January Musings: No F***ing Thanks

A few years ago I was on the way home from a job interview when I had a powerful case of l'esprit d'escalier (“the spirit of the staircase”), the thing where you think of the perfect thing to say after it’s too late. They’d asked if there was something about me that they’d learn after working with me for a while, and in the moment I’d said something about how they’d find out that I’m a huge nerd. Later I came up with the much better answer that because I design RPGs, I think a lot about how to make processes and systems better, which my bosses usually find out when I send them long emails with ideas about how we do things. My day jobs for the past 6 or so years have involved a lot of stuff where the company wants us to accurately evaluate a set of somewhat subjective data, and a big part of the challenge of that kind of endeavor is figuring out how to create and convey a process that works consistently. I don’t think I’m some kind of savant with this stuff by any means, but sometimes people making it feel like any awareness of process is a superpower.

I’ve been reading, tweeting, and thinking a lot about NFTs lately, mainly because I spend too much time on Twitter and they’ve been coming up a lot. Before you reach for that button to delete your Patreon pledge, I’m not in favor of NFTs, and not planning to try to buy or sell them. I’ll admit to being jealous of the ludicrous amounts of money involved, but a combination of my own morals, their lack of utility, and people’s general disdain for NFTs keep me away. Also, I don’t have any connections to crypto bros who might use my work for money laundering.

A “blockchain” is a decentralized ledger, distributed among all its participants and constantly updated as new transactions are added. It would be a little reductive but ultimately accurate to call it a distributed database, though that wouldn’t get investors clamoring for the new buzzword. Cryptocurrency was the first application of blockchains to draw major attention, but among other things it has the flaw that the majority use “proof of work,” which makes for massive energy consumption. (And with it, shortages of graphics cards.) Crypto’s fans (who are really, really terrible as ambassadors for the technology) like to call out the energy consumption of the mainstream financial system, despite the fact that even with all the brick-and-mortar buildings for banks, Visa transactions and their ilk still use massively less energy. There is a movement towards “proof of stake” blockchains, which reduces the energy consumption, but doesn’t fully solve the ecological concerns.

The decentralized ledger concept has some potential applications outside of the stuff crypto bros are pushing—for example when a small group of companies want to maintain a ledger that is fully open to those parties—but those are a lot more niche than the dream of replacing fiat currency. On a large scale a blockchain is incredibly inefficient—Bitcoin can only handle a maximum of 7 transactions per second worldwide for example—which severely limits its usefulness and makes for surprisingly long processing times. If you're accessing the Bitcoin blockchain directly, a given transaction can take hours or outright fail, which makes it non-viable for something as simple as buying a cup of coffee.

Blockchains also inherently don’t allow for overwriting data, so modifications only come in the form of adjustments that they record as separate transactions. There’s no single blockchain, but rather several different ones, which is fortunate considering that the Bitcoin blockchain is now up to around 360 gigabytes, which everyone mining or otherwise making transactions directly has to store and constantly update. (Since blockchains work by consensus, they also inherently have the possibility of a “51% attack,” where if someone can achieve a simple majority of the blockchain’s capacity, they can dictate its contents.) For any application where you might consider a blockchain, you need to ask if a normal database would be sufficient. Despite the rush of investor enthusiasm for blockchain technology, when the rubber meets the road companies have usually found it an inefficient and unnecessary approach.

If you’re somehow not aware, NFT is short for “Non-Fungible Token.” The first implementation of the general premise of NFTs was in 2014, when Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash threw together a proof of concept at a conference. An NFT is a unique token on a blockchain that identifies an owner and points to an asset. They’re effectively certificates of ownership, but to something that exists on a specific web server. A blockchain can’t process all that much actual data, which is what forced NFTs to be links to assets rather than putting them on a blockchain directly. NFTs thus don’t provide any security for the actual asset per se. Nothing about them stops you from downloading the files they point to, hence “right-clicking” has become a meme. Cryptocurrency lives on the blockchain and thus is very difficult to access without the owner’s consent, and when you hear about someone’s Bitcoin getting stolen, the theft usually occurred via some other means, such as social engineering or hacking an intermediary website.

