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NFTs as skeuomorphs: Weaponized sameness and fascist utopias

2022; Wiley; Volume: 125; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/aman.13805

1548-1433

Catherine J. Frieman,

FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance

In a much-quoted viral Gawker article, writer Dan Brooks (2021) describes NFTs—short for nonfungible tokens and used primarily to denote digital pop-art that operates as cryptocurrency financial instruments—as combining "the nuanced social awareness of computer programmers with the soulful whimsy of hedge fund managers. It is art for people whose imaginations have been absolutely captured by a new kind of money you can do on the computer." He deplores the aesthetic of NFTs alongside their environmental and economic destructiveness and describes their adherents as perpetual adolescents, immature and toxic, lacking in higher feeling, foresight, and taste. Other commentators have deconstructed the ways NFT art markets hurt artists (Dash 2021), operate as some unholy combination of a pyramid scheme or multilevel marketing scam and a speculative bubble (Olson 2022), and contribute to crypto's staggeringly pernicious environmental footprint (Tabuchi 2021). These critiques and others continue to be published and to garner widespread interest and approval. And yet. Over the course of 2021 and (perhaps to a lesser extent) 2022, visual artists, athletes, and other celebrities have created NFTs that have sold for enormous sums in Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies; NFT markets boomed, attracting investors and the already wealthy, but also plenty of ordinary crypto enthusiasts from outside the financial sector; and communities or clubs of investors aggregated around brightly colored, flashy collections like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, CryptoPunks, or the open-source Nouns DAO (Figure 1). Through it all, the meme-influenced NFT art did exactly what memes do: it spread widely across the internet through processes of imitation and iteration, a form of creative recombination common to online communities and digital art. Examples of the Nouns DAO collection. (Creative Commons license CC0) [This figure appears in color in the online issue] Image description: An array of four rows of six images from the Nouns DAO collection. All take the form of busts of anthropomorphic figures in three-quarter profile with different heads, square glasses in different colors, neutral-colored backgrounds, and highly patterned, colorful shirts. The art is colorful, cartoonish, and pixelated. Each image depicts a pixelated noun as the anthropomorphic figure's head, but some of these are hard to distinguish or interpret. At the heart of the NFT art phenomenon is a tension between authenticity and reproducibility. Although the tokens themselves—the stable URLs or "receipts" on the blockchain—are eponymously nonfungible, their JPEG incarnations are eminently fungible. Right-clicking (copying, saving, and reposting) an NFT JPEG purchased (often at great expense) by someone else is a common form of public critique levied at NFT investors to dispute the originality of a given NFT. To me, this practice wildly misunderstands NFT art. Imitation and iteration seem fundamental to the ecosystem. Successful collections spawn myriad copycats. Numerous NFT collections that ape (with apologies for the pun) the Bored Ape Yacht Club have been listed by Crypto.com among the most-traded NFT collections. The Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Rumble Kong League, and CyberKongz are all more or less ape-related with recognizably similar art and stylistic choices. Zoomed further out, the NFT marketplace itself is clearly mimicking established art markets, including replicating many of the same flaws, from money laundering to speculative bubbles to collectors who are more investors in financial-instruments-that-happen-to-be-called-art than art lovers. Here, I want to tease out these relations of imitation and iteration. Taking an archaeologically influenced material culture studies perspective on NFTs and NFT art collecting more broadly builds on archaeology's long-standing efforts to take digital objects seriously as objects (Aycock 2021; Jeffrey 2015; Morgan 2019, 2021; Rabinowitz 2015). I propose that if we want to understand what NFTs do and why they are valued (not to mention, why their destructiveness seems at best not to bother and at worst to attract NFT adherents), it behooves us to look at these mimetic layers and locate them within longer genealogies of engagement with and production of material culture. My contention is that the evident lack of authenticity or uniqueness and endlessly iterative fungibility are, in fact, key to inspiring buy-in—both literal and figurative. My entry point into this domain of inquiry is skeuomorphism, defined here broadly as a meaningful imitation in one material of an object typically made in another (Frieman 2012b). Although skeuomorphism recently entered the digital lexicon to describe design choices made to approximate digital objects to physical objects through the use of patterned user interfaces (UIs) (e.g., an app bookshelf with pseudo wood grain patterns and leather-styled features made to look like a set of wooden shelves) (e.g., Page 2014), the concept has a long history in archaeology. It was coined as a descriptive category for stylistic or technical choices that lagged behind technological changes—an aesthetic of the vestigial, like stone copies of wooden architectural forms or painted patterns on early ceramics imitating basketry (Colley March 1889). Certainly, this sense of superfluity underlies much of the digital design critique of skeuomorphic UIs (Pogue 2013). Archaeological readings of skeuomorphism are frequently linked to evolutionary models of technological change and used to highlight material instabilities as new technologies emerged and old