Art and the internet as a self cannibalizing machine ( the nft of doom).
So, here’s the thing, you might recognize that this blog used to be called something else ( paintings are stories) if you followed the link to that site from elsewhere, apologies, there are reasons behind the appearance of my new persona and frankly the old blog title was beginning to seem a little anachronistic as I no longer paint and the reason behind originally writing the blog is no longer important.
You may notice from my avatar that I appear to be someone you might know. You might recognize some of the content I’ve posted especially if you are, or have been, a member of what I considered to be my home on the internet, the Facebook group Glitch artists collective. I Had to leave there and pretty much all corporate social media because being me I got to arguing with certain people and realized that there is something of a gold rush, land grab going on in the guise of a novel instrument of speculation known as an nft, work mysteriously turning up on marketplaces which have been shall we say appropriated and seemingly sane people turning overnight into zealots and proselytizers for something which at best seems dubious.
I wanted no part of
that given that I primarily work with opensource software and advocate
and publish my work under creative commons licenses and could see that where there are cracks to form in social groupings this is where they will start in arguments for and against. In an environment where I was used to sharing ideas and methods I could see that that co-operative atmosphere could break down really quickly as we start to monetize what was previously ephemeral and freely shared. Don't get me wrong I'm all for artists making money, I'm partial to getting paid myself, the standing joke in GAC and probably must other artist circles being when someone would enter into a conversation with an Artist looking for something for free with the standard line - 'It will be great exposure' so someone in Gac came up with the idea of the exposure buck as in ' Are we working for exposure bucks?'. I'm not just in this for the money( if I was, as an artist, I would be sorely disappointed) I actually believe there is a point in openly sharing work in the same way that opensource developers share their work, this is what the internet was built from, and its not a bad model for society, sharing culture and art makes us stronger and more cohesive.
There also didn't seem to be much thinking of consequences such as the ecological black hole that Blockchain and Nft's may well plunge us into. Are we as artists going to actively vandalize what little is left of our environment powering ever expanding server farms which hold a record of who owns our non-existent art and non-existent money. Sounds pretty much like the plot to Accelerando by Charles Stross. If data is the new oil Nft's are the new Exxon Valdez , first in a long line of beached financial instruments waiting to pollute, poison and tokenize what is left of the old web and pull apart a vibrant and vital culture, nfts are a sign that late stage capitalism has turned to cannibalism and we, dear artists, are on the menu.
Don't get me wrong , I'm hardly a technological Luddite but generally when something looks too good to be true it generally is
So in response to those events I’m slowly pivoting my online presence into the Fediverse and away from those other spaces. A lot of the posts I will be making in the next while will be copies of my blog and work from another space so bear with me while I get up to date.
Why have I started to use crash-stop as a username and as the new title for this blog ? I love science fiction and especially the work of Iain.M.Banks and his Culture series . In the Culture ships minds have both consciousness and agency, a crash stop is one of the most ruinous things a ship can do to itself , but it also acts as an emergency signal, it has consequences and that Is essentially what I have done.
