A wise person once said that NFTs are just beanie babies for people who get mad whenever there are black people in Star Wars movies. Those same people are now attempting to make a new version of Dune, after that spent $3 million dollars on a copy of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune concept art, a book that has existed for decades and a book of which there are still copies of in the world.
Jodorowsky — a man who openly admitted to sexual assaulting an actress in one of his films but has since become the wacky guy who maybe had some arguably okay ideas to adapt an impenetrable text — once tried to make a version of Dune. That version of Dune was never going to get made and would have been as widely derided as David Lynch’s Dune. Both versions miss the point that Paul isn’t a messiah but has merely been propped up by the larger forces as work to appear heaven sent, but white men turning complex characters into white saviors (see also: Skywalker, Luke) is nothing new. The art is admittedly cool but has been available for the better part of forever and was scanned in pretty decent quality and placed online in 2021.
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (read: a bunch of libertarian techbros trying to leave democracy up to the tech gods) Spice DAO purchased a copy of Jodorowsky’s work for $3 million actual literal dollars that were raised mostly based on the Ethereum blockchain. It is, undoubtedly, a stupid amount of money for something that has been widely available, and far exceed the $47 thousand the last copy of the book went for at action.
Even dumber was Spice DAO tweeting out the absolute dog shit about what they planned to do with the book.
Spice DAO — who, coincidentally, is hawking its own copywrite skirting cryptocurrency named $SPICE — allege that they are going to make the book public (it’s already public), “produce an original animated series” to sell to a streaming service, and support derivative projects from the community. If a giant exclamation point from Metal Gear Solid just popped up over your head, congrats, you immediately figured out what the problem with the latter two statements is.
Namely, buying the book doesn’t immediately give Spice DAO the rights to make anything to do with the book. The artwork and ideas itself would likely be the copywritten material of Jordorowsky and the artist who created the art. Dune itself is the copyrighted material of Frank Herbert, and the film rights are currently sitting at Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros, who might have something to say about a bunch of nobody losers trying to undermine their recently relaunched Dune franchise.
Spice DAO later clarified that buying the book for $3 million dollars was meant to show rights holders they were serious about adapting the material (sure, Jan) and would instead be creating original works of fiction based on Dune’s ideas, but even skirting close to anything in that book would likely land Spice DAO in hot water.
So what’s really going on here? Did Spice DAO simply not understand that buying a book didn’t give them the rights to make a deriative version of that work? Are the members of Spice DAO really confused that buying a copy of Captain America doesn’t entitle them to make a Captain America movie?
Or, did Spice DAO convince a bunch of rubes to pump their shitty crypto token under the auspices of rescuing the book, only for them to eventually pull the rug out from all of their devotees and disappear with the money and the book?
My gut says it’s probably that second one.
Cryptocurrency and NFTs are, by and large, a huge fucking grift, and Spice DAO is no different. The entire concept of the blockchain in general is essentially a libertarian nightmare; it’s Silicon Valley’s worse impulses to solve problems that don’t actually exist made manifest. Its decentralized nature makes grifts like this possible, wherein goofballs pump tons of real-world dollars into a vast, unregulated sea of scammers and con artists in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, they’ll be able to hit on one of these dumb tokens making billions of dollars.
A general rule of thumb in investing is “if your grandparents have heard about it, it’s too damn late to jump on the train”. The time to invest in crypto was ten years ago, when you could buy cheap and there weren’t thousands of similar coins with similar technology and meme coins like $SPICE and Dogecoin vying to be the next big thing. The moment your Dad went down to the local Micro Center to buy 6 GPUs to set up a mining rig was the moment that the crypto moment was over.
Your Bored Ape isn’t going to grow exponentially in value just because you click your heels and wish for it. NFTs are a particularly heinous form of grift, as not only do you not own the copyright to NFTs (except in some very niche cases), but you don’t even own the actual image. Instead, NFT owners merely own a link that points to a receipt on the blockchain that says they own…a link. NFT owners, essentially, own little more than a line of code. And not even cool, Matrix-type code. Just a hyperlink on a Google Drive in some cases.
It’s certainly not worth destroying the fucking planet over to hope that fucking Spice DAO convinces Netflix to make an animated series based on the derivative works of an alleged (and basically admitted!) r*pist while desperately trying to dodge lawsuits from the numerous rights holder who own a piece of said copyrighted material.
