What I say when people ask if I am worried about the death of NFTs

By Luke Whyte, Editorial Director

When people ask me if I’m worried about the death of NFTs, I tell them about a short science fiction story by Terry Bison I’m fond of titled, They’re Made Out of Meat. 

The story centers around two intelligent beings capable of traveling faster than light discussing one’s recent discovery of a solar system containing sentient, purely carbon-based lifeforms “made up entirely of meat” (i.e., us). It’s a hard concept for the second character to grasp: 

"No brain?" "Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!" "So... what does the thinking?" "You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat." "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!" "Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?" "Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

Disgusted, the two characters agree to “erase the records and forget the whole thing”, marking our solar system “unoccupied”. Thus damning humans to live out our existence alone, capable only of traveling short distances through space in our “special meat containers”.

Worrying about the death of NFTs is, in my opinion, typical of thinking meat in the meatspace. It’s carbon chauvinism, to quote Carl Sagan. 

Life relies on growth. Growth relies on expansion and, if we’re honest, the heyday of meatspace expansion is likely behind us. We’ve been to all our planet’s corners, we’ve put them on the derivatives market and we’ve covered them in concrete.

So where will we grow from here? Some say we turn outward. They suggest we get in our “special meat containers” for seven months and build Tupperware on Mars. Ok, sure, but others ask, what if we journey inward? What if we transcend the meat? What if we augment its reality, expand its universe and journey toward a post-carbon digital frontier of near infinite possibilities from inside our living rooms? This is the promise of the metaverse.

When people ask me if I’m worried about the death of NFTs, I tell them about Krista Kim’s Mars House, the first NFT digital house (no Tupperware required), which was sold as an .mp4 on SuperRare for more than twice my mortgage.

“Mars House and the project I created was really a sneak peak into the future of NFTs,” Kim told SuperRare, “the next generation, which will become 3D, digital, programmable assets in augmented reality.”

I then tell them about Thobey Campion’s The Gateway, the “first 4th-dimensional NFT”, just minted this week and featuring a lossless zoom functionality – a first step toward NFTs that represent…