![]() So it is no wonder that the moment a direct option emerged, it got everyone excited. Many creators have millions of fans willing to pay them, but that relationship is owned by Big Tech platforms. It shows that something is absurd about the current internet. The range of those who have attempted to get NFTs to their fans, from popular film stars like Amitabh Bachchan and earlier-era cricketers like Sunil Gavaskar in India to Damien Hirst and Banksy who’re globally famous for high-brow art works, is revealing. It gave artists a taste of what could happen if they connected directly with fans willing to pay for their creations. The arrival of NFTs was fortuitously timed-in the midst of a pandemic that had made the long-running woes of the creative economy even worse. In the shadow of Big Tech, everyone in the creative economy is reduced to a sideshow, trapped on a treadmill chasing eyeballs. While many of them have attracted gigantic audiences, platforms control everything, including their reach via blackbox algorithms and the amount of advertising money they share. Things are not much better for emerging independent stars on platforms like Instagram, TikTok or Spotify. The worst hit are media companies, as advertising revenue, which largely supported traditional creative professionals-writers, journalists, radio stars, filmmakers-continues a decade-long decline. That judgement doesn’t do justice to the motivations of a lot of serious folks building blockchain, NFT and related technologies to solve a very real crisis of the internet economy-the relentless centralization and growth in power of Big Tech at the cost of everyone else. However, it would be wrong to dismiss all of this merely as a new mania. Add to it aggressive advertisements, and there hangs more than a whiff of get-rich-quick schemes. There is also a new uncertainty in the mix, because right now, private cryptocurrencies face a regulatory sword of Damocles in India. ![]() It does not take a degree in economics or history to suspect that when virtual goods are sold in exchange for virtual currency, the dangers of a speculative bubble are real. The fact that they are joined at the hip to another even more hyped technology, cryptocurrencies, makes matters worse. Sceptics spot a bubble in the rapid increase in the value of NFTs.
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