Silicon Valley – Close Read

The persistence of NFTs

NFTs freak me out. One of the ways in which my grandmother lost touch with her daughter – my mother – was my mother’s generation’s access to and use of computers, smartphones and the internet. And one of the ways in which my mother and father are out of touch with my generation is digitisation: the amount of information, and ways to manipulate it and extract wealth from it, that has become virtual. And I’m becoming surer that NFTs will be one of the big ways in which I’ll lose touch with the generation following mine.

From my point of view, NFTs have two facets, one each for the physical and the digital worlds they span. NFTs are essentially digital, but their name itself – non-fungible tokens – indicates that they are the product of a time in which the physical, typified by the fungible, and the digital coexist but in which the fungibles are still more important, even as the non-fungible is starting to evolve its first ‘offline communities’. Such communities are perhaps the best indications there could be that something is worth noticing, even if it’s misguided or just culturally hollow.

The film (and the book, which I haven’t read) Ready Player One should quickly clarify how powerful and how liberating the non-fungible universe, the metaverse, can be, even though it’s very much an outcome fantasy, and NFTs are allowing people to crenellate around such possibilities. Yet I remain deeply sceptical of NFTs because they exist in a superposition of high energy-consumption, the socio-economic privileges of their proponents, the absence of socialist values in their development trajectories and, immutably, a soup of jargon that constantly keeps their principles out of reach of those who would like to debate them. (The last point is non-trivial: intended inexplicability is a common symptom of scams).

I’m aware that, with these vectors of scepticism, I’m also part of a global community that’s pushing back against the nebulous rhetoric that has enveloped NFT culture – a community animated by the obvious and considerable distance between the present as lived by countless people in the “Global South” and the future as those in New York and California are imagining it.

At the same time, I’ve also been sort of wary of what the essential motivation for the NFT culture and the metaversal tendencies more broadly might be. This picture isn’t immediately clear because both cryptocurrencies and the metaverse are the brainchildren of that white + libertarian + Silicon Valley + tech-bro space that has prided itself on its profiteering, technocratism, cynicism of politics and a unique brand of super-rationalism. So it’s hard to conclude that anything this group thinks is a good idea is more than a good idea to make more money.

On the flip side, the existence of communities around an asset as baffling as NFTs at least indicates the presence of a deeper angst, particularly among people of certain ages. What might this be?

I recently read an article by Ginevra Davis, published on January 21, that attempted a diagnosis:

Our generation is notable for our lack of a youth-led counterculture, or any coherent rebellion, at least not on the scale of the late 1960s. But this lack of open rebellion does not mean that we are more satisfied than previous generations, or that we have nothing to rebel against. We are by many measures poorer, sicker (mentally and physically), and have fewer close relationships than our parents or grandparents. But instead of running away to some proverbial California, we have mostly chosen to express our frustration in private, on the internet, where you can laugh at memes about major depression or wanting to kermit sewer slide from the safety of your bedroom.
In the NFT community, we are witnessing the logical conclusion of a generation that is so alienated, so profoundly unfulfilled, that they are considering abandoning the physical world altogether. At least the metaverse is something new—maybe somewhere they can be rich, or important.

Either this is really true or it’s what the NFT-evangelists are telling themselves. Either way, it’s led to the creation of a parallel dimension that apparently promises to quell the tension that inhabiting the physical world in the 21st century entails. But it’s probably what the evangelists are telling themselves because, for an observer at infinity, it’s very difficult to distinguish the mores of the wider cryptocurrency + metaverse community, especially the self-indulgence and consumerism, from those of the tech scene that this community is apparently tiring of (Metakovan’s eyebrow-raising purchase of that piece of art for $69 million comes to mind). In fact, it’s tempting to consider whether NFTs are the result of a people doubling down on a culture and worldview in search of a purpose that this culture and worldview have thus far failed to produce, that their angst is less the desperation to break out and more the desperation per se. Davis herself is more charitable in her conclusion:

