New technologies of the past few years have sprung up around the idea of blockchains, such as NFTs, and with this "metaverse" nonsense being pushed by Facebook the dissemination of digital scarcity has been slowly coming to a head. I'm of the opinion that digital scarcity (minus a few select use cases, such as for currency) is the antithesis of a free society.
The core idea I want to point out here is that data on a computer can be copied for (effectively) no cost, and distributed for also (effectively) no cost. Data is cheap; it's extremely easy to share with others. In fact, this is one of the most powerful and compelling benefits of computers - how quickly and easily information, software, and works of art can be transmitted to people on the other side of the planet. Digital scarcity artificially imposes difficulty on copying and owning copies of your data with very few real world benefits. I'm primarily talking about works which would otherwise be completely free and easy to copy - a piece of software, a PDF document, the digital data composing an encoding of a video, a FLAC file of a song, or, the most common NFT example today, a simple PNG image. There's nothing stopping you from just emailing or creating torrents for files like these and sharing them with thousands or millions of people. If NFT technology advances further than it is today, it's possible that this paradigm may irreparably change. A PNG image or a video on a video sharing platform may become a highly cryptographically secure transaction with a blockchain just to enjoy it, strictly limited in its ownership by those allowed to view the media on the blockchain.
What do we gain as a society by doing this? Really, the only people that are benefitted are the greedy. Just like proprietary software today is highly controlled through being distributed as executables and having to link up with online servers in order to be used, many other general forms of media will start to be restricted in the same way. It's the conceptual difference between the last generation technologies of music CDs and movies on DVDs: a CD you can easily rip and copy to other devices, while a DVD is restricted to only being played by special authorized players, with restrictions imposed on what parts of the DVD you can skip, and absolutely no freedom given to rip the DVD except with illegal software. (Note that illegal does not mean unethical in this case, in my opinion.) The benefit of controlling media in this way is simply to squeeze as much money out of the general population as possible through artificial scarcity. In the case of software (let's take Adobe Photoshop for example), if nobody can legally or practically change your software or even copy it as it is without paying an exorbitant price directly to the developer, that leads to greater profits. But as a result of that greed, everybody else suffers. And that's exactly the same situation that may result from the proliferation of digital scarcity.
The metaverse ties into this by being the biggest and most public antithesis to software freedom perhaps ever devised, and not just because it's (almost certainly) proprietary software. In the world of Facebook's metaverse, because of how free and easy copying and distributing data is, there's no reason that people should not be able to own swathes of digital "land", decorated with any art they choose, with their avatar looking any way they would like. The actual amount of physical storage in the real world would be minimal (especially for Facebook), and the cost to copy items to place on that property, such as digital models of couches, artwork, chandeliers, etc. is nonexistent. A virtual world is inherently one of the most powerful things we could ever have because the cost of physical objects evaporates and the coveting of physical objects becomes less and less of a problem for humanity. Facebook is undermining this entire idea by popularizing the idea of items in the metaverse being blockchain based, or at least custodial where Facebook verifies the items you have and only allows you to select them from certain categories or stores. Why would they choose to do this? Because it's the "trendy" thing to use a blockchain (not really, for people with an actual brain); because it's in the corporate interest to have more avenues to turn nothing into profit and promote consumerism; because of the massive amounts of money whales have proven they will spend in other software on nothing so long as it's shiny and digital; and, most of all, because it gives Facebook direct control over an entire world of proprietary, restricted software and goods where they can take a cut from every transaction. It's their scheme to turn lead into gold.
Now, I don't necessarily thing that digital scarcity is all bad. I don't even think that the model of digital scarcity that Facebook uses is always bad either. It depends on the situation. For example, cryptocurrency cannot function without scarcity - in fact, currency is scarce by design. Replacing banks and credit institutions with cryptocurrency transactions based on libre software makes the general population more free and more independent, not less. In that case, digital scarcity makes perfect sense. Similarly, if we had some kind of online game with an online economy, like an MMORPG, the experience would be ruined by being able to freely generate items or currency within the game, and therefore it makes sense to have the server the game is running on verify and authenticate the movement of items within the game. Without this, the game would not function. But trying to create an entire virtual world restricted in this way, a world that's advertised as being a place for learning and living a second life, is completely immoral. Will classroom space and virtual classroom materials like whiteboards and anatomy models for teachers working virtually be nickel and dimed by Facebook? Where do we draw the line?
NFTs right now are pretty harmless because very few people actually take them seriously. But the technology has vast, dangerous implications on our freedom in a world that's transitioning to be more and more digital. The web as it is now, mostly free of charge and still working on a "wild west" model, may become restricted technologically, turning it into a walled garden. Think of the damage this will do to people in other countries especially, who cannot afford to buy outright software or works of art (or do not have an accepted currency, consistent internet, or access to a central bank) and therefore must "pirate" these things by necessity. Should their access be restricted even further from living what we in the West consider a normal, even lower class life? I don't think so.
All I want is for you to think about what you're doing and what impact you're having. Think about the ethics behind your actions and the technology you support - not on the terms set by corporations (i.e. "copying is theft"), but on your own terms and with your own moral compass. Consider the utopic civilization that computers have brought us so close to living, with the free exchange of technology, art, and information, and what you can do to get us closer to it. If you're an artist or philosopher, I implore you to consider releasing your works under libre licenses such as the CC BY or CC BY-SA licenses, if not immediately then after a few years of having them be available, instead of contributing to a locked down future by creating NFTs that will decrease the quality of life of many people you will never meet around the world (many of which would never have been capable of purchasing your art or philosophical treatise in print anyways). Do profits trump morality?
July 6, 2022