aesthetics adhered to them (Blitz 2015; Taylor 2007). Imitation has also been extracted from these linear and functionalist frameworks and explored as a meaningful material property in its own right, with distinct technological and social histories. Thus, skeuomorphism has been interrogated through the lens of object agency (Knappett 2002), value creation (Frieman 2012a), subversive practice (Harrison 2003), and identity formation and affiliation (Frieman 2010, 2012b, 2013). The goal here has been to shift our understanding of skeuomorphism (and imitative practice more broadly) away from the realm of passive aesthetics and positivist progress narratives and into a more social context where the gestures and technological sequences that produce skeuomorphic material could be explored alongside the impact and perception of those materials. That imitation is not just aesthetic but also powerful is not itself a novel observation. Taussig (1993), following Benjamin ([1936] 1969, [1933] 1979, [1933] 1999), situates the power of mimetic acts and things in the liminal space between the copy and the original it invokes and on whose meaning it draws. Copies employ this power to reshape the world around them, reformulating the relationships between the body and reality, between individuals, and between people and things. Indeed, even in the digital space, researchers are now revealing that skeuomorphic design choices produce genuine impacts on people's online behavior (Meng and Leary 2022; Pelet and Taieb 2017; Urbano, Guerreiro, and Nicolau 2022). Skeuomorphs don't just look a certain way; they shape how people engage with technology and understand their relations to it. In my work on innovation (Frieman 2021, 72–78), I have returned to the concept of skeuomorphism in order to unpick the contemporary pejorative association between imitation and a lack of creativity. I argue that emulation is intrinsically creative, as it requires constant reinterpretation. Moreover, technological imitation and the mimetic qualities of skeuomorphic objects—viewed as a sort of textile of interwoven materials, gestures, schools of thought, learned practices, histories of making, and relationships—create a rich milieu for communicating complex ideas about affiliation, social values, and how one relates to specific practices or technologies. In a digital context, this is most visible in the vibrant online communities of artists and makers who iterate and create through creative recombination and remixing or "knowledge collaboration" (Stanko 2016). Through remixing a digital object—a pattern for a 3D model, for example—an artist demonstrates their creativity and expertise in a way that enhances their connectivity to other members of their community (Flath et al. 2017). The aesthetic of online memes clearly emerges from this culture of creative recombination and emulation. The concept of the meme famously originates with Dawkins (1976), who saw it as a sort of social parallel to the gene: a unit of information that could be passed on from mind to mind, evolving through selective pressure as it spread. More recently, the term has come to encompass a wide variety of viral practices—from dances to images to text strings or joke formats—that are transformed and shared online on platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook. Just because something is viral, however, does not make it a meme (Miltner 2017; Shifman 2013, 2015). Memes are defined by a participatory and transformative element: although they share a format, core text, or common idea, they are the product of creative recombination. Milner (2015) argues that the process of "memetic participation . . . characterized by the creation, circulation, and transformation of collective texts" is itself what makes a meme. This tension between collective practice, shared texts, and novelty lies at the heart of meme culture. Following Owens (2019, 103), audiences consume and disseminate memes because the shared template of a given meme format or genre renders them "familiar and recognizable" and, hence, relatable. In other words, memes form an emotional media that helps create and reinforce relations between people, facilitating conversations and bridging personal and cultural differences, and this is due in large part to their skeuomorphic quality—the way they disseminate a shared and expected, familiar and comfortable grammar (text, image, format, action, etc.) while allowing for personalization and reinterpretation through creative recombination. Memes have a quality of sameness that is enhanced by variations in presentation, not overwritten by them. Artist Pierre Chaumont (2019) terms the emergence of emotive communities around memes as "memesis," which he defines as "the process of a community creating itself through the spreading of its culture." Indeed, from its origins on online forums like 4chan and /b/, meme culture has operated through in-jokes, shared vocabulary, and key memetic texts that both enhance connections among community members and create boundaries to distinguish communities from outsiders and "normies" (Nagle 2017). Memes denote community membership even as their dissemination strengthens and expands that community. NFT art, with its cartoonish characters, sometimes animated in rudimentary games or videos and frequently reproduced as profile pictures (PFPs) seems to foster its own sort of memesis within intensely invested (again, figuratively and literally) communities connecting through Twitter and Discord servers. Insiders are created and boundaries enforced through the conscious promotion of "clubs" and collections as online communities and the deployment of obfuscating crypto terminology. While outsiders mock NFT buyers by right-clicking, following the principles of meme culture and the exigencies of the social media attention economy, both emulation and dissemination create influence (Shifman 2013, 32–33). This is an art form and subculture in which