In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” [Joan] Didion captured a moment in time; a small group of teenagers who tried to find meaning in psychedelics. But it was also one of the first major literary works documenting the broader phenomenon of American decadence, or cultural malaise in the face of unprecedented economic prosperity. In the fifty-odd years since “Slouching” was published, a diagnosis of “decadence” has become shorthand for a constellation of cultural neuroses plaguing Western countries, including technological stagnation, cultural repetition, sterility, and nihilism. Unlike in the 1960s, it no longer includes coping with unprecedented prosperity.
As I wandered through New York, I wondered what Didion would think of the festivities at NFT.NYC. Are the desires of NFT proponents to rebuild the world online the endgame of a fully stagnant society—a final detour into the absurd before we give up on progress for good? Or is the starry-eyed optimism of digital true believers a last stand against decadence?
…
I came away from NFT.NYC with a certain respect for the NFT community. They are not taking decadence lying down, and have found a way to revel in the absurdity.

I don’t know agree with her, of course. My principal point of disagreement is Davis’s use of the word “we” to refer apparently to all of us as one cohesive mass. But there are many wes here: on the ground, there are super-rich Americans, wannabe-rich Americans, white Americans, non-white Americans, immigrants; off the ground, there are people around the world that technically belong to the same generation but are operating in much less privileged socio-economic contexts, as well as others in the same context who are in turn further disprivileged by class, caste, race, gender, geography, leadership, etc.

On this multi-layered pyramid denoting many strata of a single generation of people, there are many, many things that people on the lower rungs have left to do – from exiting poverty to eliminating caste-based discrimination, from improving income equality to reducing carbon emissions – before the future looks bare enough to populate with NFTs. The only way a unified “we” makes sense is that we will all suffer the vision this vanishingly small group of wealthy and influential people has for a better future.

On crypto-art, racism and outcome fantasies

If you want to find mistakes with something, you’ll be able to find them if you tried long enough. That doesn’t inherently make the thing worthless. The only exception I’ve encountered to this truism is the prevailing world-system – which is both fault-ridden and, by virtue of its great size and entrenchment, almost certainly unsalvageable.

I was bewitched by cryptocurrencies when I first discovered them, in 2008. I wrote an op-ed in The Hindu in 2014 advocating for the greater use of blockchain technology. But between then and 2016 or so, I drifted away as I found how the technology was also drifting away from what I thought it was to what it was becoming, and as I learnt more about politics, social systems and the peopled world, as it were — particularly through the BJP’s rise to power in 2014 and subsequent events that illustrated how the proper deployment of an idea is more important than the idea itself.

I still have a soft spot for cryptocurrencies and related tokens, although it’s been edging into pity. I used to understand how they could be a clever way for artists to ensure they get paid every time someone, somewhere downloads one of their creations. I liked that tokens could fractionate ownership of all kinds of things – even objects in the real world. I was open to being persuaded that fighting racism in the crypto-art space could have a top-down reformatory effect. But at the same time, I was – and remain – keenly aware that fantasies of outcomes are cheap. Today, I believe cryptocurrencies need to go; their underlying blockchains may have more redeeming value but they need to go, too, because more than being a match for real-world cynicism, they often enable it.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are units of data that exist on the blockchain. According to Harvard Business Review:

The technology at the heart of bitcoin and other virtual currencies, blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. The ledger itself can also be programmed to trigger transactions automatically.

NFTs have been in the news because the auction house Christie’s recently sold a (literal) work of art secured as an NFT for a stunning $69.3 million (Rs 501.37 crore). The NFT here is a certificate of sorts attesting to the painting’s provenance, ownership and other attributes; it exists as a token that can be bought or sold in transactions performed over the blockchain – just like bitcoins can be, with the difference that while there are millions of bitcoins, each NFT is permanently associated with the artwork and is necessarily one of its kind. In this post, I’m going to address an NFT and its associated piece of art as a single, inseparable entity. If you read about NFTs in other contexts, they’re probably just referring to units of data.

