2022.02.04 互联网现在只是投资银行

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The Internet Is Just Investment Banking Now
The internet has always financialized our lives. Web3 just makes that explicit.

By Ian Bogost
Irene Suosalo
FEBRUARY 4, 2022
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Twitter has begun allowing its users to showcase NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, as profile pictures on their accounts. It’s the latest public victory for this form of … and, you know, there’s the problem. What the hell is an NFT anyway?

There are answers. Twitter calls NFTs “unique digital items, such as artwork, with proof of ownership that’s stored on a blockchain.” In marketing for the new feature, the company offered an even briefer take: “digital items that you own.” That promise, mated to a flood of interest and wealth in the cryptocurrency markets used to exchange them, has created an NFT gold rush over the past year. Last March, the artist known as Beeple sold an NFT at auction for $69.5 million. The digital sculptor Refik Anadol, one of the artists The Atlantic commissioned to imagine a COVID-19 memorial in 2020, has brought in millions selling editions of his studio’s work in NFT form. Jonathan Mann, who started writing a song every day when he couldn’t find a job after the 2008 financial collapse, began selling those songs as NFTs, converting a fun internet hobby into a viable living.

NFTs have become both memes and marketing, too. Taco Bell sold “iconic and original artwork inspired by our tacos.” Gap made NFT pictures of Gap-branded hoodies. The first edit to Wikipedia got the NFT treatment. NFT-native collections, such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s generated images of ugly primates, have become so popular that an individual ape might sell for millions of dollars.

But it’s not terribly helpful to conceive of NFTs as a new form of digital art or ownership or even technology. Owning an NFT doesn’t confer any rights in the intellectual property underlying the thing owned, which anybody can download for themselves. Those who purchase NFTs end up with nothing but a digital record—the deed for a thing that can be copied at zero cost, with zero repercussions.

Forget the hype around all things crypto. Set aside, for a moment, whether it makes sense to spend a fortune on an ape picture. Those matters are distractions. Let’s call things what they are: NFTs represent a first step in the securitization of digital assets. They turn digital data into speculative financial instruments. That shift has enormous implications because computers are in everything, and that makes anything a digital asset—your bank records, your Fitbit data, rings of your smart doorbell, a sentiment analysis of your work email, you name it. First the internet made it easy for people to conduct their lives online. Then it made it possible to monetize the attention generated by that online life. Now the digital exhaust of all that life online is poised to become an asset class for speculative investment, like stocks and commodities and mortgages.

NFTs might burn out, the crypto-collectible equivalent of Beanie Babies. But the more likely scenario is weirder and scarier: a securities market for digital data. Financiers, who previously turned everything, whether loans or hurricanes or payroll data, into bets, will likely go to town on all this fodder. But ordinary people may also become fledgling financiers of their—or others’—computer records. It is, in a way, the most honest turn of the internet epoch. From the start, online businesses have presented themselves as making culture, even as they really aimed to build financial value.

Now, at last, the wealth seeking is printed on the tin.

Imagine if you had a collection of artwork or jewelry, and you wanted to get it insured. To do so, you could make a list of the items—a signed edition of a limited-run print, maybe, or your grandmother’s jeweled brooch. The entry grandmother’s jeweled brooch is not the same as the brooch itself. But the record refers to the brooch—you could even attach a picture to clarify matters in case you had to make a claim against it later. As a proxy for value, an NFT isn’t much different from the words grandmother’s jeweled brooch on a list in your safe-deposit box or your insurer’s filing cabinet. It’s just stored on a blockchain where anyone can, in theory, look it up.

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Consider Beeple’s $69 million NFT. The art—or the thing an everyperson would construe as art, the picture you can look at with your eyeballs—isn’t in the NFT at all. Instead, the NFT points to the place where the art can be seen. That creates some problems. The art—the picture file—could vanish if its URL is moved or the server that hosts it goes offline. Also, anybody who can load a URL can view or download the picture file. Someone with access to the server that houses it can alter or even delete the image.