People tend to use intermediary websites because without them crypto is a huge pain to use, but since crypto is the wild west, a lot of crypto exchanges have been shady or just poorly made. Mt. Gox (the result of the owner of the Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange repurposing his site) had 850,000 Bitcoins go missing, about 7% of all of the Bitcoins in the world. Not every crypto site has that kind of problem, but it’s not unusual for sites to turn out to be the work of some teenage coder who didn’t think all that hard about security. The mainstream financial system has deep flaws that we really need to address, but cryptocurrency has been an object lesson in just how bad unregulated markets can get.

I care a lot about art, but I care about it as a form of human expression rather than as an investment asset. I like going to art museums, but even if I had the money to throw around, I wouldn’t be interested in art auctions where people spend millions of dollars. The commercial side of the art scene has a lot of bullshit, with people taking radical innovations that question what art even is and using them as an excuse to throw random garbage at a wall and call it art. When Duchamp put a urinal in an art museum and called it “Fountain” in 1917, he was questioning the nature of art, what separates it from everyday objects, and while I like it when people break down barriers like that, there have been a lot of cynical imitations of Duchamp’s innovation. It gives fine art a bad name, and clutters museums with random junk that can push works of actual merit (which do still happen!) out of the public eye.

It sucks that so many talented and creative artists don’t get paid well for their work, but that’s also an issue for pretty much all of humanity. Things like Patreon have made it easier for artists to build an audience and get paid, though we still run into the thing that what’s good for artists can conflict with a corporate culture that calls for endless growth. One of the supposed selling points of NFTs is that they can benefit artists, and there have been a lot of high-profile cases of people selling NFTs for astronomical sums. A lot of those have something shady going on though, and it really feels like with NFTs people have essentially recreated all the worst parts of the traditional art market without the worthwhile bits. NFT art is mostly ugly and often procedurally generated, amounting to running every iteration of a picrew. They mostly live on the Ethereum blockchain, which made “smart contracts” a key feature. NFTs generally make it so that the artist receives a percentage of any future sales of the NFT, which is honestly a neat idea, though (1) it’s not possible to update the contract and (2) it specifically only matters insofar as that specific NFT on the Ethereum blockchain is concerned. While it’s possible to attach a copyright agreement to an NFT sale, NFTs inherently lack any kind of copyright enforcement mechanism, and there doesn’t seem to be any way that they could have such a thing in the first place.

Where it originally cost around $70 to mint an NFT, some newer sites have reduced the fees, in some cases even making it free, and there’s been an accompanying explosion of art theft. DeviantArt implemented a system that notifies people when someone makes an NFT of their art, and that system has inundated some artists with notifications, enough to show that there are likely bots doing the minting now. The idea that it’s going to be good for artists doesn’t seem to be holding true. There are a few exceptions, a handful of artists who made a ton of money from NFTs (and some of them might even not be involved in a money laundering scheme), but given just how much money crypto guys claim to have on hand they ought to be able to be up there with Suspiciously Wealthy Furries in terms of the amount of money going into commissions.

NFT fans like to bring up the Mona Lisa, trying to say that right-clicking an NFT is like snapping a photo in the Louvre. This ignores that if you go and take a photo of the Mona Lisa you don’t end up with a flawless replica of the painting, unlike what happens when you download the image an NFT points to. A forger who could make a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa would be a world-class genius in their own right, whereas most people—literally about 80% of the world’s population—have the means to make a perfect copy of an NFT in their pockets in the form of a smartphone. We also aren’t talking about iconic, world-famous pieces painted 500 years ago by one of the all-time great artists of human history, but more often than not mass-produced ugly jpg images.

NFTs are in essence an attempt to create artificial scarcity of something that is inherently un-scarce. Monetizing content that’s so easy to duplicate isn’t easy, but we’re progressed from Don’t Copy That Floppy to Napster to BitTorrent to the current proliferation of subscription models. There are issues with the sheer number of subscription services and how little revenue some of them give to creators, but we do have better avenues than ever for artists to get paid.

One area where crypto fans are talking up NFTs is games, which is more in my wheelhouse. Working in game design forces you to think about systems and how they influence human behavior, which makes me wish more people at least dabbled in game design enough to see these things. That way maybe some of the people who created NFTs might have anticipated that they’d lead to rampant art theft.

