Why the climate-wrecking craze for crypto art really is beyond satire | John Naughton

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On 24 Decem­ber, the movie Don’t Look Up began stream­ing on Net­flix fol­low­ing a lim­it­ed release in cin­e­mas. It’s a satir­i­cal sto­ry, direct­ed by Adam McK­ay, about what hap­pens when a low­ly PhD stu­dent (played by Jen­nifer Lawrence) and her super­vi­sor (Leonar­do DiCaprio) dis­cov­er that an Ever­est-size aster­oid is head­ing for Earth. What hap­pens is that they try to warn their fel­low Earth­lings about this exis­ten­tial threat only to find that their intend­ed audi­ence isn’t inter­est­ed in hear­ing such bad news.

The movie has been wide­ly watched but has had a past­ing from crit­ics. It was, said the Observ­er’s Sim­ran Hans, a “shrill, des­per­ate­ly unfun­ny cli­mate-change satire”. The Guardian’s Peter Brad­shaw found it a “laboured, self-con­scious and unre­laxed satire… like a 145-minute Sat­ur­day Night Live sketch with nei­ther the bril­liant com­e­dy of Suc­ces­sion… nor the seri­ous­ness that the sub­ject might oth­er­wise require”.

Those com­plaints about cru­di­ty and OTT-ness rang a bell. It just so hap­pens that a dis­tinct­ly over-the-top satire pub­lished in 1729 attract­ed com­pa­ra­ble reac­tions. Its author, Jonathan Swift, was an Anglo-Irish cler­gy­man who was dean of St Patrick’s Cathe­dral in Dublin. Swift’s title – A Mod­est Pro­pos­al for Pre­vent­ing the Chil­dren of Poor Peo­ple from Being a Bur­then to Their Par­ents or Coun­try and for Mak­ing Them Ben­e­fi­cial to the Pub­lick – gives only a hint of the sav­agery of the satire with­in. For the nub of the pro­pos­al was that that the impov­er­ished Irish might ease their eco­nom­ic trou­bles by sell­ing their chil­dren as food to rich gen­tle­men and ladies. “A young healthy child well nursed,” it reads, “is, at a year old, a most deli­cious nour­ish­ing and whole­some food, whether stewed, roast­ed, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equal­ly serve in a fric­as­see, or a ragout.”

You get the drift. Swift’s tar­get was the Anglo-Irish aris­toc­ra­cy, often absen­tee land­lords liv­ing on the rents of their des­per­ate­ly poor Irish ten­antry while ponc­ing about in May­fair. McKay’s tar­gets are more dif­fuse. He aims less at a spe­cif­ic class than an entire way of life – at peo­ple too stu­pe­fied by con­sumerism, short-ter­mism and social media, too hyp­no­tised by the inter­ests of big tech cor­po­ra­tions, to wor­ry about the future of humankind.

Which brings us, odd­ly enough, to a con­tem­po­rary obses­sion – the fren­zy now sur­round­ing non-fun­gi­ble tokens or NFTs. For those who have not yet noticed this obses­sion, an NFT is basi­cal­ly a trace­able code that is indeli­bly attached to a dig­i­tal object such as an image or record­ing. Once some­one has bought that object it becomes irrev­o­ca­bly reg­is­tered to their ID and so they can be said to be own­ers of the code.

If it sounds abstruse, then that’s because it is. And yet, over the last 18 months or so, NFTs have become a sen­sa­tion in the art world or, at any rate, in the part of it con­trolled by the big auc­tion hous­es. Last June, Sotheby’s ran an auc­tion of NFTs with prices rang­ing between $9,000 and $11m. In an ear­li­er auc­tion by Christie’s, a dig­i­tal art­work by Mike Winkel­mann, who calls him­self Beeple, sold for $69m. Up to that point, Mr Winkel­mann had nev­er sold a print for more than a hun­dred bucks.

You can guess what this has trig­gered: an avalanche of wannabe Beeples, plus a lot of spec­u­la­tive hus­tlers who see a pos­si­bil­i­ty of more mod­est jack­pots for rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle work (say a record­ing of your charm­ing cat’s purr). Any­one can play at the game and there are use­ful DIY guides on the web for those inter­est­ed in hav­ing a go.

So what’s not to like? Sure­ly it’s a good thing that artists who have had a hard time earn­ing a crust in the pan­dem­ic can get paid? It is. But there is one small snag: the tech­nol­o­gy that ensures that the NFT you’ve bought is a blockchain sim­i­lar to the ones that pow­er cryp­tocur­ren­cies such as bit­coin or Ethereum. And the com­pu­ta­tion need­ed to pro­vide the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion that is the USP of blockchains requires mas­sive amounts of elec­tric­i­ty, which comes with a cor­re­spond­ing­ly heavy car­bon foot­print. A sin­gle trans­ac­tion on the Ethereum blockchain, for exam­ple, cur­rent­ly requires 232.51 kWh, which is equiv­a­lent to the pow­er con­sump­tion of an aver­age US house­hold over 7.86 days.

If McK­ay decides that he’d like to have anoth­er go at Swift­ian satire, there’s an open­ing for him here. Nero mere­ly fid­dled while Rome burned: we’re enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly bid­ding for NFTs while heat­ing up the planet.

What I’ve been reading

One more thing
Why I Trad­ed My Fan­cy Climb­ing Gear for a Pair of Ram­shackle Watch­es is a nice blog­post by Con­rad Anker that will have mean­ing for any­one who is cursed (or blessed) with a col­lect­ing gene.

Back to the future
The great robot­ics expert Rod­ney Brooks does his annu­al review of the pre­dic­tions he made in 2018.

The great escape
The Haunt­ed Cal­i­for­nia Idyll of Ger­man Writ­ers in Exile is a love­ly essay by Alex Ross in the New York­er about the intel­lec­tu­als and artists who fled Hitler and wound up in LA.

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