On the Eve of the Web3 NFT Revolution
How NFTs will usher in an explosion of new technology not seen since the Victorian Era
Author: Frank the Tank, ZeroBlade
Editor: Giovan Michael
The Second Industrial Revolution and Web 3.0
The doorway to the new internet is right in front of us, waiting for us to open it and experience the difference of a decentralized web. It is the next, natural step in the evolution of the internet and a purer form of what it was always intended to be: a space that democratized information and connected human beings in every way possible, from commerce to discussion, to collaborative creation. And while many have seen the doorway to Web3 for years, the growing popularity of blockchain technology is finally the key we need to enter it. Many people believe that the development of Web3 will rely heavily on NFTs since their connection to art makes them much more popular than other fields of blockchain like Defi and encryption.
Much like the Victorian era over a hundred years ago, people today are eagerly anticipating the next burst of exponential growth in technology. The new widespread use of electric power and the internal combustion engines after the international exposition of 1851 spurred what would eventually be called the Second Industrial revolution. It was a wild and exciting time to be alive. It connected the old world with a new one. The conflicting powers of technological advancement and old cultural habits have always played tug of war with each other, but never as dramatically as during this pivotal moment in history where a bridge is being constructed between two distinct eras in human existence through the use of technology.
Human beings tend to like stability, and for things to stay the same. We feel safe in the homeostasis of normalcy. While this urge has always been useful to our survival, it comes with an inverse impulse (implanted deep in the human psyche, perhaps even in our lizard brains) to wander. To go into the chaos and to learn something new. This is why we get a thrill when standing on the edge of a cold pool, or the edge of ski-slope, or moments before a kiss. Our two natures, the one that wants to keep us safe and comfortable and the one that seeks to explore in a constant state of cosmic play, are dancing with each other. And we feel the rhythms of their footsteps as the butterflies in our gut. Because of this primal psychic dance, human beings have always lived several years behind what the technology of the times could actually make a reality.
For example, back in the 19th century, horse-drawn buggies were on the cutting edge of transportation technology. These buggies were so popular in fact, that an 1894 article of Times reported that many people feared that the streets of London might be flooded with horse dung in no less than 50 years. That same year, however, on July 23rd something was happening in France that would change the course of transportation tech forever. The French Pictorial, L’illustration would be hosting the world’s first Motor Car race, consisting of 101 participants in total.
While the issue of long-distance travel had been attended to with the invention of trains, short-distance travel was still mostly done on foot, with upper and middle-class families having access to horses, buggies, and carriages. The idea of a car being the primary mode of transportation would have seemed preposterous to most Londoners, and yet it happened, and we have the race to thank in part for that. While cars were mostly the expensive playthings of the super-rich, they would eventually evolve into a staple of everyday people’s lives through the growing popularity of these motor-car races which are still an important part of the international automobile industry today. This has always been the case with new tech. The wealthy and privileged get access to it first, which is not as bad of a thing as it sounds because prototypes are expensive.
By letting the super-rich play with the imperfect but new models, we are letting them pay for the privileged to be first, but they are also engaging in R&D, working out the kinks, and finding better, cheaper methods of production. Once that happens, the world is ripe for some like Henry Ford to come along and create the Model T, a car that had been stress-tested by the rich and was now ready for popular usage. A similar thing happened with Uber, which was an incredibly expensive way to get around while in its early stages, and was even seen as luxurious. Because Uber was luxurious it was able to stay alive through the support of those with disposable incomes while the company found better methods to scale and reduce prices. Car engines served to fill a need. Specifically, they bridged the large gap in transportation technology that existed between locomotives and people’s feet. So, what do NFTs have to do with car engines? Well, to answer that we need to take a closer look at Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs.
What we can learn from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
The human body has a bare minimum of needs to keep it alive. A certain amount of food and water, decent shelter from the heat of the sun, the cold of the night, and claws of panthers. Beyond that, human beings do not need to live lavishly and can survive in poverty for the entirety of their lives. What human beings cannot seem to live without, are stories. Stories are so important to our survival that they fall into the category of basic spiritual or psychological needs, just above our base needs for food, rest, and reproduction.
We see an example of this in Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duffo’s book Poor Economics, a Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. In the book, the authors describe a village in the developing world stricken with poverty. Many children were dying from malnutrition-related causes like lack of good and water and yet, most families in this village had a TV set. The authors of this book found it an odd sight that although these parents had children who were dying from lack of food, a TV still hung on the wall. Many villagers told the authors that they would save up for years in order to buy a TV, and when the authors asked them why they didn’t use the money for food instead their answer was very telling of our profound spiritual needs for stories: “Because the Television is more important than food.”