Crypto fans think that you’ll be able to obtain an item as an NFT and then use it in multiple games, even when the original game it came from shuts down its servers. While that’s technically feasible, it strikes me as the kind of idea that won’t go anywhere in the long term. It’s just the kind of innovation that game devs might experiment with a bit and then move on from. One of the ways the Sega Dreamcast distinguished itself from the PlayStation and N64 was that its standard memory card was a “VMU,” or “Visual Memory Unit,” which had an LCD screen and basic game controls. When you had it plugged into your controller it could serve as a secondary display, and you could load mini games to play on the go that would then let you earn points in the main game. Aside from its poor battery life, there just weren’t a lot of games that used it, and even fewer that used it in a compelling way. Tech Romancer had those minigames, some football games let you pick plays without another player in the room seeing, and Soul Calibur would show a chibi version of the character you were playing. Sony released a similar “PocketStation” for PS1 in Japan only, but the general concept died before long. Similarly, innovations like the Gamecube/GBA link cable and the Wii Remote got some interesting uses here and there (Pac Man Vs. and Wii Sports come to mind), but for the most part game devs kept making the same general kinds of games as before on the hardware as best they could.

Going between games is a more difficult proposition than people might realize. From a pure game design standpoint, a designer should vet every asset that crosses over to ensure it functions in its new context. Strictly cosmetic items don’t usually affect game balance, but the moment they do, players will usually go en masse towards whatever is most effective. When Halo 3 let you play as Covenant Elites in multiplayer, players realized that it’s very slightly easier to get a headshot on an Elite, and the vast majority used Spartan avatars instead. Anything that directly affects gameplay needs to be able to withstand the utmost abuse. It doesn’t matter much if someone is doing that in a strictly single-player game, but (to my irritation) gaming is more about multiplayer than ever these days.

Back when I worked at a company that localized and published cheap Asian MMOs, I spent some time playing one of their games on a live server to get a feel, and I found that entering a PVP zone was essentially a death sentence because there were so many whales who’d spent $2,000 or so maxing out their characters. Another game had a major infestation of hackers, so any time you got into PVP there was a good chance you’d wind up facing an outright impossible challenge. Identifying, vetting, and balancing every NFT item would take a lot of work, and even if someone could devise a more portable standard, there’d inevitably be competing standards and exploits. Also, the moment you give players control over anything visual, you’re going to have to figure out how to keep them from posting dicks, as I discovered immediately after I started playing Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast.

From a technical standpoint it becomes even more complicated. It goes a bit over my head, but my understanding is that modern games often require choices about engines and implementations that make porting an asset from one game to another even more complex than it might sound to a layman, sometimes even for games in the same franchise that use the same engine. That’s a lot of resources that game developers would have to expend on something that’s uncertain and may only ever apply to a small fraction of players. I can imagine some publishers creating interoperability with their own titles (plus the occasional cross-promotion), so that e.g., Blizzard might let you acquire an item for Word of Warcraft and use it in Hearthstone, but they don’t need a blockchain to do that unless they’re specifically trying to squeeze money out of crypto guys and investors who’ve decided that NFTs are the Next Big Thing.

For better or for worse, video games are first and foremost a commercial enterprise now, and the companies involved tend to jealously guard their IP, which is another major barrier to creating the kind of interoperability NFT fans are envisioning. Even if the technical aspects were trivial, getting the likes of Blizzard and Ubisoft to share assets would be a serious challenge. Fan-made mods often live on the fringes of legality, staying up exactly as long as an IP holder is willing to let them, and between major companies the stakes would be a lot higher than a fan having to take something down because of a C&D letter.

They’re also pushing for “p2e” or “play to earn” to become a major facet of gaming. This is simply the idea that in the course of playing a game you’ll get rewards that can include NFTs and monetary incentives. The President of Square Enix just released a letter about how the company is going to look into NFTs and blockchain stuff, dismissing the concerns of “some people who ‘play to have fun’ and who currently form the majority of players” as he lays out the purported benefits. The push for greater monetization is something gamers have learned to live with, but it mostly makes for worse experiences. DLC can add interesting new content and breathe new life into a game, but loot boxes and microtransactions can easily add gambling and create a pay to win environment. Marketplaces for in-game items have largely been terrible too. Blizzard ultimately shut down the auction houses for Diablo III, and gold farmers have been a problem in MMOs for years now. People are bad at managing economies even in the real world where big players can afford what are supposed to be the best and the brightest (though given how popular Austrian School economics is, that particular field isn’t doing so hot).

