A few days ago, Justin Bieber bought an NFT for the price of 500ETH (about $1.5 million at the time this article was written). This is, I believe, a landmark event. In the following article I will try to understand it in a historical context. I will show that the NFT is the latest of a long series of important human inventions which were made to make our trust in other people obsolete. These inventions had (and still have) a significant impact on the way humans live together. I want to show that they, albeit being very convenient in many ways, also pose a serious threat for humankind. This seems to be contradictory: isn’t the world supposed to be safer, if we don’t have to rely on humans? As we will see, this is only true for the individual which makes use of these inventions, not for society as a whole.
Let’s start to study the history of such inventions from the present:
Why would some people pay such an enormous price for a piece of art which has, compared to similarly priced classic works, probably very little artistic value:
- Most expensive NFTs are not made by famous artists
- Some are even procedurally generated (i.e. a computer can produce hundreds of them in seconds)
- Technically they represent only an URL to a picture which can be replaced with something else anytime
Of course we could argue that there is a speculation bubble: „I know it has no value, but I’m sure somebody will buy it from me soon for a much higher price“. But even a speculation bubble needs to be fueled by some kind of enthusiasm. Where could this enthusiasm come from? The reason probably is that NFTs are a much safer way to store value than normal art. They cannot be stolen (at least in theory) or get otherwise lost. They exist as a large number of copies on a blockchain. Conventional artworks in contrast can be stolen (even if this is rather rare due to their uniqueness and the resulting difficulty to sell them), can burn in a fire or can be damaged in a flood. To trade conventional art, you need to trust auction houses and galleries. Not even gold or money in a bank account can match the safety of NFTs: to store and trade both, trust in some institutions (i.e. banks) is required. Furthermore, the value density of NFTs is almost infinite: the private key which represents (and controls) the possessions can be stored on a tiny memory stick.
Now NFTs and cryptocurrencies are just the latest and so far fanciest inventions which make trust in humans obsolete. But there have been many other such inventions before. Let’s look at some of them. It is interesting to analyze their impact on society to get an idea what could happen when the newest breed is set loose:
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Money
A few thousand years ago, money did not exist. There was no way to store large amounts of value. If a member of these early societies had a very productive (or lucky) phase, the only thing he could do was to share the fruits of his work with others. He (or she) could then hope that his favors will be returned by the other members of the group when a less lucky phase comes. It seems logical to assume that social prestige and status were associated with the amount of help one could provide for others. Of course this scheme worked only within a group of people who knew each other well. Helping efforts were somehow stored in the memories of the group members. This collective memory served as a kind of early „bank account“ or „blockchain“. When some early traders started to travel to buy and sell rare goods, this system did not work well anymore. The strangers they were trading with could not be sure that a similar amount of valuable goods will be returned later. So they were not willing to give their goods for free. Therefore a system to compensate someone immediately for a „gift“ was required. Also gifts with a very high value density were required to make them easy to transport. This led to the invention of money, a standardized „return gift“ with high value density. Later versions of money (i.e. „fiat money“) required trust into an institution to work (today the central banks).
The important thing is to realize that money was ultimately invented to make trust in humans obsolete. -
Insurances
Not long ago, insurances did not exist: if somebody’s house burnt down, others would help to rebuild it. With the invention of insurance policies, trust in your fellow human beings was replaced by trust into an institution (i.e. insurance company). With the insurance, you don’t need others to help you voluntarily anymore, you can simply pay people to help you. -
Social System
Our modern social system is only about hundred years old. Before its invention, people would just help if someone was in need. The invention of the social system replaced trust into fellow human beings by trust into a government institution.
We see that for a long time trust in other humans was essential to survive. Later trust in humans has been replaced by trust in institutions (like banks, insurances and central banks). Even brands are an invention which replaces trust in people (somebody selling „no name“ shoes at a market) by trusting an abstract entity („Nike“). With the invention of blockchains we don’t have to trust humans (or institutions controlled by humans) at all anymore. We started to fully rely on technology.
Why are we so obsessed with getting rid of the need to trust people? Of course humans are unreliable, can be unfair and often have limited resources. And we are always trying to minimize pain. We strive for a life which is guaranteed to be painless for us and our loved ones. Therefore there is a huge interest in getting humans out of the equation.
But these obvious benefits come at a high price:
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Suffering and unfair treatment by others make us compassionate
Only if we have experienced unfair treatment at least once by ourselves, we can feel compassionate with others who get treated unfairly. The reason for this is that our brain uses our own mind to assess the feelings of others. If someone does not know about suffering, he does not know that others can suffer. His actions will therefore not consider the possibility of other peoples suffering. A human who has never suffered has necessarily a cruel and selfish personality. -
Only getting help from real people makes us feel safe
To receive help from others is an essential experience. Our brain has evolved in a way to interpret these events as a signal that we are safe. An abstract paper contract with an insurance company simply does not have the same effect (even if it is technically doing a good job): insurance contracts did not exist yet at the time when our brain has evolved. So even if we are technically safe we often still feel threatened. This explains why so many people suffer from anxiety disorders. To receive help is a very rewarding experience. It makes us feel loved, needed and protected. If we never experience this, we must feel lonely, useless and scared. -
We deprive ourselves of the pleasure to give and help
Because helping others is an ancient way to „store value“ it is considered an effective strategy by our brain. Therefore helping and giving are rewarded, i.e. we experience good feelings when we behave compassionately. By organizing our modern societies in a way which does not require helping anymore, we deprive our brains of an important source of positive reward. This makes us unhappy and depressed.
