#IMAGINE I had gone in and had to listen about nfts and then go to a separate business class after ...

[jisungshotfirst]

I skipped class coz anxiety but apparently it was partially about nfts so a good save<333

[aion-rsa]

What Are NFTs and Why Are Comics Companies Selling Them?

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With an announcement from collectible maker VeVe, the world was introduced to the first officially licensed DC NFTs. “What is VeVe?” you might ask. Or possibly “What is an NFT?” 

Excellent questions, friends! We will do our absolute best to explain them in clear, concise terms to you right now. 

Here are simple answers to complicated questions: NFTs are ecologically devastating vaporware created to part very dumb, very wealthy collectors from their money, made by stoned libertarian math nerds trying to prove a point they think is profound but is actually just very banal. Veve is no different than any other secondary huckster that springs up around a particularly successful snake oil economy.

As for why DC is getting in bed with them, it’s hard to know if the company is trying to just be cutting edge or if it’s because AT&T took on a shitload of debt buying Warner, and like anybody with creditors breathing down their neck, they need to make several quick bucks or else. 

THE NEXT EVOLUTION IN COMICS HUCKSTERISM

Two full decades after Metallica teamed up with record labels to make sure we didn’t own anything we purchased digitally, a group of rejected Captain Planet villains came up with a workaround: NFTs.

NFTs use blockchain, a distributed AI accountant that requires ENORMOUS amounts of processing power to work properly, to assign certificates of ownership and record transactions. Accepting the pitch behind blockchain technology requires one to step back to an absurdly abstract level, then a zoom back into the extremely micro. 

Every transaction between two people is built around trust: I trust that you are giving me the thing I’m paying for, while we both trust that the currency I’m handing you has a (relatively) absolute value which will allow it to be traded for other things. Blockchain purports to eliminate that trust: it uses a distributed ledger that anyone can see and confirm to record our transaction; it uses an algorithm to make sure every copy of the ledger is the same; and it assigns tokens to each transaction that can be given a value. 

NFTs add in an absurd additional abstraction: ownership of digital media. I have always had the ability to, for example, produce an animated reaction gif from a television show and sell that animated reaction gif to you for a fixed sum of money. You would be an idiot for purchasing that reaction gif for several reasons: anyone else could make the exact same gif and you could find it in iMessage’s search engine, for one. But nothing in the past has ever prevented this transaction from occurring. 

The “innovation” around NFTs is that it uses blockchain technology to “prove” “ownership” and “authenticity,” a sentence that is so heavily caveated that to express it correctly in writing makes the writer look like a conspiracy theorist. The NFT assigns a ledger value to the piece of digital artwork, and then that ledger value is what is sold between parties. It is a non-fungible token – unlike Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, the idea is these art pieces’ tokens’ inherent value doesn’t change (hence the non-fungible), while cryptocurrency is a token whose value is relative to other less imaginary currency. 

This has led to some frankly embarrassing sales online. Jack Dorsey, the vacuous and bizarre founder of Twitter, is auctioning off his first tweet, something that already happened, that you can find with one simple Google search, for millions of dollars. Beeple, an artist the internet assures me is real, auctioned off a digital JPEG collage of all their previous works for $69 million. Jose Delgo, a comics artist from the ‘70s that very few people remembered until this happened, has made almost $2 million selling NFTs of his own artwork, spurring DC to email freelancers to remind them that they should not be using DC characters to try and skate atop this obvious bubble. Not because of the catastrophic environmental impacts caused by the blockchain algorithm, mind you. No, it was because AT&T needed to get some of that sweet, sweet tulip money.

THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS MOSTLY POOR PEOPLE

Joanie Lemercier, a French artist and climate activist, has sold six NFT pieces so far. The act of accounting for those sales – assigning a token, then transferring ownership of that token from Lemercier to the purchaser – was 8.7 megawatt hours of energy. That’s roughly equivalent to the entire energy consumption of his studio for two entire years. 

The algorithm used for NFTs, like the one used for Bitcoin, other cryptocurrency, and all blockchain transactions, requires computers perform a certain volume of complex activity to access the ledger. That’s how it prevents fraudulent transactions – by making the barrier to writable access so high that it’s functionally impossible. 