The reason a combined view of the two is fruitful here is that AFP has called crypto user Metakovan’s winning bid “a shot fired for racial equality”, presumably in the crypto and/or crypto-art spaces. (Disclaimer: I went to college with Metakovan but we haven’t been in touch for many years. If I know something, it’s by Googling.) He and his collaborator also wrote on Substack:

Imagine an investor, a financier, a patron of the arts. Ten times out of nine, your palette is monochrome. By winning the Christie’s auction of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days, we added a dash of mahogany to that color scheme. … The point was to show Indians and people of color that they too could be patrons, that crypto was an equalizing power between the West and the Rest, and that the global south was rising.

This is a curious proposition that’s also tied to the NFT as an idea. The ‘non-fungible’ of an NFT means the token cannot be replaced by another of its kind; it’s absolutely unique and can only be duplicated by forging it – which is very difficult. So the supply of NFTs is by definition limited and can be priced through speculation in the millions, if need be. NFTs are thus “ownership certificates for digital art that imbue” their owners “with demonstrable scarcity,” as one writer put it. This is also where the picture gets confusing.

First, the Christie’s auction was really one wealth-accumulator purchasing a cultural product created by consuming X watts of power, paid for using a new form of money that the buyer is promoting, and whose value the buyer is stewarding, in a quantity determined by the social priorities of other wealth-accumulators, to an artist who admits he’s cashing in on a bubble, plus allegations of some other shady stuff – although legal experts have also said that there appear to be no “apparent” signs of wrongdoing. What is really going on here?

Minting an NFT is an energy-intensive process. For example, you can acquire bitcoin, which is an example of a fungible token, by submitting verifiable proof of work to a network of users transacting via a blockchain. This work is in the form of solving a complex mathematical problem. Every time you solve a problem to unlock some bitcoins, the next problem automatically becomes harder. So in time, acquiring new bitcoins becomes progressively more difficult, and requires progressively more computing power. Once some proof of work is verified, the blockchain – being the distributed ledger – logs the token’s existence and the facts of its current ownership.

‘NFTs are anti-climatic’ is a simple point, but this argument becomes stronger with some numbers. According to one estimate, the carbon footprint of one ether transaction (ether is another fungible token, transacted via the Ethereum blockchain) is 29.5 kg CO2; that of bitcoin is 359.04 kg CO2. The annual power consumption of the international bitcoin mining and trading enterprise is comparable to that of small countries. Consider what Memo Atken said here, connecting NFTs, fungible tokens and the “crypto-art” in between: “Artists should be able to release hundreds of digital artworks” – but “there is absolutely no reason that releasing hundreds of digital artworks should have footprints of hundreds of MWh.”

Of course, it’s important to properly contextualise the energy argument due to nuances in how and why bitcoin is traded. In February this year, Coindesk, a news outlet focusing on cryptocurrencies, rebutted an article in Bloomberg that claimed bitcoin was a “dirty business”, alluding to its energy consumption. Coindesk claimed instead that bitcoins and the blockchain do more than just what dollars stand for, so saying bitcoin is “dirty” based on Visa’s lower energy consumption is less useful than comparing it to the energy, social and financial costs of mining, processing, transporting and securing gold. (Visa secures credit and debit card transactions just like, but not in the same way, the blockchain secures transactions using consensus algorithms.)

However, the point about energy consumption still stands because comparing bitcoins and the blockchain to the Fedwire RTGS system plus banks, which together do a lot more than what Visa does and could be a fairer counterpart in the realm of bona fide money, really shows up bitcoin’s disproportionate demands. Fintech analyst Tim Swanson has a deep dive on this topic, please read it; for those who’d rather not, let me quote two points. First:

“The participating computing infrastructure for Fedwire involves between ten and twenty thousand computers, none of which need to generate [power-guzzling cryptographic safeguards]. Its participants securely transfer trillions of dollars in real value each day. And most importantly: Fedwire does not take the energy footprint of Egypt or the Netherlands to do so. … the more than 2 million machines used in bitcoin mining alone consume as much energy as Egypt or the Netherlands consumes each year. And they do so while simultaneously only securing a relatively small amount of payments, less than $4 billion last year.”

