Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun: NFTs and the Prohibition of Expenditure
There’s nothing new under the sun, yet. Smart contracts—computer programs or transaction protocols meant to be executed automatically—have been around since the mid-2010s. Were we to take the Nietzschean motif of amor fati—the eternal recurrence of exponentially recurring and self-referential cycles—to task, the current NFT craze could be compared to the 90s dotcom bubble (which itself coincided with the cultural contagion that came from the East known as Pokémon). Translated to our current cultural landscape, it is the same memetic contagion we would describe as mimetic desire.