Contemporary Digital Capitalism: Acceleration into Uselessness

    The absurdity of NFTs is apparent to anyone above an amoeba smooth-brain. Any object which possesses artificial scarcity, inasmuch as it otherwise replicable, is fundamentally stupid. However, I believe this observation can be extrapolated to all social arrangements of commodities, objects, artwork, etc. dependent on scarcity. In principle, the logic here is clear: that which can be made available, but is not, must have some justification — to whom, and for what purpose, does a limitation serve?

    In accordance to the commandeers of market forces, the answer is clear. The perennial bottom-line is profit — a value subsumed in a primacy of exchange, rather than of practical use. When homes exist plentiful, yet there lay waste a social substratum of destitution exposed to the elements, the use-value, or practical purpose of home as human shelter, becomes secondary to the exchange-value, or profit.

    When Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute justified Chinese sweatshops to scoffing college students, in spite of the employers ability to return increase wages to correspond to a standard of living above industrial poverty — a sacred scarcity that must be relationally maintained to ensure surplus extraction — that was never the point.

    At least, we can say that homes are valuable. However, with the advent of the NFTs, capitalism has transmuted beyond this contradictory discourse. In the case of NFTs, the use-value has collapsed and dissolved — nothing intrinsic is to be gathered. Capitalism has intensified beyond the sensible exchange of commodities based on its use-value, as the case with homes. Instead, as similar to NFTs, the use-value of commodities is increasingly based on its exchange-value in totality of otherwise distinguishable classes. It is flipped upside down. The usefulness is precisely because of its uselessness.

    Karl Marx critiqued capitalism and said little of communism, but did formulate it as, fundamentally, a post-scarcity superabundance of wealth; productive advancement spurred by automation. When exchange-values predominate as the social primacy, it is clear that even when technological post-scarcity is possible, capitalism will not allow this liberation. The breadth of human attention is too busy spent on uselessness, and I fear this will only exponentiate.