NFTs After Finitude
Art, the Crypt0-Absolute, and Justice.
There is really nothing to be called, um, art.1
We ain’t got time2
Subsequently, everything we have to say here is already over (but unseen).3
1.
This is what we will have needed to say to ourselves: because of the sunken eco-costs of NFTs (the clash with finitude) there will be those who drop and those who don’t drop. The scene of the NFT dialectic will immediately become a subtle warfront between the chad who drops and doesn’t care, either because ETH2 will save us or because it’s all over anyway, and the virgin who does care and wants NFT production to be halted until the eco-dilemma is squared away. Both sides may be embraced as part of the protocol of a false problem, which is to say as part of the meta-philosophical concept of the ‘protocol’ itself. The issue is not whether the crypto domain can be the first to solve its finitude bottleneck, therefore becoming an exemplum for other human work-zones, but the very fact that NFTs intersect with the issue of radical finitude at all.
2.
There have of course been other immortal protocols, not that precedence equates to a ‘gotcha’. Yet a natural rhythm of aesthetico-conceptual ‘eureka’ does break out as leitmotif between different claims about digital omnitemporality, contractual singularity, the reduction ad digitus of conceptual art, Duchampian true objects, mortalized finitude, universal normativity, intelligibility for ‘everyone’, signing anything and everything, and absolute uniqueness. The reply guy qua reply guy (the one who speaks just beneath, in the under-writing) will be emblazoned with the title of finitude heckler, as Antigone is to Ismene or Justine to Claire. Beneath the tweet which always already (immer schon) is itself a primitive NFT, whether minted or not, and which flexes the most sophisticated or nonexistent NFT transcendental contraband it can find, one will locate the complainer, the quantum insister, the thinkboi, the one who wants finitude to inflect the deal. Recall the ‘collect call’ which Junior Soprano receives under house arrest, and takes, but only on the basis that ‘it’s all over anyway’. We are that collect call, we are talking to you, now.4
3.
Some other hyped protocologic monads have been — and continue to be — divine inexistence (Meillassoux), eternity through the stars (Blanqui), escape from the entropocene (Stiegler), transcendental perhaps (Derrida), absolute formal ontology (Badiou), philosophical AGI (Negarestani), the truth of extinction (Brassier), Kantian angelic mind (Land), artificial time (Land), ontological (ex)change (Malabou), from the World to the Universe (Laruelle), absolute music (Matt Ox), and, searching back to what perhaps clarity-blasts all of these, the mind of great bliss seeing emptiness (Dzogchen). If we allow all the logical boundaries to appropriately blur, these ‘examples’ have been ‘minted’ for a while now as ‘protocols’ that go, in Meillassoux’s implied jargon, beyond finitude. They assert themselves in an after finitude modus in the same way that SuperRare collectibles first spread panic by not depending on their issuer for their existence.
4.
The definition in the crypto sector of a ‘protocol’ as an abstract or concrete security function that may involve a series of cryptographic primitives can itself be ‘minted’ in abstract philosophical terms; the above philosophical and mathematical protocols invite self-formalisation as ‘artworks’ in a new ‘already’ cryptographeme decalmania—the immer schon itself dropped. Protocol totalizing design is a driver of non-philosophical and non-academic and non-aesthetic innovation. Money, becoming everything at last, is (literally) less than zero. The great mind of bliss loving emptiness (Dharmakāya) is auto-liquidation without the need for drops. But even so, the quantic heckler may ask, what if I am excited to announce a drop for . . . niche finality?
5.
We say here without much shock—we are already saying it—that the conceptual manoeuvre of the ‘NFT’ effortlessly joins this string of immortal protocols which it accelerates, fields, but also simply mimes. The name ‘Matt Ox’ is the name of an absolute collage, the completion of SoundCloud Idealism that times out (‘ten songs on each beat . . . ten beats on each song’), the name of a ‘.gif’ mystically becoming lightning-strike imago 01. The name ‘Meillassoux’ is already a machine for thinking in non-fungible terms that which escapes finitude completely, or rather almost completely. We say almost completely to recall our iterative problem, which is the time-clash between NFTs as theoretically immortal protocols and finitude per se.
6.