The more we insure our lives against harmful impacts, the more we become insensitive for other peoples sufferings. This sooner or later leads (or has led already) to a cruel society where we can rely on the help of only very few people (basically our close family). Furthermore we only very rarely experience receiving substantial help from others which creates fears in us. Because of these fears we feel the need to further insure our lives against the suspected cruelty and egoism of other people. This is a vicious cycle! And this is the ultimate reason why NFTs and cryptocurrencies are so extremely successful. They are tools designed to further dehumanize us. And the reason we all want them is that we all are already so dehumanized.
Technology made our modern societies to reach deadlock in a state which is harmful for everybody.
The help we can receive from others is not guaranteed but potentially unlimited. But to be able to help ourselves in all kinds of adverse circumstances we need to amass value (like money or property). This is another method how we can insure ourselves against disasters. And to amass large amounts of value is only possible by depriving others of their share. We don’t enjoy exploiting others, it is against our nature (see 3. above). To make it easier for us, we have developed all kinds of tools to keep the people we exploit at distance. It has become very easy today to create suffering and not even become aware of it:
- Some CEOs fire thousands of employees by sending an email. This is very convenient, they don’t have to look into thousands of sad eyes.
- With „online marketing“ and „growth hacking“ we have perfected the science of treating people like cattle. People are controlled in „marketing funnels“ and manipulated using countless psychological tricks to make them spend money.
- Ransomware has become a big business. Targets are even more attractive if they are insured against ransomware attacks.
- We receive tons of spam emails which try to exploit us in one or another way every day.
- Many computer games are made intentionally to be as addictive as possible.
- Many people are rude and abusive on social media platforms. Most would never behave like this when facing their victims personally.
- If we hire people on online freelancing platforms, we don’t see how poorly these people can live from the little we pay them for their services.
- We buy online clothes which were produced under horrific conditions. But we are well shielded from the corresponding disturbing images of sweat shops: we see only images of rich and happy people on these websites.
- To improve our status we lie on social media platforms about our lives, showing only the glamorous parts and hiding our problems. This makes other people depressive.
We have invented „fire and forget“ communication, often unidirectional (like advertising) and one-to-many. And we are now exposed on average several hours per day to this mess!
In our modern digitized economy people appear only in statistics and very rarely as individuals. Individuals are replaced with „personas“ which represent large groups of people. The victims of our actions are often invisible, the damage often abstract: there are, for instance, people exploiting the social system in a way they would never exploit real people who helped them voluntarily.
I caught myself once thinking that maybe people deserve no better treatment. Aren’t they horribly ugly with their stupid cravings for branded stuff and shallow entertainment? But then it came to my mind that these people were made like this. They are the terrible product of our many successful attempts to exploit them. The results of decades of smart advertising targeting every conceivable weakness of their mind. We even made many of them physically ugly: we made them buy super-gulp drinks full of sugar and XXL burgers. We try to trick them into buying status symbols, often objects with little real value but only an artificially created scarcity (like luxury watches or game items). We hijack their attention with poor quality entertainment only to be able to show them more advertising.
How big is the damage so far? I fear it is huge. We can analyze a recent event to get a rough idea: there are large numbers of people believing in the Qanon conspiracy theories, which include the believe that some elite circles kill children and drink their blood. Now we might just want to laugh about these claims but the number of people who think this is indeed possible should make us think about the phenomenon for a minute.
It is known that many animals eat their own offspring under certain circumstances. They do it only in great despair when raising the offspring seems to be impossible. Only in this rare case it makes sense to at least recover the caloric energy stored in the offspring. As we are the descendants of animals it is safe to assume that such instincts remain active also in humans to some extent. The reason why we perceive children as cute is exactly this: that we don’t simply eat or kill them. But the feelings of compassion can be weakened by a depression. Mothers are able to kill their children if they are in a heavy depression.
Now what does it mean if so many people fear that the elites eat children? Such a fear is a projection. I have mentioned above that our brain uses our own personality to predict the behavior of others. It therefore means that a substantial fraction of the population fears that they could be capable of eating children. It’s a self assessment! If we want to understand from where such a devastating perception of ourselves comes, we don’t have to go far: it has become so ubiquitous to exploit others, we all do it so often and we experience it so often from others that we have come to the conclusion that most people must be monsters. We have come to a point where we expect only the very worst from ourselves and others. The results is a collective deep depression, a very pessimistic view of our society which we are mostly not even aware of. It is the source of all the hate we see today on social media. It is the reason why the US is on the brink of a civil war.
Who is to be blamed? The answer is as simple as it is surprising: nobody! The whole disaster is a collective phenomenon which was made possible by technology and our lack of awareness. We don’t know who we are and what we really need to be happy. And we don‘t understand yet the impact of technological innovation on our society. We urgently need to start working on these issues!
Image: Shutterstock / Lightspring
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