The energy consumption, and the second point, shows up when users need to protect against a vulnerability of consensus-based transactions, called the Sybil attack (a.k.a. pseudospoofing). Consider the following reductively simple consensus-generating scenario. If there is a group of 10 members and most of them agree that K is true, then K is said to be true. But one day, another member joins the group and also signs on 14 of his friends. When the group meets again, the 15 new people say K is false while the original 10 say K is true, so finally K is said to be false. The first 10 members later find out that the 15 who joined were all in cahoots, and by manufacturing a majority opinion despite not being independent actors, they compromised the group’s function. This is the Sybil attack.

Because the blockchain secures transactions by recursively applying a similar but more complicated logic, it’s susceptible to being ‘hacked’ by people who can deceptively conjure evidence of new but actually non-existent transactions and walk away with millions. To avoid this loophole without losing the blockchain’s decentralised nature, its inventor(s) forced all participants in the network to show proof of work – which is the mathematical problem they need to solve and the computing power and related costs they need to incur.

Proof of work here is fundamentally an insurance against scammers and spammers, achieved by demanding the ability to convert electrical energy into verifiable digital information – and this issue is in turn closer to the real world than the abstracted concepts of NFTs and blockchain. The problem in the real world is that access to crypto assets is highly unequal, being limited by access to energy, digital literacy, infrastructure and capital.* The flow of all of these resources is to this day controlled by trading powers that have profited from racism in the past and still perpetuate the resulting inequality by enforcing patents, trade agreements, import/export restrictions – broadly, through protectionism.

* Ethereum’s plan to transition from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake system could lower energy consumption, but this is an outcome fantasy and also still leaves the other considerations.

So even when Black people talk about cryptocurrencies’ liberating potential for their community, I look at my wider South and Southeast Asian neighbourhood and feel like I’m in a whole other world. Here, replacing banks’ or credit-card companies’ centralised transaction verification services with a blockchain on every person’s computer is more of the same because most people left out by existing financial systems will also be left behind by blockchain technology.

Metakovan’s move was ostensibly about getting the world’s attention and making it think about racism in, for some reason, art patronage. And it seems opportunistic more than anything else, a “shot fired” to be able to improve one’s own opportunities for profit in the crypto space instead of undermining the structural racism and bigotry embedded in the whole enterprise. This is a system which owes part of its current success to the existence of social and economic inequalities, which has laboured over the last few decades to exploit cheap labour and poor governance in other, historically beleaguered parts of the world to entrench technocracy and scientism over democracy and public accountability.

I’m talking about Silicon Valley and Big Tech whereas Metakovan labours in the cryptocurrency space, but they are not separate. Even if cryptocurrencies are relatively younger compared to the decades of policy that shaped Silicon Valley’s ascendancy, it has benefited immensely from the tech space’s involvement and money: $20 billion in “initial coin offerings” since 2017 plus a “wave of financial speculation”, for starters. In addition, cryptocurrencies have also helped hate groups raise money – although I’m also inclined to blame subpar regulation for such a thing being possible.

I’ll get on board a good cryptocurrency value proposition – but one is yet to show itself. The particular case of ‘Everydays’ and the racism angle is what rankles most. “Depending on your point of view, crypto art could be the ultimate manifestation of conceptual art’s separation of the work of art from any physical object,” computer scientist Aaron Hertzmann wrote. “On the other hand, crypto art could be seen as reducing art to the purest form of buying and selling for conspicuous consumption.” Metakovan’s “shot” is the latter – a gesture closer to a dog-whistle about making art-trading an equal-opportunity affair in which anyone, including Metakovan himself, can participate and profit from.

If you really don’t want racism, the last thing you should do is participate in an opaque and unregulated enterprise using obfuscated financial instruments. Or at least be prepared to pursue a more radical course of action than to buy digital tosh and call it “the most valuable piece of art for this generation”.