imitation signals both admiration and affiliation while replication (even when motivated by mockery) provides "free memetic labour" (sensu Goerzen 2017) crucial to enhancing the value of the NFT and the prestige of its purchaser. Following Frye (2022), when it comes to NFT art, "the reproduction is the original, and anyone can experience it for free. The only thing that's really scarce is the clout of ownership." In more anthropological terms, NFTs might be understood as a species of inalienable possession that can be continuously exchanged and reproduced while retaining a stable lineage and mythology (Weiner 1985), a history of transactions documented for eternity on the blockchain and its permanent record books. However, instead of the knife-edge of keeping-while-giving, we see NFT enthusiasts acquire clout and status from keeping-AND-giving. The uniquely reproducible properties of digital objects, and the norms of the NFT community, mean that one is able and encouraged both to keep ownership of an NFT and at the same time to give others access to it through licit copies and right-clicking, concomitantly concentrating wealth in an individual and enhancing their prestige through acts of reciprocity. Skeuomorphism, then, is not just an important interpretative tool to describe or analyze NFT art but seems also to contribute directly to both its increasing value and its potent memesis. Although NFT art bills itself as paradigm-shifting, in fact it has a clear art historical genealogy. In the early twentieth century, Italian futurists promoted disruptive art that championed mechanization, machinery, novelty, youth, and a belligerent masculinity, as well as repudiating the aesthetic and cultural choices of earlier generations. In order to shock traditionalists, their work was frequently intentionally grotesque and discordant, and in their manifestos, they enthused about destruction, violence, and pollution as a symbol of thrusting mechanization (Poggi 2009). Proponents of NFT art and the crypto-sphere echo much of this language, attitude, and sentiment in their engagement with "normies" and other community outsiders. Of significance here is that many of these futurist aesthetic principles were (and are) shared with fascism (Benjamin [1936] 1969; Eco 1995); indeed, Marinetti authored both the original futurist manifesto (Marinetti 1909) and the subsequent fascist manifesto (De Ambris and Marinetti 1919). Moreover, an art form whose appeal and dissemination rely on sameness and emulation clearly recalls fascist art's imperative of unity, conformity, and standardization (Huener and Nicosia 2006; Machin and Richardson 2012). Koepnick (1999), drawing on Benjamin's ([1936] 1969) model of the aesthetics of fascism, argues that promoting the consumption of standardized industrial products and popular culture was a necessary complement to the uniforms, chants, and drumbeats of Nazi public spectacles. Together they created an image of communality and a sense of community, papering over the ways fascist politics deconstructed and inhibited other forms of social and interpersonal solidarity. He sees in this orgy of capitalist consumption and conformity a sort of thwarted utopia creating "a phantasmagoria of power and community" (Koepnick 1999. 53) for the citizen-consumers of the fascist state. This history offers a cautionary tale about the very real dangers of growing a vigorous community around a grossly destructive technological trellis and then reinforcing and sculpting it through an aesthetic of sameness and emulation. Certainly, the whole crypto-sphere, with its facilitation of the financialization of everyday life and social relations, could be described as a sort of fascist capitalist utopia. Likewise, in the communities of NFT enthusiasts, we can observe the growth and elaboration of a particularly aggressive, discordant, and masculine form of utopian capitalism (cf. Mendoza-Denton 2021). In this context, imitation, replication, and memetic labor all contribute to the increasing value of digital goods and the expansion and strengthening of the enthusiast community. Communities of consumers affiliate themselves with art collections and practices of consumption, creating micro-identities of distinction within a highly imitative and undifferentiated ecosystem, tribes of purchasers chasing the clout of membership in a highly viral, capitalist elite. The art itself is a sort of insignia or flag, but embodied (Morgan 2019; Taylor 2002): it not only signals community membership but, in its use as a social media PFP, becomes its owner's public face, their avatar within the NFT community and their calling card outside its boundaries. Skeuomorphs, as I have argued elsewhere, are ideal boundary objects (sensu Star and Griesemer 1989), particularly potent tools for creating shared identities and value systems across divergent communities because they can draw on a diversity of technological, semantic, and aesthetic practices (Frieman 2012a, 2012b). Opining about cartoonish aesthetics or ease of copying rather misses the point when imitation and replication create value for the owners of NFT art and—in the futurist tradition—the environmental destructiveness of the media is just the Gucci sunglasses on the cartoon ape. Instead of condescending laughter or misguided right-clicking, we should perhaps more carefully consider what other values, practices, politics, and ways of being are mobilized via memesis through the communities of idealistic NFT consumers as they keep-and-give. This article was written and researched on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country, and I pay respects to the Elders, past and present, of this beautiful place. I benefitted from critical support and feedback from Caroline Schuster whilst drafting this. Open access publishing facilitated by Australian National University, as part of the Wiley - Australian National University agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.