NFTs are typewriters

The NFT market is early. We have a bunch of people experimenting, and even more are merely bandwagoning. Those of us on the inside have faith that something interesting will come out of these experiments, but from the outside, the NFT market looks from the outside like we have a thousand monkeys banging at typewriters and we expect them to produce Shakespeare.

That’s a fair enough perspective. Let’s run with it.

Push the monkeys aside for now.

If you do, you are left with two fundamental technologies: writing, and the typewriter (three, if you count language). You don’t need a typewriter to be Shakespeare (obviously), but if you are a writer, the typewriter enabled you not only allow you to work faster, but to produce content like you hadn’t before.

Even the old, clunky mechanical typewriters allowed an individual writer to easily produce exact copies on the fly, and later electronic typewriters allowed us to correct mistakes as we went as well. Even more, you had writers like William Burroughs use the typewriter itself in the creative process, by taking advantage of its consistent, even spacing to do cut ups. And then, you could think of the first teletype computers as “just” digital typewriters.

So yeah, right now NFTs might be monkeys banging at typewriters, but the fact remains that there is a new technology here, and we are only seeing the first version of it, and we shouldn’t judge it by the fact that it looks like primates hitting random bits on a clunky metal thing.