this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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chapotraphouse

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The most obvious stupid scam ever conceived and they actually managed to hook a bunch of actual corporations

Square Enix, Nickelodeon, Coke, KFC, and more fell for this shit while regular people were laughing about how obvious a con it was.

Really puts into question the capitalist myth of the genius entrepreneur and the idea that these corporate types are rich because they are smart or deserving in some way.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

funny thing about the bourgeoisie. All through the 1800s most bourgeois economists were convinced that labor is the source of value in commodities. After all, that is what Adam Smith and David Ricardo thought. Then Marx comes along and takes that fact to its logical conclusion (while adding nuance that it was labor power and not labor, but I digress): Proletarian revolution and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of wage labor and the capitalist mode of production. The construction of socialism. So from that point onwards Capitalists began increasingly inventing and embracing subjective (i.e. useless, non-materialist, non-predictive) theories of value, in order to distance "mainstream" economics from Marxist conclusions. This, coupled with the creation of fictitious capital, leads to them huffing their own farts more often than not, especially during recurring economic crises. Hence, nonsense like NFTs.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

leads to them huffing their own farts more often then not

Techbros tried to call this "vectorialism" some years ago: the belief that capitalism would be replaced by even more alienated and displaced abstracts of capital.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Google Glass was INEVITABLE.

VR company meetings were INEVITABLE.

The Metaverse(tm) was INEVITABLE.

NFTs were INEVITABLE.

Venture capital is driven by whatever brainworms have wriggled into credulous techbros that particular season.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i just wish that new technology that came out was cool and good and made our lives better. When I was a kid all the phones went from landlines with boingy cords to wireless! The internet went from annoying dial-up noises that turned off the phone to so fast you could watch a movie faster than you could download a song just 5 years prior. Cars started coming with the unlocking button fob! THE BUTTON YOU PRESS TO UNLOCK YOUR CAR! it was so cool! Now all the technology sucks man. When's the last time some little cool gizmo came out that made our lives better?

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was learning 3D art and videogame design when NFTs became popular, I uploaded some renders I made for fun as art proyects to a NFT site, some idiot bought it for 1ETH, around 1000€, LOL

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

Critical support. fidel-salute-big

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago

it was a money laundering scheme, just a techbro "innovation" that perfectly copied the role the fine art market plays in haute bourgeois society

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago

No need to use the past tense here. I have a friend who is still slinging NFTs. I haven’t talked with him in years but I stalk him every now and then to check in on him. He invested in bitcoin early on and then dumped it before the pandemic. If he’d held on to it (and then dumped it at just the right time), he’d be a billionaire now. So I think he’s reluctant to let go of NFTs. His big break is just around the corner. And he’s also a millionaire and his parents are hedge fund managers so he wins either way, at least until the revolution comes.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago

Everything is like this.

Sucking up, lying, putting on a show, and being merciless is the biggest part of how anyone attains a managerial position.

It's not a bug, it's a feature.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is one of those moments where you realize these companies aren't jumping on these trends things for us, but they're doing it to placate an investor class that doesn't know any better and wants them to be into the new, hot thing among these twitter brained friends.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

yeah I think the execs in these companies saw that people in their rich social circles were messing around with crypto and thought that meant everyone else is doing it and it's the next big thing, for an industry that markets itself as innovative there's a lot of herd mentality in tech

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Square Enix selling the rights to Deus Ex and Tomb Raider so they could leverage more capital for crypto investment will never not be funny to me.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the funniest thing about nft's is the one nft guy i convinced ghosts are real because of the metaverse

people who buy into nfts will believe literally anything

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

that's basically the story we were talking about ghosts and eventually he decided because "everything you can conceive of is real" ghosts are real in the metaverse. I then attempted to explain to him what reality is

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Terminal stage idealism.

Invisible pink unicorns are real because I just brought them up. I just put one into your room. Problem?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

That's just a plotline in Digimon: CyberSleuth.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

This happens all the time among the MBA crowd. They are afraid of not doing something they think everyone else is doing, even if they don't understand it. The head of my group at work has been talking about AI for months while all of the use cases for it have basically nothing to do with our work outside of writing emails. He did this before with crypto and we have a whole product offering that is useless now because the whole rypto market sublimated overnight.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Really puts into question the capitalist myth of the genius entrepreneur and the idea that these corporate types are rich because they are smart or deserving in some way.