Some have compared NFTs to receipts. If you’ve ever watched Antiques Roadshow, you know that a vintage Rolex presented with its packaging and original sales receipt helps validate it as authentic and establish its value. When your house burns down in a fire, you present a certificate of authenticity for your limited-edition print or an appraisal of your grandmother’s brooch to claim reimbursement. But it’s just as easy to sneer that NFTs are merely receipts, and that buying one is akin to buying the packing slip for a Rolex without ever getting the wristwatch itself.

Both positions have merit: Paying thousands of dollars for a receipt is stupid, and yet receipts have always exerted substantial value in cultural affairs. In art, horse breeding, real estate, and countless other human affairs, provenance and ownership have always been bureaucratic matters: You own your house because a deed says that you do, and a traceable record of title affirms it. It’s somewhat disconcerting to apply this principle to, say, computer pictures of ugly apes, but perhaps only because those pictures seem so new. One can, after all, own shares of a company, a practice once recorded on physical stock certificates but long since delegated to electronic bank records. Such ownership is entirely symbolic; the owner of stock cannot claim a portion of a company’s inventory or a measure of office space in its headquarters.

Read: What critics don’t understand about NFTs

So NFTs aren’t strange or novel because they make appeals to value, provenance, and ownership via collective fantasies of paperwork. That’s old news. They feel strange and novel because normal people don’t usually construe monetary value in mere references to everyday things, like a cash-register receipt, or computer data.

Belief in such value is, however, completely normal in the financial sector. In that context, an instrument that confers ownership, which can be bought or sold and which holds monetary value, is called a “security.” Stocks are a type of security called equities, which represent an ownership interest in a company. When a firm goes public in an initial public offering, it takes a portion of the ownership of the company and divides it up into shares of stock, which it sells as equity securities to the public. Once bought, the new owners can exercise some limited rights in the operation of the company, for example via shareholder votes. But mostly, people buy stock to speculate in the future value of the company, with the hopes of later selling the security for a profit. The same thing can be done with bonds, which are securities made from debt rather than ownership, or commodities securities, which are financial instruments derived from the market value of raw materials.

In each case, ownership refers to an underlying asset, such as a company or a commodity, rather than the literal possession of that asset. That arm’s-length relationship allows financiers to manipulate value without having to store agricultural products or manage companies. A commodities trader, for example, can bet on the declining demand for corn or pork or oil by trading a futures contract.

The asset that underlies a security typically has some obvious, intrinsic value. A company has value in its physical plant, its cash holdings, its inventory, and its future sales. Corn and pork and oil have use-value as food and fuel. But in the 1970s, finance started to invent securities with less obvious intrinsic value. The most infamous of these were pooled home mortgages, which backed investments that banks sold as “mortgage-backed securities.” The collapse of this type of financial instrument, which hid the exposure of high-risk loans, is widely credited for bringing about the financial crisis of 2008.

But even mortgages have some obvious use in the world. Since home loans became popular targets for securitization, all manner of assets have become collateral for securities. There are weather derivatives that allow shippers to hedge against delays or damage caused by storms. Goldman Sachs issued a bond backed by future royalties from the Bob Dylan song catalog. Movie box-office futures were briefly authorized for commodity-market trading but then prohibited due to fears of insider trading. Regulation notwithstanding, anything that can be construed as an asset can become the basis for a security. And if anything can become the basis for a security, then why not JPEGs? Before software ate the world, finance already had.

Today, some technologists have included NFTs in their vision for a third age of the internet: Web3. It’s a hopeful moniker, a name-it-and-claim-it theology for the brave new world of crypto-driven applications—the securitized internet.