I sincerely doubt anyone involved in Spice DAO’s “leadership” had any intention of actually doing anything with the book, other than maybe lighting it on fire like so many lost souls lost their hard earn money on something that will never touch. Nevertheless, Spice DAO managed to convince a bunch of desperate numbskulls to fork over a few million dollars for a book they’ll never see and/or touch in person, but the current Silicon Valley/libertarian tech meta is basically “you can own anything and nothing if you waste enough money and melt enough ice caps”, so maybe that was the goal all along.
P.S
They’re literally gonna burn the actual book.
…it may be the dumbest NFT thing I’ve come across to date…which puts it well into the disturbingly dumb category
…they want to scan the pages of something that has previously been scanned & made freely available…then burn their $3million copy while other copies of the physical book remain at large…& thereby somehow confer suppos d value to the NFTs they plan to attach to their scans…if I got up extra early in the morning & tried real hard I still don’t think I could squeeze that much stupid into one thing?
…if the underlying damage being caused by the resources being wasted in their support cryptocurrencies & NFTs would be laughable…but as it is I figure they hover around tragic pretty reliably…& this might be the most tragic effort yet…so thanks for the write up
They’re basically trying to create scarcity on a thing that’s not scarce by burning it. Like, even burning it doesn’t make it scarcer, since there are (at least) ten more copies of it floating around somewhere in the ether, to say nothing of the books that came up for auction before this one.
They’re just burning it for the sake of burning it. Which you could say is basically what crypto bros and NFT hoarders are doing to the planet, come to think of it.
Even though he’s also a total fuckwit, at least Martin Shkreli wasn’t following this completely stupid line of non-logic with the Wu Tang album he wasn’t going to play. Just a garden variety asshole.
Nice to see you and thanks for this.
God I hate NFT bros.
Like so much.
I liked Dune the book series but the later books got too weird even for me. I enjoyed the Lynch Movie. I thought Jodorowksy was too fucking weird even for Dune but I liked the concept art by Chris Foss.
The great white savior is a trope I would hope die. I prefer to mine it as a source of comedy or turning the trope on its head and use the character as a well meaning but foolish villain.
Star Wars and Dune’s main characters don’t bother me as much as Smurfs In Space aka Avatar because they weren’t as blatent (or I was too young to notice.)
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…a friend always called it “dances with smurfs” back when it came out…which works but comes up short on muppets references?
Not surprisingly, Trump’s supposed rival to Twitter headed by Devin Nunes has some… odd financing involved.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-12-13/the-trump-spac-pipe-is-free-money
The article says the big investors who provide initial funding for these kinds of deals usually have to wait until legal approval is made before selling. But this deal is set up to let them sell before normal review, and they can buy at a massive discount. It calculates that big investors are guaranteed a massive return no matter what, despite what appears to be extensive short selling of futures predicting major stock price drops.
It speculates that “it would be weird if there wasn’t insider trading” going on and suggests it is a way for Trump to dole out huge favors for investors, whoever they are, and what they may be doing in return is unknown.
And yes, the SEC has already started investigating.
Hey! Long time no see!
One of the things I like about “Dune” is that yes, Paul’s built into a white savior, but Herbert goes pretty hard in tearing that shit down over the next 4 books. I much prefer that to heroes playing hero forever!
The other thing is that a friend of mine once called gambling “an uncut form of capitalism” and now I feel like NFTs are just gambling on steroids. A few people might win! But the majority of people will lose and the ramifications for everyone, even those not playing the game, will almost entirely be negative.
It’s kinda worse than gambling. At least with gambling you know the odds, however stacked in favor of the house they may be.
There’s literally no guarantee of a return on investment with NFTs. Zero. In fact, it’s practically guaranteed that the only person who will buy your NFT is someone who’s already into NFTs. You can’t jump in and clean house on a fluke and then convince yourself you’re on a luck streak like gambling. For the most part, you lose immediately when you buy into NFTs. It will never be worth what you put in, and the chance it will be our practically non-existent.
I think the last [checks almanac] 500 years suggest there’s still probably a flow of gullible people who will buy in.
As you say, the most galling/funniest thing is that you’re buying absolutely nothing. I legitimately think that’s why some people struggle to wrap their minds around it — they truly can’t believe that there’s no “there” there, that surely there must be something and aren’t there rules about this sort of things and onward and onward until they either get radical or convince themselves they can somehow profit off it.
At least beanie babies and tulips exist!
Quite the self-own?
This is an astonishing story even for these crazy days. Good to see you, hope you are well.
Hahahahah guess no one ever told them about trying to make profit from fanfiction. Which is exactly what “derivative works” would be.
Hello, lovely to see you!