More than that, it calls into question the very concept of economic rationality - that the market behaves rationally based on the rational business decisions of rational actors acting in their own rational self interests.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Did any real company lose money on it? It was free income for the IP holders.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

It's funny "ha-ha" but also funny "damn this sucks dude".

Square Enix, Nickelodeon, Coke, KFC, and more fell for this shit while regular people were laughing about how obvious a con it was.

That's one of the big things I think the NFT craze highlighted. When the suits at MEGACORPS saw a potential way to make money off intellectual property they jumped at it. IP law is really bad, and IP financialization is even worse. They thought they saw a whole new way to create new sort of "premium" product and they all went feral like they were consumed Spirit of Greed from Weird West. They really believe they could make a gazillion dollar from nothing, they either truly thought that or convinced themselves that they did.

Really puts into question the capitalist myth of the genius entrepreneur and the idea that these corporate types are rich because they are smart or deserving in some way.

Big time! It also really highlighted how everyone is despite to get out of the capitalist trap. I really felt kinda bad for regular people who got duped into NFTs and crypto as a whole. I'm not trying to say they are dumb people or have no agency, just saying lots of regular people lost their hard earned cash cause they bet on NFTs and crypto being "the future". Lots of regular people lost cash on the Robinhoods, the Coinbases, and the crypto dotcoms of the world. All of the "smart" "business people" were telling you NFTs and crypto was the future. Just yet another vampire scheme to siphon the lifeforce from working people =,

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (35 children)

Heads up, we have a genuine cryptopeddler (don't say it's about crypto, because the goalposts keep moving even as the peddler argues for NFTs and related grifts) in this thread, and the entire carnival barker routine is now in play, including "beat capitalism's casino by doing a newer shinier capitalism casino" and messianic "this will change the world and revolutionize everything" speeches.

soypoint-1 cryptocurrency dumpster-fire soypoint-2

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Lmao it's all good, capitalism is gonna capital

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

SBF convinced venture capitalists at sequoia to invest in FTX while playing WoW.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

:theory-gary: it was League of Legends

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

and he wasn't even winning at the game

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

Some are stupid enough to drink the coolaid but most actually realise that its stupid but want to cash out on the other stupids then duck out. But the thing is they also have to tell everyone else that its actually really cool and good to get that stupid in to buy the thing.

Square is the funniest example of drinking the coolaid though. I wonder what they're even going to do now.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

Also the Metaverse nonsense.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

How many of these companies were actually buying NFTs? I thought they were all minting and selling them.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

there's degrees to "falling for that shit" though. the cost of minting an NFT is literally negligible for the coca cola company, and the upside is enormous if it becomes an irrational market like bitcoin was. otoh, making a game centered around NFTs is sad as fuck, those people got screwed hard.

also, this is just my perception, but it could've been the other way around even. bitcoin became an irrational market because there was some purity to its conception: it was merely an unfeasible currency theory put into action, so libertarians could masturbate over it. as lousy as the theoretical pinnings of bitcoin are, there were no companies getting in on the action from the getgo. it wasn't meant to be a casino, it just devolved into one. companies getting day one onto the NFT train just made it way more obvious that it was meant to extract profit from compulsive gamblers, and the unsightliness accelerated their demise. it was just too on the nose for most people.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

The real kicker is that there are plenty of good theoretical applications for blockchain technology and all we get are shitty investment commodities and grifts

The technology never gets employed to a productive end because the entrepreneurs are in charge of deploying it

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (11 children)

there are plenty of good theoretical applications for blockchain technology

This is not true. Distributed ledgers allow for consensus without trust. That is it. Every other application of them is just a slower database. So pretty much all they are good for is digital money, but digital money with a hard throughput limit and no backing from any government. The rush to use them for anything and everything violates the most basic principles of good computer engineering, and there's a very good reason no one has created anything worthwhile with them besides money that can be used for crime.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I🖤crime. The Revolution will be funded by and implemented by criminals.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (15 children)

Most supposed use cases besides crime money involve needlessly spreading out a calculation (of a picture of a monkey or whatever) so many more computers have to verify the same calculation as a stupidly unnecessary waste of electricity that also dumps more carbon in the air. And the crime money also does that but dae le drugs amirite stop-posting-amogus

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