When people are stricken low by poverty, they often turn to accessible art in order to nourish their wounded souls. We’ve seen this in America during the great depression when the sale of movie ticket prices soared. In a time when people had been robbed of most of their luxuries, they turned to the stories told on the silver screen to transport them to another place. Something similar happened with the soaring sale of lipstick tubes in what was to be called the “lipstick effect.” Women were almost engaging in a ritual of manifestation, spending the valuable money that could have been used for a much-needed lunch on a luxury like lipstick, projecting the luxury they lacked out into the physical world. Fashion, too, is a highly elevated form of storytelling.
Our need for art and stories has not decreased since the time of the great depression. If anything, our hunger for narrative has only grown as our tastes have become more refined and diversified as we now have access to narrative and art from all over the world. The NFT will only fill that deep human need which right now is experiencing a gap between Web 2.0 and Web3 as large as the distance between the locomotive and the human foot. And, much like the way that the automobile engine not only connected that gap but served as a means to evolve human transportation, the NFT will help evolve the way we engage with that base survival need for stories and art.
The F1 Grand Prix, the Model T, and NFTs
Today, people may hear about the notorious NFT auctions at Southeby’s or Christy’s auction houses where NFTs sell for millions and scoff. Sure, the rich and powerful can buy NFTs worth millions, but that’s not really something in the price range of 99% of the population. However, while it may seem distant right now, the high-price game of the NFTs is being refined and scaled in a similar way that the F1 motor car was 130 years ago at L’Illustration and other races like it. What started as a game for the super-rich evolved into a common fact of life, and this is true of NFTs as well because they give us a new and exciting way to engage with that deep-seated spiritual need of ours to have access to stories and art. The door has always been in front of us, but now with NFTs we finally have the key.
The pivotal innovation in automobile history was not the fancy F1 racing cars, but the car for the common person: Henry Ford’s 1908 Model T. The emergence of this car marked the beginning of an influx of consumer-grade goods like oil were now proliferating in the market, consequentially lowering their costs. If the train threatened the position of the carriage, then when the Model T appeared it became obvious that the horse was also soon to be marginalized. The automobile industry flourished and took several peripheral businesses with it like chain grocery stores and fast food restaurants.
If the current high-brow model of NFT auctions can be seen as the F1 races of the past, then it’s only a matter time until someone invents the Model T of the NFT generation. Something that will make the technology accessible to the general public, which will drive down prices and encourage further innovation. In much the same way that the model T became popular because it met peoples desire for liberated transportation, the NFT should meet people’s desire for liberated creativity. We have to think about the core of NFTs: property certificates and the traceability of property relationships. This core consensus can ensure the uniqueness of rights and lower the threshold for large-scale social cooperation through more efficient uses of time, cognition, or economy.
“Model T type:” next-generation NFT products
Distribution according to work: NFTs properties of rights confirmation can solve many problems for creators.
In our current internet, Web 2.0, creators have many obstacles they have to face. Often, their work is widely distributed without any credit or recognition being given to the original creators. This is especially true of meme creators due to the nature of the artform. Memes have become this generations folk-tale, passed from mouth to mouth, receiving small changes and upgrades along the way. This would be fine if certain pages didn’t profit off of the free work of other creators, curating meme pages they didn’t create and having no way to compensate the original creators even if they wanted to since their identity is often lost. Even in cases of famous memes and internet, the creators can remain anonymous while the content itself becomes more and more famous.
The NFT makes it easier for the original creators to recieve credit where credit is due and they allow us to give credit to any secondary creators also involved in the project. Similar to open source development, it is easy to find all creators and collaborators involved in the making of an NFT. If profit is made in an open source program then there is clear evidence of who contributed what and how to fairly distribute that income. These economic benefits encourage more creation.
Simplifying the authorization process.
Here’s an example: if someone wants to make a secondary creation or even commercializes on the original work of another creator, it would be hard to get in touch with the original creator. At the same time, creators have no way to be clear about what can and can’t be done to their works, which leads to many disputes among creators. This reality changes in Web 3 and allows us to focus on the shape and form of an efficient and low-cost co-creation economic pattern for the creators because the original work and secondary creations can be linked and support each other through NFTs.
Attracting the social component of the original work by the secondary creation is becoming more and more significant in the process of IPization of the pieces. Hence, the legal department and marketing department of the companies (games, comics and animation companies) usually argue in terms of secondary creations. Although the marketing department eventually wins (like in the case of Onmyoji), and occasionally the legal department wins, these disputes can often trigger public relations crises.