Let’s revisit Web1 and Web2 from a similar financial perspective. The first online age was that of marketization. The web got its start as a noncommercial, distributed publishing system that researchers, nerds, and hobbyists could use to communicate with one another. Then, in the mid-1990s, companies learned to move their businesses, and the brick-and-mortar world of retail, online. They built a marketplace that would sell the same products and services in a new way, or else they speculated on the potential to do so. We got Amazon and eBay and Craigslist—and also Pets.com and HomeGrocer and the dot-com crash.

By the mid-aughts, online life was an end in itself. Blogger and WordPress made it easy to publish text; Flickr and YouTube did the same for photos and videos. MySpace and Facebook and Twitter provided social diversion. The smartphone pulled the internet away from the desk and into the pocket and purse, where everyone could partake of it at any time, and then all the time. But these Web 2.0 companies, as they became known, generally gave away their services for free. So how could they make money?

By amassing data on the real and inferred behaviors of millions, then billions, of users, Web2 companies developed a foundation for selling ads, or charging modest fees, against people’s attention and engagement. Now the web was “monetized.” And the act of monetizing, once an esoteric aim of straight-laced bankers, became an everyday activity—and a natural goal for regular “creators” like, well, you and me.

The huge success of Web2’s giants shifted the center of American business aspiration from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. At the height of Web1, Microsoft was the lone software firm among the 10 largest global businesses, and big investment banks were the kingmakers who took fledgling tech firms public. Two decades later, the top five were all technology companies. Though some lamented the decline of manufacturing, nobody felt too badly about financial institutions losing status. Bankers and financiers always had a somewhat dark reputation as swindlers, but technologists reframed them as indolent parasites who made nothing and preyed upon the inventions of others. Web entrepreneurs, on the other hand, were builders, making tools for work and leisure and entirely new ways of living online.

Read: Cryptocurrency might be a path to authoritarianism

But even if the social-media and search tycoons could use the popularity and apparent utility of their products as a cover story, they optimized their work for wealth and power, just like the bankers and the hedge funders did. The only difference was, they also claimed that they were changing the world for the better.

That facade is finally crumbling. Web3, the nascent third age of the internet, represents a turn away from Web2’s goody-goody idealism and back toward Wall Street’s brazen greed. Sure, some hints of the old content-expression-oriented web have stuck around; some NFT creators have found a way to make some good money from their art, even if the gold rush might not last. But overall, the tech founders who are building crypto platforms and tools, like the users who are buying and trading blockchain assets, are trying to produce wealth via rapidly appreciating speculative value.

When Twitter’s founder and former CEO, Jack Dorsey, sold the first tweet as an NFT for almost $3 million, that digital content’s distinctiveness helped underwrite its value. But like any security, an NFT’s worth has less to do with what it is than what it might be worth. Just as the pork-futures commodity trader is not principally interested in taking delivery of pig meat, so the NFT trader is not necessarily concerned with the usefulness or even the symbolic value of an ape. NFT traders are betting on the underlying digital assets, but they are also betting on the whole asset class—the idea that people, and maybe lots of them, will find ongoing and growing value in securities collateralized by digital data rather than material goods, corporate equity, or government debt. They’re also counting on the prospect that cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies will have huge value potential on their own.

As a part of that gamble, blockchain purveyors are re-creating some of the esoteric names and structures that made finance require specialized expertise. Technically speaking, if you just want a record of a digital asset, you can accomplish that feat with an ordinary database. Web3 proponents insist that the blockchain is necessary to produce a public account of the records, which no one agent controls. Or, in the case of smart contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations, computer code that automatically enforces rules. But that decentralized aspiration is already devolving to centralized control, as NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea (which serves Twitter’s profile-pic feature) and crypto wallets such as ​​MetaMask achieve Web2-style scale. Whether Web3 really ends up being decentralized might not really matter, so long as enough people believe in the speculative value it purports to create.

As that value continues to accrue, and Web3 grows in scope and influence, it would be prudent to reflect on the history of securitization in the financial markets. In short, things got only weirder: first corporate ownership, then debt, then mortgages, then weather, then Bob Dylan. Today, digital art makes up the collateral of most NFTs—pictures, music, sometimes even little software programs that run on the blockchain itself. Others are even more bizarre: NFTs of colors, of national parks, of stars (like, in the sky), of references to recorded songs, of derivatives of evidence of consumed chicken wings.

