Link: Doctorow: NFTs are a flex
The NFT explainer I’ve been looking for from Cory Doctorow:
On Oct 26, an NFT bro calling himself Midwit Milhouse coined the term “right-clicker mentality” to refer to these spoilsports who insist on pointing out the inconvenient truth of his white-hot ponzi scheme.
Milhouse used the term to disparage an amateur chef who made his own version of a $2,000 “Salt Bae” steak for $90. Salt Bae is a trendy London chef who charges tens of thousands for gold-leaf-covered steaks that he showers with salt in a kind of tableside piece of performance art.
Milhouse called this person “a great example of right-clicker mentality,” whose homemade steak didn’t deliver “the satisfaction, flex, clout that comes from having eaten at Salt Bae’s restaurant.”
https://twitter.com/kenlowery/status/1455662848345055232
Milhouse went on: “The value is not in the cost of the steak. Go ahead, make yourself a gold-coated steak at home. Post a picture of it on Instagram. See how much clout it gets you.”
And then, displaying galactic-scale lack-of-self-awareness, “Salt Bae’s dish costs around 1500GBP because people want to pay 1500 GBP to show off that they can afford to pay that much. It’s all about the flex.”
You really couldn’t ask for a better encapsulation of the NFT bezzle: buy an NFT to “flex” and “show off you can afford to pay that much.” Ignore the intrinsic value or satisfaction of the underlying work. You’re doing this for “clout.”
Right-clicker-mentality is a value we should all aspire to. As Matthew Gault wrote on Motherboard: “Sometimes a word or phrase comes along that’s so perfect it almost makes you angry.”
“To right-click is one thing, but to have a right-clicker mentality implies an ontological break between crypto-fans and critics. Indeed, it implies the person saving the JPEG to their hard drive isn’t just wrong, they’re broken in some way.”