Rattibha

Web 1.0: the web is for sharing information!
Web 2.0: but what if we could make money too?
Web 3.0: the web is only for making money.

To be more slightly historically accurate it's more like:
Web 0.1: information!
Web 1.0: maybe we can make money too, sometimes?
Web 2.0: make money too by designing it all nice!
Web 3.0: we built a pyramid scam into the very DNA of the web so you can't NOT make someone money

Not to sound like a communist making fun of capitalism but you're trying to make the very substrate of information flow in the modern age into a ponzi scheme.

I've seen Soviet propaganda that had less severe critiques of capitalism than that. This is some Brave New World/Make Us Happy shit, where you've got a dystopia that takes existing trends and turns them up to 1000 to expose the underlying problems of the system

And that's one of the real problems with trying to make fun of this shit: you cannot make a heightening joke, it just doesn't work. You can't satire it by taking it to the point of absurdity, because it's already there. You end up just describing it accurately

"so imagine in the future, the world is dying because of all the co2 in the atmosphere and someone designs a type of money powered by releasing more of it and destroying computers!"
"why would anyone do that? Unrealistic, stick the stories about Martian invasions."

"so people can use the death-of-the-planet money to buy images. But they don't really own the image, it's lot something they can hang on their wall. Instead a computer says they own it, and anyone else can steal it trivially"

"robert, I know you're a grand master of scifi, but I think your story about a polycule fleeing lobster monsters who hate geometry and end up flying to Oz was significantly more realistic."

"OK so here's the new idea: in the future we've got a worldwide network which provides cheap and easy access to all information and communication and commerce, and people are trying to replace it with a version based on making money by killing the planet"

"THAT WOULDN'T EVEN BE A SENSIBLE CAPTAIN PLANET EPISODE! GO BACK TO WRITING ABOUT HOW ROBOTS HAVE RULES, ISAAC!"

There a lot of people suggesting these NTFS things are just a thinly veiled money laundering scheme and to be honest, I'm not sure I'm that optimistic. Because don't get me wrong, that is the optimistic read on the situation.

"a bunch of rich crooks are using this scam to launder the money from their crimes because it's a new method that's not as monitored as the old ways, so the authorities aren't keeping an eye on it as closely, yet"

That's a way more optimistic take than the one where these people actually think it's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to kinda prove you own a jpeg

And the twist that would mean it was too unrealistic to be a scifi story?
They're not even good jpegs.

You're not "owning" custom art or photographs by modern masters, it's the output of generic procedural generation systems. You've got people paying thousands for a squiggle or a pixel art monkey that should have stayed on 2003 deviantart where it belonged

Oh my God. I just got it.
They're bad on purpose. It's part of the scam.

You ever get an email saying you can get millions of dollars from some prince in Nigeria? You know how they're badly spelled and formatted?
That's not just them not speaking English well, it's on purpose.

The idea is that the scammers don't want to waste time talking to people who will figure out that it's a scam. Those people waste their time and make them no money.

The scammers want to target the people who will not figure it out, because they are the ones who will make them money.
So the bad spelling is an obvious red flag, ensuring the only people who reply are the people who will miss further red flags.

And NTFS are doing the same thing. They're bad on purpose, because if they weren't, they'd attract a bunch of people who'd realize it's a scam and would tell similar people to avoid it.

By making it the silliest and most pointless shit, they're preemptively selecting for people who have no idea about the value of art and clearly don't know anyone who does.

And they're the ones most likely to believe the scam and actually pay up.

They don't want this scam to look half reasonable, because then it'd attract people who look into the details and go "HANG ON A MINUTE!" and start broadcasting that it's all a scam

By making it look bad from minute one, it ensures the only people who will bite are the ones foolish enough to hopefully miss the fact it's a big scam. It saves them time and money and cuts down on the backlash of people figuring it out and telling everyone

"in the future there's a global communication mechanism and there are words you shouldn't say because if you do, robots will show up and copy your name and face and try to get your friends to give them money, and they'll be invisible to you!"

"STOP SMOKING ALL THAT WEED AND GO BACK TO WRITING ABOUT A BIG TUBE IN SPACE FULL OF ALIENS, CLARK!"

When are the tripods coming? I know they're gonna mind control us while slowly xenoforming our atmosphere, but I think that might be a better future than the one we seem to have ended up in.

At least there the atmosphere is turning poisonous because of the evil aliens we can fight against, instead of doing it ourselves while refusing to stop because we're making a bunch of money, and some brain trusts on the internet figured out how to monetize accelerating the end

My climate change hot take is that I don't give a shit about how much it costs to address the problem and I think it's irresponsible when people talk about the price tag.

Because it seems like this should be obvious to everyone and I feel like a fool saying it, like I'm stating the obvious, but if we're looking at two futures, one where we have to spend a lot of money and still have a planet to live on, and one where we save the money but don't...

It kinda seems obvious which choice I would take.

Like "oh no what if the global economy collapses and its like the 1920s and people are starving in the streets!" versus... We all die.
Yeah, those options suck, but I think this is why we've been talking about trolley problems so much recently.

And not just because it distracts people from asking "hey why are we in this situation in the first place?"
Because usually when you have to chose between to bad options, it's because you failed to make better choices earlier.