This brings me to the second issue: what can the energy cost of culture be? For example, Tamil-Brahmin weddings in Chennai, my home-city, are a gala affair – each one an elaborate wealth-signalling exercise that consumes thousands of fresh-cut banana leaves, a few quintals of wood, hundreds of units of power for air-conditioning and lots of new wedding clothes that are often worn only once or a few times – among many other things. Is such an exercise really necessary? My folks would say ‘yes’ in a heartbeat because they believe it’s what we need to do, that we can’t forego any of these rituals because they’re part of our culture, or at least how we’ve come to perform it.

To me, this is excessive – but then I have a dilemma. As I wrote about a similar issue last year, vis-à-vis Netflix:

Binge-watching is bad – in terms of consuming enough energy to “power 40,000 average US homes for a year” and in other ways – but book-keepers seem content to insulate the act of watching itself from what is being watched, perhaps in an effort to determine the worst case scenario or because it is very hard to understand, leave alone discern or even predict, the causal relationships between how we feel, how we think and how we act. However, this is also what we need: to accommodate, but at the same time without being compelled to quantify, the potential energy that arises from being entertained.

At this juncture, consider: at what point does art itself become untenable because it paid an energy cost deemed too high? And was the thing that Metakovan purchased from Beeple, ‘Everydays’, really worth it? While I don’t see that it could be easy to answer the first question, the second one makes it easy for us: ‘Everydays’ doesn’t appear to deserve the context it’s currently luxuriating in.

Aside from its creator Beeple’s admission of its mediocrity, writer Andrew Paul took a closer look at its dense collage for Input Magazine and found “juvenile, trollish bigoted artwork including racist Asian caricatures, homophobic language, and Hillary Clinton wearing a grill”. (Metakovan said in one interview that he felt a “soul connection” with Beeple’s work.) ‘Everydays’, Paul continues, “appears to say more about the worst aspects of the art world and capitalism than any one … of Beeple’s doodles: gatekeeping, exploitative, bigoted, and very, very tiresome.”

Tech bloggers and the poverty of style

I created my writing habit by performing it over a decade (and still continuing). When I first started blogging in 2008, I told myself I would write at least 2,000 words a week. By some conspiracy of circumstances, but particularly my voracious reading habit at the time, I found this target to be quite easy. So it quickly became 5,000, and then 10,000. I kept this pace up well into 2011, when it slowed because I was studying to become a journalist and many of the words I had, to write, were published in places other than my blog. The pace has been more or less the same since then; these days, I manage about 1,000-2,000 words a week.

At first, I wrote because I wanted to write something. But once it became a habit, writing became one of my ways of knowing, and a core feature of my entire learning process irrespective of the sphere in which it happened. These days, if I don’t write something, I probably won’t remember it and much less learn it. How I think about writing – the process, beginnings and endings, ordering paragraphs, fixing the lengths of sentences, etc. – has also helped me become a better editor (I think; I know I still have a long way to go), especially in terms of quickly assessing what could be subpar about an article and what the author needs to do to fix it.

But this said, writing is really an art, mostly because there’s no one correct way to do it. An author can craft the same sentence differently to convey different meanings, couched in different spirits; the complement is true, too: an author can convey the same meaning through different sentences. In my view, the ergodicity of writing is constrained only by the language of choice, although a skilled author can still transcend these limitations by combining words and ideas to make better use of the way people think, make memories and perceive meaning.

This is why I resent a trend among some bloggers – especially people working with Big Tech – to adopt a style of writing that they believe is ‘designed’ to make communication effective. (I call this the ‘Gladwellian style’ because it only reminds me of how Malcolm Gladwell writes: to say what the author is going to say, then to say it, and then to remind the reader of what the author just said.)

