may i have your thoughts on this? I agree with a lot of it, especially considering i mainly browse the web on my phone (and also maintain my own website)

https://whiona.weblog.lol/2023/09/on-mobile-phones-the-small-web-and-able-bodied-privilege (the lack of css is not on purpose, so i recommend turning on your own equivalent of reader view to make reading a little bit easier)

It really depends on whether it is doing what I would call "art," because, for instance, "making art using neural networks" is like trying to explain why water freezes

I tend to think of "art" as involving a very complex set of aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, historical, etc. elements and interconnections, and these are impossible to define in a way that everyone would have the same opinion on

That's an opinion I have a lot.

I think that even if there's nothing wrong with them per se they are likely to get used as a method of transferring wealth from poor people to rich people while obscuring the fact that the money is being transferred. I think it's easy to come up with good reasons to be skeptical about whether these particular NFTs can be used for that kind of thing: the creators of NFTs have made this abundantly clear by announcing that they have a mechanism by which a large number of transactions at a moment's notice could put all NFTs in circulation at once. Still, people could conceivably use an NFT as a method of obscuring the transfer of wealth in a way that doesn't need to involve crypto and doesn't get us caught in the arms of cryptocurrency-related problems.

That said, I think this obscures the main point of NFTs rather than actually solving it. The main point of NFTs is to be something you can buy and sell and trade in just like any physical object. I think this is a real problem that people face; it's also one I've talked about elsewhere, but I wanted to emphasize it here. People have a distinctly ancient and honorable tradition of taking physical goods and trading them as if they were money or commodities. This is important! A society which never had an old, honorable tradition of this sort -- where, for instance, someone would write a poem about what they had for dinner the other day, and it wouldn't be clear from reading the poem itself that it's supposed to be a commodity or a "commodity asset" -- would be strange and somewhat alien to us. The ability to take physical things -- paintings, books, physical objects -- and say, "well, I don't want to own it. That's too much hassle. It's not as good as this other thing, and I don't care that much, but I could buy it for five hundred bucks. It's basically just like money" -- that's a very good and very useful thing.

And what is NFTs but a method of taking this tradition and applying it in a digital realm? We've invented new words, new ways to say things, but the structure of the exchange is "take a physical object and treat it as if it were, in every way, a monetary object." You take an NFT and say "well, I don't really care all that much about this thing and I don't have to. I could put it up online, but that's too much hassle, and besides, I don't actually want to buy it right now." It's "money" in every respect. People talk as if there must be something weird about money being physical and yet treated as if it were essentially the same as other physical things, but I don't see it that way. Money is exactly what it seems to be. It's a physical thing that someone will accept in exchange for a service or for goods and services from another person. No one is confused by the concept of money, or even by "money-like things." It's no surprise to see someone say "this is money" about a digital object if they mean it to convey the sense of "you could buy this object with real money and it would be like trading any other physical good."

In short, I don't see the problem with these objects as objects, I just see the problems with treating them like money, in all senses of the word.