Good point, you are correct. I conflated the status conferred by ownership with a part of a content distribution mechanism.
Though I think NFTs are about something bigger than patronage. Our brains are wired for building and navigating hierarchies. Status management is a huge aspect of that. On the NFT-less web, managing status was hard and more often than not boiled down to things like post or follower count. But NFTs change the game by allowing more of our built-in status-seeking drives to exist online. One way the game is different is that, unlike followers, NFTs can be gifted—although a version existed for this in the form of “guest posts” and similar mechanisms to share status.
Also, unrelated to this train of thought, I wouldn’t want to own the Mona Lisa. I don’t find that image helpful or inspiring or anything like that. But my monkey brain would love to own an NFT of Meditations on Moloch because of how meaningful that text is for me—and for the community I care about.
Good point, you are correct. I conflated the status conferred by ownership with a part of a content distribution mechanism.
Though I think NFTs are about something bigger than patronage. Our brains are wired for building and navigating hierarchies. Status management is a huge aspect of that. On the NFT-less web, managing status was hard and more often than not boiled down to things like post or follower count. But NFTs change the game by allowing more of our built-in status-seeking drives to exist online. One way the game is different is that, unlike followers, NFTs can be gifted—although a version existed for this in the form of “guest posts” and similar mechanisms to share status.
Also, unrelated to this train of thought, I wouldn’t want to own the Mona Lisa. I don’t find that image helpful or inspiring or anything like that. But my monkey brain would love to own an NFT of Meditations on Moloch because of how meaningful that text is for me—and for the community I care about.