Of course, as demand for these transactions increases, so too does the computing power needed to record them. Hence the massive power consumption from Lemercier’s sale. Bitcoin transactions, especially since Elon Musk invested heavily in them to drive up their price (presumably the “pump” part of “pump and dump”), now use more energy annually than the entire country of Argentina. 

Here’s the catch: in a perfectly green, zero emission energy environment, this wouldn’t be a huge problem. Unfortunately, as anyone who has gone outside in the past 18 months has noticed, we’re not quite there yet. And while adding another Argentina to global power load isn’t the same as adding another China, it is still a significant drain on existing grids, and if it’s not timed and sited right, it’s using very dirty power (it’s fairly complicated, but the short version is electricity generation generally gets dirtier as demand increases).

So when Grimes auctions off a certificate of creation for her digital artwork, she’s triggering a set of computer actions that put a massive stress on the power grid that churns out oodles of negative environmental consequences, which according to study after study fall disproportionately on poor people and people of color. 

Or! Instead of auctioning off something that clearly doesn’t exist, maybe she’s just using fracked natural gas as laundry detergent for mafia cash.

DIGITAL MONEY LAUNDROMAT

Let’s say I was a certain very sadistic, very fictional, black mask wearing crime lord of an American city and I have $1 million in cash lying around that I made from my operation’s drug business. If I suddenly bought a house with that million dollars, the authorities would notice that large transaction (probably through transaction reporting from the bank handling the sale, or the property exchange paperwork that runs through City Hall) and start sniffing around to find out where that money came from. 

The same goes if I were to purchase IRL fine art through an auction house. The auction house would ask questions about where that money came from, and if it didn’t like what it found, it would report it to the authorities. Same for buying cars, or businesses, or lots of other real life transactions. 

Now replace bank, city hall, and auction house with “a bunch of computers playing tic tac toe against each other on a 1025 square board” and try and guess where the reporting comes in. We don’t have to wait for an answer, that reporting doesn’t exist. 

NFT transactions are the perfect confluence of the shadiness of art dealing with the shadiness of off-book dark web money-moving. They’re not all money laundering, but they are easy enough to use as money laundering that the authorities are getting concerned. 

PRECARITY, PANDEMICS, AND COMICS ART

So why are comics people doing this? To start with, we mean actual people, and not people in the legal sense of the word (corporations).

It’s not hard to see the eye popping amounts of money changing hands and understand why at least some of them are getting involved. But it’s equally easy to look at the economics of the pandemic era of comics creation and at least sympathize with the pull. Comic page rates have been largely stagnant since the 1980s – penciler page rates in recent years are actually lower than the modest demands made by creators during the abortive effort to unionize in the 1970s.

With that money being so limited, most artists relied on the sale of original art, sketches, and sales at conventions to help make ends meet. So the last year has been exceptionally tough on them. Add to that the trend towards digital art, where there’s no actual physical page produced for the comic, and it’s not hard to imagine a hard up artist, one year into not seeing another living soul except for when the grocery clerk brings a bag of food out to their car, seeing someone coming along waving a conservative five figures at them and not explaining the extremely convoluted yet catastrophic environmental impact of the proces, saying yes to the quick cash.

To their credit, many comics creators are repulsed by the idea. Several have expressed serious concerns with NFTs on Twitter, with Doomsday Clock artist Gary Frank expressing “bewilderment” at the idea of his art being used to sell one of these things, and Marsha Cooke, widow of New Frontier great Darwyn Cooke and manager of his estate, going so far as to ask DC to stop using his art in them. 

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Hopefully the companies involved (or thinking of getting involved) with NFTs listen to their creatives. Nothing more honors the spirit of Batman than using his image to help give a pallet of Bratva money a quick scrub. 