I work in news and I can understand the importance of following a simple set of rules to communicate one’s point as losslessly as possible. But the news space is a well-defined subset of communication more broadly, and in this space, finding at least one way to make your point – and then in fact doing so – is more important than exploring ways to communicate differently, with different effects.

Many tech bloggers undermine this possibility when they seem to address writing as a science, with a small and finite number of ways to get it right, thus proscribing opportunities to do more than just get one’s point across, with various effects. Writing in their hands is on one hand celebrated as an understated skill that more engineers must master but on the other is almost always wielded as a means to a common end. (Medium is chock-full of such articles.)

There’s none of the wildness writing is capable of – no variety of voices or no quirky styles on display that an organic and anarchic evolution of the writing habit can so easily produce. Most of it is one contiguous monotonous tonescape, interspersed every now and then with quotes by famous white writers saying something snarky about writing being hard. (Examples here and here.) This uniformity is also reflected in the choice of fonts: except for Medium, almost every blog by a tech person who isn’t sticking to tech uses sans-serif fonts.

Granted, it’s possible that many of these ‘writers’ have nothing interesting to say, which in turn might make anything but a sombre style seem excessive. It’s also possible some of them are just doing what Silicon Valley tech-bros often do in general: rediscover existing concepts like coherence and clarity, and write about them as if people didn’t know them before. We’ve already seen this with everything from household technology to history. It’s also probably silly to expect the readers of a tech blog to go there looking for anything other than what a fellow techie has to say.

But I’m uncomfortable with the fact that writing as a habit and writing as an art often lead limited lives in the tech blogging space – so much so that I’m even tempted to diagnose Silicon Valley’s employees’ relationship with writing in terms of the issues we associate with the Silicon Valley culture itself, or even the products they produce.

The virtues of local travel

Here’s something I wish I’d read before overtourism and flygskam removed the pristine gloss of desirability from the selfies, 360º panoramas and videos the second-generation elites posted every summer on the social media:

It’s ok to prioritize friendships, community, and your mental health over travelling.

Amir Salihefendic, the head of a tech company, writes this after having moved from Denmark to Taiwan for a year, and reflects on the elements of working remotely, the toll it inevitably takes, and how the companies (and the people) that champion this mode of work often neglect to mention its unglamorous side.

Remote work works only if the company’s management culture is cognisant of it. It doesn’t work if one employee of a company that ‘extracts’ work by seating its people in physical proximity, such as in offices or even co-working spaces, chooses to work from another location. This is because, setting aside the traditional reasons for which people work in the presence of other people, offices are also designed to institute conditions that maximise productivity and, ideally, minimise stress or mental turbulence.

But what Salihefendic wrote is also true for travelling, which he undertook by going from Denmark to Taiwan. Travelling here is an act that – in the form practiced by those who sustain the distinction between a place to work, or experience pain, and a place in which to experience pleasure – renders long-distance travel a class aspiration, and the ‘opposing’ short-distance travel a ‘lesser’ thing for not maintaining the same social isolation that our masculine cities do.

This is practically the Protestant ethic that Max Weber described in his analysis of the origins of capitalism, and which Silicon Valley dudebros dichotomised as ‘word hard, party harder’. And for once, it’s a good thing that this kind of living is out of reach of nearly 99% of humankind.

Exploring neighbourhood sites is more socio-economically and socio-culturally (and not just economically and just culturally) productive. Instead of creating distinct centres of pain and pleasure, of value creation and value dispensation, local travel can reduce the extent and perception of urban sprawl, contribute to hyperlocal economic development, birth social knowledge networks that enhance civilian engagement, and generally defend against the toll of extractive capitalism.

For example, in Bengaluru, I would like to travel from Malleshwaram to Yelahanka, or – in Chennai – from T Nagar to Kottivakkam, or – in Delhi – from Jor Bagh to Vasant Kunj, for a week or two at a time, and in each case exploring a different part of the city that might as well be a different city, characterised by a unique demographic distribution, public spaces, cuisine and civic issues. And when I do, I will still have my friends and access to my community and to the social support I need to maintain my mental health.