Doubly infuriating is the smug insistence that this is being done for the "benefit" of creators - as if the point of digital scarcity is a means to benefit creators rather than the speculators who will fuel the secondary market - from which creators see little to no gain. Surprise, Pablo Picasso (nor his estate) doesn't see a dime from the speculation on his art at high-society art auctions - the verifiability of art (i.e., NFTs) benefits overwhelmingly speculators, not creators.
I watched the FB keynote today and some parts were just dystopian. Instead of street art being on a wall for everyone to look at, the VR "street art" expired after mere seconds, requiring you to "tip" the creator to simply keep looking at it? Can we not financialize every moment of existence? FB's vision for the metaverse feels a lot like being nickeled and dimed every 3 seconds for all eternity, where every interaction is commercialized. It's hard to imagine any kind of real shared human experience emerging from this. It feels like FB looked at the state of the real world - where commercial interests are grafted onto the human experience, and decided to just skip the human experience part and go straight to the commercialization part.
Digital scarcity is just such a depressing failure of imagination - artists can produce copies of their art at literally zero marginal cost! Instead of producing art for one customer at a time, they can now produce art that can be sold en masse - so everyone can have access to the art they admire. Why does a pair of virtual metaverse sneakers need to be one-of-a-kind? Why can't we instead sell copies of the sneakers to everyone who wants it, and the price would be low because the marginal cost of production is zero? Why can't we revel in the widespread abundance - provided to both the community and the creator - rather than wallow in the artificially-induced scarcity?