The post What Are NFTs and Why Are Comics Companies Selling Them? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[communiteabooks-onlinestore-blog]

Indifference & Reading; Part II: Riding the Train in New York City

I miss reading while riding the train. I preferred to stand so I would, either, find a free space to lean against the side of the car or I’d wrap my arm around a pole, and I would read. When living in The Bronx I would get on the train at Parkchester and ride it, usually to 86th and Lex, but sometimes further. That is a twenty minute ride, at least. I had nearly an hour of reading time every day simply by riding the train. My problem now is the time, where do we find the time to read? Eh, actually, I have more than enough time, but how do we decide to allot our time to one thing over another? ​Sometimes, on the train, something intriguing would redirect my attention. I have too many accounts for it not to be difficult to even come up with one. I do recall one late night when I was riding the train back from Brooklyn—from Brooklyn to The Bronx mind you, so it was a bit of a ride—and a young man, he may have been homeless, and/or just completely out of his mind, sits down next to this older African American woman. He faces her and begins talking to her, only he started in the middle of a sentence, as if an earlier conversation of his had abruptly ended and he arbitrarily decided on this moment to best represent the end of his story—assuming, of course, that there is a discernible ending. The woman wasn’t entirely too phased, her only reaction to this character was to hold her purse a little closer to her chest, although that might be habitual for her, who knows, while she read her book. She was reading. No, but that didn’t stop this guy from talking to her. And, no, what he had to say was not coherent, there were very few coherent ideas coming from his lips, nevertheless it was entertaining, and enough so even for me to put my finger between the pages, marking my place, while I blatantly stared at the happening. His eyes were glazed, I don’t remember him blinking, once. He just stared straight ahead into-, and through the train telling his incoherent story seemingly to this woman but, really, to nobody at all. When he stood to leave. I can’t imagine he actually knew where he was getting off, he must have made the trip so often that the entirety was as automatic as a dog finding his way home after being left somewhere far, far away. He left, and then I continued to read. There is something happening to eye contact. The way people engage with one another. It’s all changing so rapidly, well maybe not even changing, it’s just disappearing, and I honestly don’t think it’s only the way that we interact in person, I, sometimes believe that it’s the undoing of all interactions. How we talk to people and why. I do not recognize this world as the same one I grew up in. And I grew up in the 90’s, I mean, this wasn’t that long ago. Before I moved to New York City I bought a pocket sized travel book called, NFT: Not For Tourists Guide to New York City, and at some point in the book is expressly states not to make eye contact with people on the train. A handful of the stigmas that book created took me a couple of years to unlearn. Eventually I was making eye contact with almost everybody on the train, because that is a human response to other humans. We make eye contact. If you look at people a certain way or are not conscious about what you’re feeling or thinking while your maintain eye contact you might discover some surprising, and unfriendly reactions, but that’s only because we emit what we feel and what we think by how we look at someone inasmuch the same way that we do when we communicate with them verbally, the vast majority of our interactions are nonverbal. So shutting yourself off to the people around you, in the train car, and in the world it isn’t going to create a safer or better place for you, it might sometimes feel safer, but, I mean does it really? This crack head that was sitting on the train telling us his incoherent story was completely out of his mind, but he was harmless because we allowed him to be human—regardless of how different his humanity is from our own. I’m not sure how I got off on this tangent exactly. I know that every time I read a book a big part of the reason that I lose myself in the story is because I am not satisfied with the direction society has gone. We talk about creating a better world, and change, and then we argue about what that means, and we are always wrong. With every step that we take we think that we are headed in the right direction, and still we consistently manage to f$%k it up. Meanwhile I’m trying desperately to lead some semblance of a normal life, but, really, all that I want to do is go build a cabin in some remote woodland area—if I can find one—or to live on my long anticipated dream boat and return to ‘civilization,’ if only immensely dire: such as the imminently problematic, and unlikely event that my boat is sinking. I actually haven’t read anything new in way too long—I’ll leave it up to your own imagination to invent how long is too long in this case, for me—but when you listen to too much news radio and spend even a fraction of the day on Facebook without losing yourself from time-to-time in a good book, or rather when I listen to too much news radio and spend even a fraction of the day on Facebook without losing myself in a good book, it doesn’t matter how green it is outside I know a long weekend of some Golden Milk and several happy pills while binge watching Roku’s background graphic is in store for me or I am going to lose my mind! I suppose that is part of the reason why I miss riding the train, and reading so much. For nearly an hour every day I would both read and be surrounded by people just being people: I would occasionally hear conversations spark up between strangers, random people singing, the occasional argument, but nevertheless everyone on the train, whether aware of the people around them or not, they affected one another—if only for that hour, and my head could be buried in that book so deeply I’ve missed my stop, and the next one, and the next, nevertheless all the people sharing that car with me became a part of that story in ways that I cannot always know.