when he couldn’t find a job after the 2008 financial collapse, began selling those songs as NFTs, converting a fun internet hobby into a viable living.

NFTs have become both memes and marketing, too. Taco Bell sold “iconic and original artwork inspired by our tacos.” Gap made NFT pictures of Gap-branded hoodies. The first edit to Wikipedia got the NFT treatment. NFT-native collections, such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s generated images of ugly primates, have become so popular that an individual ape might sell for millions of dollars.

But it’s not terribly helpful to conceive underlying the thing owned, which for themselves. Those who purchase NFTs end up with nothing but a digital record—the deed for a thing that can be copied at zero cost, with zero repercussions.