What if that’s just the beginning? There’s almost nothing that exists today that doesn’t also have a digital shadow side—each tweet and text message you send, and every photograph and email. But also: all of the banking transactions you carry out, each phrase you dictate to Alexa, each scan of a UPS package en route to your door, every record of a COVID-19 PCR test in your Labcorp account, every bucket of wings you DoorDashed. Everything we possess or do is digital or can be represented digitally. Even things that aren’t yours, or anyone’s, can be captured as conceptual collateral thanks to digitization. A group of Olive Garden fanatics started selling NFTs of references to individual Olive Garden restaurant locations, for Pete’s sake.

You might find these new digital assets exciting or terrifying. Either way, the absurdity is only going to grow. The natural endpoint of blockchains and NFTs—the golden promise of Web3—is that every aspect of human life, as recorded by computers, will be collateralized. Just think how excited or terrified you’ll feel then.

Ian Bogost is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the Director of the Program in Film & Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His latest book is Play Anything.




互联网现在只是投资银行
互联网一直在将我们的生活金融化。Web3只是将其明确化。

作者：Ian Bogost
艾琳-苏奥萨罗
2月4日，2022年
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Twitter已经开始允许其用户在他们的账户上展示NFTs（即不可伪造的代币）作为个人资料图片。这是这种形式的最新公开胜利......而且，你知道，这就是问题所在。NFT到底是什么？

有答案的。Twitter称NFT为 "独特的数字项目，如艺术品，具有存储在区块链上的所有权证明"。在新功能的营销中，该公司提供了一个更简短的说法："你拥有的数字项目"。这一承诺，加上用于交换这些物品的加密货币市场的兴趣和财富的涌现，在过去一年中创造了一个NFT淘金热。去年3月，被称为Beeple的艺术家在拍卖会上以6950万美元的价格出售了一个NFT。数字雕塑家Refik Anadol是《大西洋月刊》委托想象2020年COVID-19纪念馆的艺术家之一，他以NFT的形式出售其工作室的作品版本，获得了数百万的收入。乔纳森-曼（Jonathan Mann）在2008年金融崩溃后找不到工作时开始每天写歌，并开始将这些歌曲作为NFT出售，将有趣的互联网爱好转化为可行的生活方式。

NFTs也已经成为备忘录和营销。塔可钟出售 "受我们的玉米饼启发的标志性原创艺术作品"。Gap公司为Gap品牌的连帽衫制作了NFT图片。维基百科的第一次编辑得到了NFT的处理。NFT-原生系列，如无聊的猿猴游艇俱乐部生成的丑陋灵长类动物的图片，已经变得如此受欢迎，以至于一只猿猴可能卖到数百万美元。

但是，将NFT设想为一种新的数字艺术或所有权甚至技术的形式，并没有很大的帮助。拥有NFT并不意味着对所拥有的东西的知识产权有任何权利，任何人都可以自己下载。那些购买NFT的人最终只拥有一个数字记录--一个可以零成本复制的东西的契约，而且没有任何影响。

忘记围绕所有加密货币的炒作。暂时抛开花大钱买一张猿猴照片是否有意义。这些问题是分散注意力的。让我们称其为事物的本质。NFTs代表了数字资产证券化的第一步。它们把数字数据变成了投机性金融工具。这一转变具有巨大的影响，因为计算机存在于一切事物之中，这使得任何事物都成为数字资产--你的银行记录、你的Fitbit数据、你的智能门铃的铃声、你的工作电子邮件的情感分析，你可以说出这些。首先，互联网使人们能够轻松地在网上进行生活。然后，它使在线生活所产生的注意力的货币化成为可能。现在，所有在线生活的数字内容准备成为一种投机性投资的资产类别，就像股票、商品和抵押贷款。