Maybe we would have two bad choices if we'd made better ones 50 years back, but given that we lack a time machine and now are stuck with two options, bad and infinitely bad, mark me down for one "bad", please.

And arguing that it won't be that bad seems pointless. Unless you have some information on why destroying the planet we depend on to live is good, actually, it shouldn't make one cent of difference in which one we'd all pick?

Anyway I keep having a vision of the news saying we've discovered a Dino-killer asteroid coming in fast, and here's the NASA guy to say "good news, it's far enough out that we can stop it. We're working overtime to build the rocket to launch next year and knock it off course"

And for balance here's the wall street fucker who says hang on a minute, let's not be hasty. That rocket is going to cost 50 billion dollars, think of the deficit!

NASA guy: but if we don't launch it, we'll all die!
Wallstreet: but 50 billion dollars! Can the country even afford that?
NASA: I DON'T CARE HOW MUCH IT COSTS! DO YOU WANT TO DIE?
Wallstreet: I don't know, it sounds like you don't care about the economy. People will lose jobs!

Anyway I know I'm known for Twitter threads that go off on weird barely connected tangents, but that isn't one. You should be the thinking about environmental impact every time anyone mentions any aspect of this shit.

It's a way to turn wasting electronics and electricity into money, without producing anything valuable as a side effect. It's like a factory that just produces pollution directly.

Anyway I have to go do things. Hopefully things that will result in useful output and not just wasted time and money and power and carbon and electricity.

OK SO two more things:
First, I want to be clear that this isn't just one thing. It's a bunch of interrelated things which are bad and scams and should not be touched:
cry/pto/curr/enc/ies in general
N/F/Ts
web3/web3.0

they are layered on each other and each have their own reason to be bad ideas. In theory you could try to build something that's not a bad scam on top of one of the others, but you still inherent all the problems of the lower layers

in reality, that doesn't seem to have ever happened, probably because anyone legitimately trying to build something good would notice the problems of the lower layers and feel it's a bad idea to try to build on that.

It's like trying to keep homeless kids warm by donating some of the furs from your puppy-killing machine.

secondly I want to be absolutely clear that when I say things like "scam" I am not trying to be hyperbolic, like you might say "Man, Nintendo is still selling Zelda: Breath of the Wild for 60$, four years after release? What a scam!"

no it is my firm believe that all of these technologies are scams, in the classic sense. There may be occasional true believers and theoretically some of them had good intentions at the start, but they are primarily being operated as scams now.

the intention is to take your money and give you nothing, or something worthless.

and the reason this shit is so fractically complicated and confusing is because it's a classic confidence trick. Clearly this is very complicated tech stuff, you can't hope to understand it all, but this guy seems smart and they say they'd made a lot of money off it...

and you don't want to miss out, do you? this is a limited time offer, after all.
And here's someone else who says they got rich off it! tell them again, Mr. Shill, how you got a bunch of money off buying some pixelart?

I mean it literally. They are scams.
At best they're technically-legal pyramid schemes like "multi-level marketing", and very few of them raise to that high level of ethical quality.

I just say this because I don't want your take-away to be that "foone hates crytypocurrentseas and ntfs and wob3.11". I do, but that's not the point. The point is I'm saying they're scams, and they're bad scams that have bad side-effects.

you'll lose your money and you'll help destroy the planet in the process.
You should always react to them by running screaming in the opposite direction.

it would arguably be less damaging and more ethical for them to punch you in the face and run off with your wallet.
But they can't do that over the internet and they can't convince VC investors to give them millions for that scheme, so here we are.

like sometimes the discussion comes up like "should we ban crytypocurrentseas?" and I would say that that is asking entirely the wrong question. The correct question is more like "why didn't we already have laws against this kind of scam already?"

"and if we did, why weren't they applied?"

this feels like a variation on that 2000-era boom when a bunch of patents were being issues for doing obvious and old things, but "over the internet".

just now it's "what if we did scams from the victorian era , but using imaginary internet money?"

and just like how "rotating an image BUT OVER THE INTERNET" shouldn't be a patentable thing, doing a classic confidence trick shouldn't be a technically legal thing just because you did it with math-money.

anyway, an actual tangent I thought earlier while I had to pause to drive around:
Has anyone thought about how all this shit is the fault of the RIAA/MPAA?

the borkchan is based on p2p technology, distributed hash trees, and the like. These are all technologies they didn't have to invent, they could just reuse from existing projects.

and why did those products exist? well, because napster got shut down by the RIAA, and central directories for p2p became an unworkable liability, so we had to build decentralized methods for distributing data across the internet that the RIAA and MPAA couldn't easily stop

and now we've got bitchon and ethernetpoints and ntfs and wob3.11 all because we wanted to pirate metallica songs and marvel movies in peace and the RIAA/MPAA said no

so all this advanced technology had to be built to evade them and it was just sitting there in open source projects, ready to be reused, and it was snapped up by the worst people imaginable who wanted to make money out of math instead of doing some simple piracy.

REJECT THE BORKCHAIN!
RETURN TO STEALING METALLICA-UNFORGIVEN_2(128kbps).MP3 OFF #!!!!!!!TEEENMP3Z ON DALNET!

/me holds up lighter.gif

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