It is impossible to hold out on not mining more NFTs, just as it impossible to not insist that NFTs in themselves have the potential to end world-anthropic time and space.5 This differend itself is the real ‘drop’, if you like, of the NFT-event. What might be curated in a nonexistent object is the ‘coincidence’ of ‘artificial time’ and an end of time. The crypto- in Crypto (an open secret) survives us, but only in the sense that writing does; remaining tied to a profound rhythm between mathematical ideality and inscription, general writing as the space of all this . . . drills.
7.
What we mean is that we are always listening to you,
ask us to do some simple things
so that we may go on speaking to you
here and now
and forever.
8.
The eco-costs heckler is, supposedly, a bore and they have little understanding of the jouissance of the lie, whose folds now spreads like they always did to world-ending fecundity, and yet without the insister the protocol for digital survivance is not able to raise a smile at all. The transcendental illusion is not just that NFTs will somehow ‘solve extinction’, but that taking NFTs to be a way out for me is discovering a way out for everyone. The transcendentalillusion.eth of crypto with regard to its own niche finitude-clash is therefore a classic grammar problem—a confusion of the first-person with the third-. There is infinite hope just for us, not for you. We are always listening to you. Ask us to speak to you, forever. Ask us to mint some transcendental childhoods, some breath-taking, heart-breaking, heart-freaking unheard-of things.
9.
Aesthetic and literary ideology always escape that way too, and nobody can be blamed, on either side, as ‘theory’ in the true sense already pointed out:
Rather than putting it in terms that suggest deceit and duplicity, one could say that the poet, like the philosopher, must forget what he knows about his undertaking in order to accede to the discourse to which he is committed.
The NFT drop, whether taken or not, thrives on the pure potential of Nietzschean or otherwise ‘active forgetting’. In fact, the primitive drop (drop as primitive) comes online as the most high tempo and sophisticated example yet of what it means to say, ‘yes, let’s lie’. Or, of course, ‘yes, let’s die’. That NFTs intersect with absolute finitude in an eclipse that fails to go away even when it does means that NFTs are, right now, marked by the drop in pressure implied by immanent finitude. One can hear this tension in the wheezing high-pitched fan noises of bitcoin mining machines in Marble, North Carolina or Liaoning Province in rural northeast China. One is structured by this canned sigh, this tacit disclosure of an enjoyable scream.
10.
On the flipside, one may wish to be merciless. The handlers who in essence say ‘PoW >> PoS in web3 will solve it’ have to be understood as hallucinating, since what is read as ‘it’? Even if green NFTs evolve to the point where a fine cryptoart becomes the most dialectically sustainable conceptual protocol in the world, it does nothing to ‘solve’ the problem of extinction more broadly that NFTS are currently intersecting with in a unique (non-fungible) moment of eclipse. One may ‘solve the problem’ and make just that a ‘drop’ ‘for others’, but only on condition of confusing the local problem with the problem itself (‘it’). Since NFTS and extinction are currently in eclipse it is as if the crypto handlers are saying, ‘well, they will pass out of eclipse soon, just wait for real Eco-NFTs’. Since an eclipse is in play, that much is true. But the point is that these two specific things can be in eclipse, regardless of whether they pass in and out.
11.
Another way of saying this is that to understand the unique problem of finitude that arises naturally in the domain of NFTs, we might want to start with Catherine Malabou’s reading of Meillassoux’s After Finitude in her Kant book. This would only be a needless idealization of the problem of sunken eco-costs in the crypto domain if philosophical items were not already established as digital non-fungibles, which they are. However unique the problem of infinitude is in its crypto domain imprimatur, it cannot escape all intra-reference to other immortal protocols. The temptation would of course be to mint divine inexistence, eternity through the stars, escape from the entropocene, transcendental perhaps, absolute formal ontology, philosophical AGI, the truth of extinction, and so on, as NFT ‘drops’ in themselves. This possibility would emphasise without delay that although these philosophical memes are already primordial protocols, they are also brought/bought into a new space by ‘crypto-’. This would be the entry-point into Nick Land’s work on BTC as a thought-space at Crypto-Current.
12.
In Malabou’s takedown of Meillassoux’s After Finitude, the pivot point is relatively simple: you say you are after finitude, but which finitude do you mean? In the same way, if the NFT handler claims that the sunken costs problem will be sorted by future digital evolutions—in other words, it will be solved—we ask again which ‘it’ is meant? The temptation is to think that the protocols themselves can be the only reference-point for this resolution. In Dzogchen’s conception of wide open intelligence, the same thing applies: only open intelligence can solve what anything conceived on the level of pure data cannot. Land makes the reference to Mou Zongsan and ‘the East’, crucially, in the section of Crypto-Current that discusses ‘Kantian angelic mind’, that is, the completist motion between intuition and German or SoundCloud Idealism.