NFTs可能会被烧毁，相当于加密货币收藏品的豆豆宝宝。但更有可能的情况是，数字数据的证券市场更怪异、更可怕。金融家们以前把一切东西，无论是贷款、飓风还是工资数据，都变成了赌注，他们可能会在所有这些素材上大干一场。但普通人也可能成为自己或他人电脑记录的新兴金融家。在某种程度上，这是互联网时代最诚实的转变。从一开始，网络企业就把自己表现为创造文化，即使它们的真正目的是建立金融价值。

现在，最终，财富的追求被印在了罐子上。

想象一下，如果你有一个艺术品或珠宝收藏，并且你想为它投保。为此，你可以列一个物品清单--也许是限量版印刷品的签名版，或者是你祖母的珠宝胸针。祖母的珠宝胸针这个条目与胸针本身并不相同。但记录中提到了这枚胸针--你甚至可以附上一张图片来澄清问题，以防你以后不得不对它提出索赔。作为价值的代表，NFT与你的保险箱或你的保险公司的文件柜中的清单上的祖母的珠宝胸针没有什么不同。它只是存储在区块链上，理论上任何人都可以查到它。

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阅读。当你是投资时会发生什么？

考虑一下Beeple的6900万美元的NFT。艺术--或者说一个人都会认为是艺术的东西，你可以用眼睛看的图片--根本就不在NFT里。相反，NFT指向了可以看到艺术的地方。这就产生了一些问题。艺术品--图片文件--可能会在其URL被移动或承载它的服务器离线时消失。此外，任何能够加载URL的人都可以查看或下载图片文件。有权进入存放图片的服务器的人可以改变甚至删除图片。

有些人把NFT比作收据。如果你曾经看过《古董路演》，你就会知道，带着包装和原始销售收据的古董劳力士有助于验证其真实性并确定其价值。当你的房子在火灾中被烧毁时，你会出示你的限量版印刷品的真实性证明或你祖母的胸针的鉴定书来要求赔偿。但是，你也很容易嘲笑NFT只是收据，购买NFT就像购买劳力士的装箱单，却没有得到手表本身。

这两种立场都有其道理。为一张收据支付数千美元是愚蠢的，但收据在文化事务中一直发挥着重要价值。在艺术、养马、房地产和无数其他人类事务中，出处和所有权一直是官僚主义事务。你拥有你的房子，因为房契上写着你拥有，而且有可追溯的产权记录证实了这一点。将这一原则应用于丑陋的猿猴的电脑图片，有点令人不安，但也许只是因为这些图片看起来如此新颖。毕竟，人们可以拥有一家公司的股份，这种做法曾经记录在实物股票上，但早已被委托给电子银行记录。这种所有权完全是象征性的；股票所有者不能要求获得公司的部分库存或其总部的一定程度的办公空间。

阅读。批评者对NFT不了解的地方

因此，NFTs并不奇怪或新颖，因为它们通过文书工作的集体幻想对价值、出处和所有权提出呼吁。这已经是老生常谈了。它们之所以感到奇怪和新奇，是因为正常人通常不会仅仅通过对日常事物的引用来理解货币价值，比如现金登记簿上的收据或计算机数据。

然而，对这种价值的信仰在金融领域是完全正常的。在这种情况下，一种赋予所有权的工具，可以被购买或出售，并拥有货币价值，被称为 "证券"。股票是一种被称为股权的证券，它代表了对一家公司的所有权利益。当一家公司在首次公开募股中上市时，它将公司的部分所有权划分为股票，作为股权证券出售给公众。一旦买入，新的所有者可以在公司的运作中行使一些有限的权利，例如通过股东投票。但大多数情况下，人们购买股票是为了投机公司的未来价值，希望以后能够出售证券以获取利润。同样的事情也可以发生在债券上，债券是由债务而不是所有权制成的证券，或者商品证券，是由原材料的市场价值衍生出来的金融工具。

