Buying a soul?

At the end of March, one of Twitter CEO’s first internet tweets, Jack Dorsey, was successfully auctioned, earning $ 2.9 million. And, the assets of this transaction are not only approximate.
Can’t touch but sell

Similarly, TIME has auctioned three of their covers on digital space and earned nearly half a million dollars. The New York Times also sold their “first article in nearly 170 years of history”, earning $ 560,000. This market is becoming more bustling than ever. A tweet by billionaire Mark Cuban sold for a thousand dollars. Beeple, a cartoonist who specializes in caricatures, has sold millions of dollars of his work, even though no one has ever touched his paintings! Video clips of basketball shoots are gathered on a “marketplace” called NBA Top Shot, and its weekly revenue can reach hundreds of millions of dollars. Is digitization a tool so omnipotent that we have to deny the beauty of the real world? Photo source: Getty In all of these deals, the asset is completely virtualized, and it is sold by a technology called Non-Fungible Token (NFT). NFT is a code that records that a certain original asset (tweet, clip, cover …) belonging to any owner is unique and does not have a second. This unique digital version certificate is purchased, not assets that are materialized in physical form. But, these virtual assets, despite the fact that they may not be as physically interactive as real paintings or newspapers, are costing many times as much as the real thing that can be touched, even if you can. Readers feel this is crazy: these things should not even be sold, in the conventional sense of most of us. Modern people are increasingly moving towards the digital world: today, only about 3% of the circulating money exists in physical form, the rest are simply numbers in bank accounts. . Technology companies digitize enormous amounts of data about a person for advertising and business. Never in history have we acted as both the most active producer and consumer of data, as we do now. In fact, we’ve been selling “untouchable” things for a long time: in 2018, the New York Times published a shocking article about the black market on social media. An American company called Devumi has sold hundreds of millions of followers to 200,000 famous customers, TV stars, athletes, and even pastors and models. On Facebook, user accounts were hacked and fanpages were bought and resold for many purposes. But, the sale of NFT pushes the view of digital to an unprecedented extreme: internet products, based on bits of information, are practically something anyone can access and enjoy. The NFT eliminated this indulgence entirely, leaving only the single acknowledgment of ownership. This vision redefines our worldview: without touching and even enjoying it, we can still price and trade at a hefty price. We often tell ourselves that humans are becoming more and more “materialistic”, when the truth is that we are slowly denying the literal materiality of this world. The 1965 American installation artist Joseph Kosuth’s “One and Three Chairs” can make us reflect on our detachment from reality: it consists of a real chair in the middle, to the right of it. is a picture of a chair and to the left is the dictionary definition of a chair. Try digitizing these 3 objects and imagine how much memory it will take up on the computer’s hard drive. The line that defines the chair only needs about one kilobyte of data. The image even has the highest resolution increase, perhaps only up to 10 megabytes. The real chair can, in a way, be considered limitless. The most accurate digital scan can only produce a “map” of its surface features, and even these features can only be reflected with a certain degree of fidelity. No matter how detailed these data points can convey other subtle things, like the feeling of sitting on the chair, or the personality of the carpenter who made it. Digitization is, in this case, completely powerless against a universal object. Real world discrimination But stories that overblown the virtual world continued to be told. In 2014, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen cheerfully wrote a series of tweets on his Twitter account – he himself called them the “tweetstorm” – announcing that computers and robots were about to free it all. we are free from “the constraints of material needs”. He declared that, “for the first time in human history, we have been able to show our true integrity and integrity: we will be whoever we want to be”. Such prophecies can be easily refuted, but in fact they have shaped public opinion. By spreading a technological utopia, defining that progress is fundamentally just technology, these tycoons have encouraged the masses to give up important aspects of their lives and give them away. Allows entrepreneurs and financial professionals from Silicon Valley to freely recreate culture to suit their commercial interests. Pablo Neruda and what remains in his collection of “blunt rags”. Photo source: Alamy Stock In the book “Digitalization” (published in 1995), Massachusetts Institute of Technology founder Nicholas Negroponte said: “Computers are no longer computers. It is about life ”. Silicon Valley is home to more devices and software than anywhere in the world, and more importantly, it has successfully sold an ideology. This “creed” is utopian technologicalism, with the tool of treating digitization as an all-powerful tool and of infinite value. The people from Silicon Valley are fierce materialists: what can’t be measured means nothing. But, they hate matter. From their point of view, the world’s problems, from inefficiency and inequality to illness and death all stem from its physical characteristics, embodying itself in chaos and lack of flexibility. The panacea is a virtual world, and the commonly told story is that this society will be recreated and redeemed by computer code, with a new garden of Eden built out of bits, dissolving the world of things. add to this virtual network. It has led to a huge rise in the price of virtual things, in the expression of a new wave of progress: a picture, no, even a certificate of ownership. Digital painting on the internet is now a thousand times more expensive than a real picture, something we can hang up, touch, look at it every day and see the beauty in it. The real beauty. Not painting stories. In the process of searching for information for this article, I came across a story by Chilean poet and politician Pablo Neruda: he was a collector of curious objects, such as tubes. bizarre carvings, masks of Africa look rather odd, ships in bottles and whales’ teeth. He wrote in his book “Memories” (1974) that “in my house, I have gathered a collection of toys, large and small, that I cannot live without”. The poems Neruda wrote often praised these seemingly trivial and unique objects. “In my poems,” he wrote: “I cannot close the doors to the streets, just as I cannot close the doors to love, life, joy or sadness.” Today, perhaps we do not often find such people who love things so often, not by the superficial preference of a consumerist, but by someone who understands being able to touch. something and feel it may be the most valuable thing in the world: “Someone who does not play has forever lost the child living in him and he will miss it very much” – Neruda wrote. For Neruda, children are considered materialistic in the purest and purest sense, enjoy the textures, sounds, colors, and smells of objects and are able to live fully in those moments. . In September 1973, during Neruda’s funeral, soldiers following the dictator Pinochet’s truth trampled on the collection and broke most of them. These rough gestures, in a sense, are also regrettable: they lost a chance to see beauty, as Neruda did. Today, no one takes away our right to touch real things with such rudeness. But, it seems that many of us are willing to give this up, for someone else’s story. About things that may not be of any value (compared to something in the flesh) but are being valued in millions.