Well, here we are again. Around this same time last year, I published an opinion piece titled “NFTs are killing the planet.” At the time of publishing, I understood NFTs as a fringe concept, something that existed on the peripherals of the tech industry, and I was concerned about its spread into art-related fields. NFTs are anti-consumer, highly business-focused and detrimental to the art world. Oh, and not to mention they’re disastrous to the environment. I wrote last year’s article in order to spread awareness of this growing digital asset and its consequences.
Today, the usage of NFTs has spread as a recreational hobby and a business and sales enterprise. In short, NFTs are wildly more popular since my opinion article one year ago. Last year’s article is so dated, in fact, that I mostly referred to the concept as “crypto art” since that was how I could best explain the phenomenon of cryptocurrency-aligned artwork. Nowadays, the term NFT is so popular that you hear it being tossed around as a talking point on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” with the esteemed talk show host having purchased and flagrantly flaunting his own non-fungible token for an art piece on live television. They’re so much more widespread, but certainly no less detrimental to our environment.
Now I am not so naïve as to think that my student newspaper op-ed would single-handedly educate the world’s population about the dangers of minting frivolous JPEGs on the…