在每一种情况下，所有权指的是基础资产，如一家公司或一种商品，而不是对该资产的字面上的占有。这种公平的关系使金融家可以操纵价值，而不必储存农产品或管理公司。例如，一个商品交易商可以通过交易期货合约来押注对玉米、猪肉或石油的需求下降。

作为证券基础的资产通常有一些明显的内在价值。一家公司的价值在于它的实体工厂、它的现金持有量、它的库存和它的未来销售。玉米、猪肉和石油有作为食品和燃料的使用价值。但在20世纪70年代，金融界开始发明具有不太明显内在价值的证券。其中最臭名昭著的是集合住房抵押贷款，它支持银行作为 "抵押贷款支持证券 "出售的投资。这种类型的金融工具隐藏了高风险贷款的风险，它的崩溃被广泛认为是导致2008年金融危机的原因。

但即使是抵押贷款在世界上也有一些明显的用途。自从住房贷款成为证券化的热门目标后，各种形式的资产都成为证券的抵押品。有天气衍生品，允许托运人对冲风暴造成的延误或损害。高盛公司发行了一种由鲍勃-迪伦歌曲目录的未来版税支持的债券。电影票房期货曾被短暂授权用于商品市场交易，但后来由于担心内幕交易而被禁止。尽管有监管，任何可以被理解为资产的东西都可以成为证券的基础。如果任何东西都能成为证券的基础，那么为什么JPEG不能呢？在软件吃掉世界之前，金融已经吃掉了。

今天，一些技术专家已将NFT纳入他们对互联网第三个时代的设想中。这是一个充满希望的名称，是对加密驱动的应用--证券化互联网的勇敢新世界的命名和声称。

让我们从类似的金融角度重新审视Web1和Web2。第一个网络时代是市场化的时代。网络是作为一个非商业性的分布式出版系统开始的，研究人员、书呆子和业余爱好者可以用它来相互交流。然后，在20世纪90年代中期，公司学会了将他们的业务和零售业的实体世界搬到网上。他们建立了一个市场，以一种新的方式销售相同的产品和服务，或者他们猜测这样做的潜力。我们得到了亚马逊、eBay和Craigslist，还有Pets.com和HomeGrocer以及网络公司的崩溃。

到了上世纪中期，网上生活本身就是一种目的。Blogger和WordPress使发布文本变得容易；Flickr和YouTube也为照片和视频提供了同样的功能。MySpace、Facebook和Twitter提供了社交的乐趣。智能手机将互联网从办公桌上拉到了口袋和钱包里，每个人都可以在任何时候参与其中，然后一直参与。但是，这些Web 2.0公司，正如他们所知道的那样，一般都是免费提供他们的服务。那么他们如何赚钱呢？

通过收集数百万，然后是数十亿用户的真实和推断行为的数据，Web2公司为销售广告，或对人们的注意力和参与度收取适度费用奠定了基础。现在，网络被 "货币化 "了。货币化的行为，曾经是直率的银行家们深奥的目标，现在变成了一种日常活动，而且是像你和我这样的普通 "创作者 "的自然目标。

Web2的巨头们的巨大成功将美国商业愿望的中心从华尔街转移到了硅谷。在Web1的高峰期，微软是全球10大企业中唯一的软件公司，而大的投资银行则是将刚起步的科技公司上市的决策者。20年后，前五名都是科技公司。尽管有些人对制造业的衰落感到惋惜，但没有人对金融机构失去地位感到太难过。银行家和金融家总是有一些黑暗的名声，他们是诈骗犯，但技术专家把他们重塑为懒惰的寄生虫，他们什么都不做，掠夺别人的发明。另一方面，网络企业家是建设者，为工作和休闲制造工具，并创造全新的在线生活方式。

