The Line Must Go Up
NFT art! Play-to-earn! Web3! Cryto! xyz-Punks! Bitium Platinum Classic coin now accepted at posh auction houses! Metaverse! Metaverse! METAVEEEEEEERSE!
I call bullshit on all of it.*
* Okay, to break editorial voice: look, I know I seem biased, given that I semi-ironically assigned the commercial vision of “The Metaverse” as a whole, a -2 (yes, negative two) of 5 stars in a major art publication. But also remember that I have a considerable investment in (and deep love, and profound excitement for!) digital arts, virtual worlds, digital artists, underground digital communities, and video games as capable of some of the most profound artistic practices of contemporary society. So, with that in mind, please take whatever respect you have for me, muster up your deepest curiosity, and watch the video “The Line Goes Up”. This will likely be the most important piece of art and games criticism of the 2020s. Now back to our normal, authoritative tone.
The vast amount of sheer carnival-barker-hype, theoretical-utopianism, and techno-babble around game-like NFT art and play-to-work games creates an absolutely brilliant smokescreen, obscuring both the practicalities and imagined future proposed by these systems, so it’s about time a clear-voiced critic stepped in to provide a bedrock critique of the system that has been hilariously described as “content-free DRM”. Dan Olson is the perfect middle-state film and video game theorist to take on this project, and do the deepest possible dive into this much-ballyhooed (and already bubble-burst) game-art-asset hybrids. Situating the fetish with crypto-everything into the context of the 2008 market collapse, Olson spins forward examining not the claims for this supposedly revolutionary but increasingly clearly reactionary media container. While a bit long, he weaves together the broader political situation, a thorough examination of the technology, on-the-ground reportage from within the NFT art community, examinations of play-to-earn game economies, in an entertaining and incredibly informative fashion. But the ultimate success of his project rests on the way Olson uses art and games criticism and journalism to suss out what the hyper-capitalism ghost-in-the-machine of crypto/NFT/play-to-earn games’ imagination of the future is: a future where everything—EVERYTHING—in life is an asset, and then to ask if that utterly amoral, accumulation-driven imagination actually leaves room for art, play, society, community, or any other form of non-monetized imagination.
Creator: Dan Olson (Folding Ideas)
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
Connections:
Hito Steyerl - In Defense of the Poor Image
Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative?
Abigail Thorn - The Problem With the Video Game Industry