The biggest weakness of blockchain technology is that the trustworthiness of that shared ledger is only as good as the information going into it. It has some unique properties and applications, but it doesn’t have anything to overcome the fundamental computing truism of “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” Bitcoin at least outright lives on the blockchain, and it represents an objective baseline for who owns what amounts of the cryptocurrency. (The lack of recourse when things go wrong is a whole other issue of course.) Copyright is complex and can often come down to judgment calls and legal proceedings in the best of times, and NFTs have no protections in terms of verifying the provenance of assets from before someone minted the NFT. While it’s conceivable to create them with an attached contract that delineates copyright—and governments might even go as far as to create legal frameworks that make those kinds of agreements binding—as things stand there’s nothing stopping anyone from screenshotting whatever’s on Disney’s home page and making it into an NFT, even if Disney’s lawyers aren’t going to be happy about it after the fact. Likewise, while an NFT can digitally enforce giving the original artist a share of future sales that happen on that blockchain, it has no ability to regulate anything that happens off the blockchain, so you they’re powerless to stop those Twitter bots that throw stuff up for sale as T-shirts.

One NFT guy got tired of how furries have so vociferously rejected NFTs and turned a bunch of furry avatars into a mosaic that he then sold as an NFT, and then learned the hard way how the DMCA takedown process works. In my experience furries are generally quirky but chill people (the ones I've met have been inordinately fond of wearing tails and giving hugs), and more importantly they’re disproportionately represented in important tech roles. It’s been said that if someone bombed a furry convention, our IT infrastructure could be decimated. The fact that furries have rejected NFTs even more emphatically than most should tell us something. It apparently rankled some crypto fans enough to get them to try that stunt, which promptly backfired.

I’ve been a technophile for about as long as I’ve had sufficient cognitive development to form opinions on things, and there are a whole lot of consumer technologies that I jumped on as soon as I could afford them. Today I have a smartphone, an Apple Watch, multiple HomePods, a laptop, a whole collection of keyboards, some smart lights, a 3D printer, a car with CarPlay, a tablet, Bluetooth headphones, and so on. Where I’ve stuck with these things, they perform some function and do it reasonably well. (I was going to say they serve a practical purpose, but I did get some Nanoleaf light panels, which are nifty but purely aesthetic.) Since the head of my bed is at the opposite end of the room from the light switch, I got some smart light bulbs so I can turn the lights on and off just by telling Siri. (I am at times profoundly lazy, plus sometimes it’s fun to put on pretty colors.) That’s about as far as I’m willing to go with the “internet of things” right now though. It could be nice to have a thermostat I can adjust with Siri, but I can’t see any reason to get a smart refrigerator or toilet. And regardless, I don’t want any of these things if there’s a serious risk of someone hacking them. Apple is far from perfect, but they’ve shown a significantly greater commitment to security than a lot of their competitors, which is why I’m willing to own a HomePod and not one of the competing smart speakers.

I’m similarly skeptical about the whole “metaverse” trend, and I’m hardly alone in that. Where NFTs have some actual grassroots support (though there’s undoubtedly a lot of scammers and sock puppets in the mix), the metaverse is mostly a corporate PR stunt. People have been trying to do virtual reality since well before computers were really equipped to handle it, and there was a lot of futurism about how some day you could put on your VR goggles and gloves to set about doing everyday office work. VR hardware has made some considerable improvements in recent years, but it’s still a major added expense for experiences that some find compelling, but currently amount to a relatively successful video game gimmick. Personally, a few years ago I started getting motion sickness just from playing regular FPS games—which sucks because I wanted to re-play the Halo and Wolfenstein games without feeling nauseous—so VR may end up being a nonstarter for me even if they do achieve their dreams.