阅读。加密货币可能是通往专制主义的道路

但是，即使社交媒体和搜索大亨可以利用其产品的受欢迎程度和明显的实用性作为掩护，他们也在为财富和权力优化他们的工作，就像银行家和对冲基金的人一样。唯一不同的是，他们还声称他们正在改变世界，使之变得更好。

这个门面终于崩塌了。Web3，即新生的互联网第三个时代，代表着从Web2的美好理想主义转向了华尔街的无耻贪婪。当然，旧的以内容表达为导向的网络的一些暗示仍然存在；一些NFT创作者已经找到了从他们的艺术中赚取一些好钱的方法，即使淘金热可能不会持久。但总的来说，正在建立加密货币平台和工具的技术创始人，就像购买和交易区块链资产的用户一样，正试图通过快速升值的投机价值来产生财富。

当推特的创始人和前首席执行官杰克-多尔西以近300万美元的价格出售第一条推文时，这种数字内容的独特性有助于支撑其价值。但就像任何证券一样，NFT的价值与其说是与它是什么有关，不如说是与它可能的价值有关。正如猪肉期货商品交易商对交付猪肉不感兴趣一样，NFT交易商也不一定关心猿猴的有用性，甚至是象征性价值。NFT交易商押注于基础数字资产，但他们也押注于整个资产类别--人们，也许是很多人，会发现以数字数据而不是物质产品、公司股权或政府债务为抵押的证券具有持续和增长的价值。他们还寄希望于加密货币和区块链技术本身会有巨大的价值潜力的前景。

作为这场赌博的一部分，区块链传播者正在重新创造一些深奥的名称和结构，这些名称和结构使金融需要专门的专业知识。从技术上讲，如果你只是想要一个数字资产的记录，你可以用一个普通的数据库完成这一壮举。Web3的支持者坚持认为，区块链是必要的，以产生一个公共账户的记录，没有一个代理人控制。或者，在智能合约和去中心化自治组织的情况下，自动执行规则的计算机代码。但这种去中心化的愿望已经在向中心化控制演变，因为NFT市场如OpenSea（为Twitter的个人资料照片功能服务）和加密货币钱包如MetaMask实现了Web2式的规模。Web3最终是否真的去中心化可能并不重要，只要有足够的人相信它声称要创造的投机价值。

随着这种价值的不断累积，以及Web3的范围和影响力的不断扩大，对金融市场上的证券化历史进行反思将是谨慎的。简而言之，事情变得越来越怪异：先是公司所有权，然后是债务，然后是抵押贷款，然后是天气，然后是鲍勃-迪伦。今天，数字艺术构成了大多数NFT的抵押品--图片、音乐，有时甚至是在区块链本身上运行的小软件程序。其他的就更奇怪了。颜色的NFT，国家公园的NFT，星星的NFT（比如，天空中的星星），对录制的歌曲的引用，消耗的鸡翅证据的衍生品。

如果这只是一个开始呢？今天几乎没有什么东西不具有数字影子的一面--你发送的每条推特和短信，以及每张照片和电子邮件。还有：你进行的所有银行交易，你对Alexa口述的每一句话，UPS包裹在送达途中的每一次扫描，Labcorp账户中COVID-19 PCR测试的每一条记录，你DoorDashed的每一桶鸡翅。我们所拥有的或所做的一切，都是数字化的，或者可以用数字来表示。由于数字化，即使不是你的或任何人的东西，也可以作为概念性的抵押品被捕获。一群橄榄园的狂热者开始出售参考橄榄园餐厅个别地点的NFT，看在上帝的份上。

你可能会发现这些新的数字资产让人兴奋或害怕。无论哪种方式，荒唐的事情只会越来越多。区块链和NFT的自然终点--Web3的黄金承诺--是人类生活的每个方面，由计算机记录，将被抵押。想想看，那时你会感到多么兴奋或恐惧。

Ian Bogost是《大西洋》杂志的特约作家，也是圣路易斯华盛顿大学电影和媒体研究项目的主任。他的最新著作是《Play Anything》。