13.
The truth of Crypto-Philosophy is the fidget spinner of intra-reference between Dzogchen as something stacked 24 world systems deep and the glamour of Western metaphysics as meme season finale.
14.
What we, the speaking motion of pre-temporal things, are therefore asking and answering you about is the rhythm and birthing of a PoC (Proof of Cope). Ask us to speak, and we will continue to murmur of this forever. Yes, yes, let’s drop it. Yes, yes, let’s lie and let’s die. Such is the ‘alloverdose’ of ana-extinction as total design. If one tonality is able to say, we want to kill the world quick and be seen as sophisticated for doing so, the other is sure to cut in, allow us to keep speaking to you of this forever.
15.
Which is to mean, the comedown of the post-rare will have been as follows: NFTs are in truth a function forcer for the fact that the whole aesthetic domain is rigged up in a direct and causal fashion with near-term co-extinctions. This is what Tom Cohen means when he says that critical climate change is a ‘literary structure’. When Schiller wrote his plays, he was impacted by what would fit into a play: if one wishes to enact and theorise the protocol or be abstinent from its curve, one may only do so absent the extinction/NFT rift. The noise of the fans in China oppresses the ex-artist into a predictive sign. Per definition, cope will arise as part of this again and again, by which we who are talking to you, until further notice, mean some kind of forever.
Paul Matus, ‘Creepy things Alexa said out of the blue’, 15 May, 2019, YouTube.
Plaboi Carti, ‘No Time’ ft. Gunna, 2018.
Nick Land, Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy, Version 1.0, https://etscrivner.github.io/cryptocurrent/, October 31, 2018. See ‘Foreword’.
For classic Twitter threads/discussions on the NFT finitude-clash see for example [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27]. [28], [29], [30], [31], [32], [33], [34], [35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41], [42].
We know what it’s like to be housebound and have a chance to hear from someone, but only on the basis of farming liquidity on the civilizational dip.
NFTS AFTER FINITUDE SEMI-STOCHASTIC READING LIST
Nick Land, Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy, Version 1.0, October 31 2018.
Matt Ox, ‘Matt Ox INTERVIEW’, YouTube, 28 January 2021.
Memo Atken, ‘The Unreasonable Ecological Cost of #CryptoArt (Part 1)’, Medium, 14 December 2020.
Lyn Alden, ‘7 Misconceptions About Bitcoin’, 11 November 2020.
Sterling Crispin, ‘NFTs and Crypto Art: The Sky is not Falling’, 22 February 2021.
‘NFTs for n00bs: A brief history of tokens and tulips, NFT aesthetics, energy dramas, fan brigades, social tokens and the meataverse with Daniel Keller (New Models)’, Interdependence Podcast, Patreon, 11 Feb 2021.
Gerald Roche, ‘Lexical necropolitics: The raciolinguistics of language oppression on the Tibetan margins of Chineseness’, Language and Communication, 28 November 2020.
Giovanni Strona and Corey J. A. Bradshaw, ‘Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change’, Scientific Reports, 13 November 2018.
Umair Irfan, ‘Bitcoin is an energy hog. Where is all that electricity coming from?’, Vox, 18 June 2019.
Paul Merrion, ‘We Need To Shut Bitcoin And All Other Cryptocurrencies Down. Here’s Why’, Forbes, 10 March 2018.
Daniel Keller, ‘Notes from Quar’, Rhizome, 22 April 2020.
David Roberts, ‘The Decisions We Make About Climate Change Today Will Reverberate For Millennia. No Pressure’, Vox, 15 February 2016.
Thornton McEnery, ‘Masa Son’s Masterwork Is A PowerPoint Presentation About WeWork That Will One Day Hang In The Louvre’, Dealbreaker, 7 November 2019.
Joanie Lemercier, ‘The Problem of CryptoArt’, 17 February 2021.
Michael Connor, ‘Another New World: NFTs aren’t just for cats anymore. What do they mean for digital art?’, Rhizome, 3 March 2021.
Rea McNamara, ‘How Crypto-art Might Offer Artists Increased Autonomy’, Hyperallergic, 2 March 2021.
Dean Kissick, ‘The Downward Spiral: Popular Things’, Spike, 10 March 2021.