Zuckerberg cited Ready Player One as an inspiration for Facebook’s transformation into Meta, apparently ignoring that RP1 is a (poorly written) dystopia story. We’re a long way from VR tech being compelling and comfortable enough for people to practically live in a virtual world. As things stand, it seems unlikely that there will ever be something comparable to The Oasis—a vast, defining virtual world under a single company—and there are already multiple competing companies talking about creating their own metaverses. They’re also already behind other similar ventures. There was a recent news story about a metaverse wedding, but people have been holding virtual weddings in Second Life and various MMOs for a while now. Pics from Final Fantasy XIV weddings easily blow the metaverse version out of the water aesthetically. People have doing various kinds of virtual socializing for decades now, from MUDs to MMOs to VRChat, and so far, Meta has shown us about the most blandly corporate take on the premise imaginable, without even Ready Player One’s pop culture slurry.

Given that it’s redundant with so many things that already exist, there isn’t really a clear definition of what the metaverse is actually for. Facebook is a behemoth that essentially lucked into a dominant position in a highly lucrative industry. As of this writing Facebook has 2.89 billion users around the world (in comparison, Twitter is currently on its way to 200 million users), and they owe a lot of that success to the absurdly wide adoption of smartphones suddenly making the internet more accessible than ever before. In the Anglosphere I often see people asking who the hell is using Facebook, and aside from Old People, it’s popular enough in other countries that it’s a problem. In some parts of the world Facebook practically is the internet, and with their understaffed and unfocused moderation, the site can become a firehose of misinformation, particularly in regions where they lack the staff to even understand what’s being said. Facebook suffers from a lack of focus in general though, and outside of selling ads on social media feeds, the company’s ventures are all over the place. The shift to the metaverse seems more than anything a gamble on a way to stay relevant and keep growing. With both Facebook and Instagram they have their hands on about as much of the world of smartphones as they possibly can, and are hoping that VR becomes the next thing to similarly take off, or at least that they can convince investors of that.

They can talk about how the metaverse can be a way to work, socialize, do various recreational activities, etc., but those are all things that we can do online now without the need to spend hundreds of dollars on VR headsets. Having a single platform that can handle all of those kinds of things isn’t a terrible idea, but I’m decidedly leery of putting that amount of power in the hands of one company, especially one with Facebook’s track record. Roblox has about 150 million users who can use it to socialize and not only play games but create them. It’s also an exploitative and unethical company that takes advantage of developers and its young users, and in a lot of ways Meta feels like it’s aiming to be a more mainstream version of Roblox.

There’s a long-running trend of “solutionism,” the idea that we can solve problems simply by deploying the right technology. Having the technical means to do something is only part of the equation though; systems only matter insofar as they function while interacting with human beings. People will do things you don’t expect, ferret out exploits, and at times just ignore your systems. It’s not possible to anticipate and correct for everything people might try to do, but you’re going to do that much worse if you rely entirely on technical measures. Blockchain originated from libertarianism and its profound distrust of human beings and institutions, but its flaws expose how systems that serve human beings can’t function without some amount of trust in people. It runs parallel to how in TTRPGs while rules can have a powerful influence on the game as it happens at the table, human problems require human solutions.

There are very real problems with the world’s monetary systems, and I tried to read Debt: The First 5,000 Years but I got too angry reading about what they did (and are still doing) to Haiti. These are problems that we need to grapple with, but cryptocurrency attempts to tackle those problems almost entirely with software. Its slow processing times and extreme volatility has made it less of a currency than a speculative asset—to the point where crypto enthusiasts talk of “stablecoins” that defy the usual volatility—and whatever Satoshi Nakamoto may have intended, it quickly proved that some amount of regulation is necessary to keep financial systems on track. It’s not all black-market stuff, but there’s a lot, and it’s also the preferred currency of extortionists and other scammers.

The tech industry has a long history of cycles of hype about new trends and technologies. Some of them work out, but even the ones that do will have hype that goes way beyond what ultimately became the version that people actually use. For a while the internet seemed like it could be just a passing fad, a thing for hobbyists with maybe some business applications, but there was also the dot-com bubble, where startups were throwing things online and assuming money would come flooding in. Startups like Pets.com burned out quickly, and some more established companies like Cisco were massively overvalued for a time. That was a high watermark for ill-conceived startups, but companies like Juicero, WeWork, and Theranos show that that trend never completely went away, and in fact got even more money involved. Blockchain and the metaverse are among those things that got trendy in the news, to the point where a lot of companies were announcing something or other with those technologies simply so they could attract investors. The future is persistently hard to predict of course, but the arguments against NFTs and the metaverse are cogent and show an understanding of how technology and business work in the real world.