Most good works will have many secondary creations, and these secondary creations will attract more fans and players to get to know this work. While the digital assets provided by secondary creators is often crucial to the success of a work, we want to create a world where the original creator is hailed for their imagination and its ability to be built upon, not a world where their names are lost under a huge pile of secondary creations, no matter how gorgeous they are.
With NFTs, overseas entities now do not even need to be companies or groups. Individuals can obtain co-creation authorization to get essential localization work done since the income generated is straightforward and difficult to distort. Thus, the authorized company does not need to worry about the entity’s qualifications, nor does it need to guarantee the reserve price. In this way, the authorized entity can start at a meager cost and use its local knowledge to promote the work.
The authorization does not even need to be exclusive; As different entities can compete with other versions and finally decide the most popular version as the official version. Simultaneously, for IP of small and medium companies, this system can save on communication costs, protect both parties’ rights and interests, and tackle the problem of benefit distribution. Not only is this system more equitable, but it is also a faster and more efficient means of distribution.
Different Utilization of NFTs in the game field- Benefit distribution of MOD producers according to work
The game platform Steam and game developer Bethesda had hoped to promote an institutionalized MOD payment together, but their move was unexpectedly met with opposition from players. Even the MOD producers themselves disagreed with the companies move. Players don’t want to pay twice, and the mod producers are not used to profiting from selling MODs. These produces are in an interesting position: they want to preserve the best possible gaming experience, but the model proposed will also allow them to be better recognized as creators. However Steam and Bethesda’s idea is not purely profit driven, it will also make MODs more consistent and steady for their communities.
Here we may simplify this issue. We can include the MOD producer’s income in the player’s game purchase (for example, 5% of the game price will be allocated to potential MOD producers). In contrast, it is difficult to practice at the current stage due to the lack of relevant data on the use of MOD. However, the emergence of NFTs can solve this problem. It can distribute compensation to MOD producers according to their work or popularity or as an official donation. The MOD producers could benefit from this system and continue to create. Hence the game has continuous vitality, and new players will join the games community.
In this case, a triple win could be achieved between game developers and operators, players and MOD producers.But we still have the next stage to think about. Even though the model T was a major tipping point for the popularity of the new technology, automobiles truly had a break through in 1956 when a bill would be passed in the United States that would favor the automobile industry and change the face of the nation.
National System of Intersate and Defense Highways, Toll Stations, and NFTs
In 1956, the “Federal Funding of the Highway Act of 1956” was passed with the impetus of major U.S. automakers, marked the beginning of the U.S. short-distance and long-distance transportation from railroads turned to highways.
This bill dramatically stimulated the development of automobiles. Cars became indispensable for the daily necessities for American people under the weak public transportation system in the United States. New businesses began to appear along the highways like gas stations, restaurants, and motels. In order to fund these massive projects, the government created toll stations.
The purpose of the toll station is to recover the considerable cost of constructing highways. With the increase of users and the passage of time, the charge was to be cut down until its cancellation (although that part seems to be only theoretical, considering that the government has not cancelled or reduced the price of many toll stations based on its financial considerations).
Today, toll stations can take the form of booths like the past, or they can look more like E-ZPass (the ETC in mainland China, electronic non-stop toll collection system), or the gas fee could be included in fuel tax (indirect toll station fee).
People can choose other approaches to avoid paying highway fees, but when they decide to take the different ways, they will find that the actual time and cost are much higher than that of the highway, so the highway has become the most economical choice.
The same logic applies to NFTs. With the next generation of products, the basic rules are naturally established. Then we have to start building a system based on these rules, and this system can provide conveniences like a highway system. This system can be constructed section by section, and it does not need to be moved to this system all at once, making the single cost investment too high to be realized. This system could continuously improve itself during this process.
We can think about this another way if we compare NFTs to the tap water system. In the past, people would choose to live near rivers, lakes, or dig wells and build diversion canals to obtain water. The storage areas also might be contaminated.The previous difficulties were eliminated when the tap water system appeared. The investment in the initial construction was huge, but the fact that we can obtain safe and cheap tap water today relies on the tap water system. We can establish this system because of the emergence of the water meter, which allows all users to pay according to consumption.
The universal logic also applies to the history of broadband development. The initial setting fee is getting cheaper, and the network speed is getting faster, while the network fee is much lower. Overall, the preconditions for achieving this goal have been met, and things we have to do is to wait for that day to come.
Epilogue
The emergence of the blockchain laid the foundation for Web 3.0. It reminds us of the 1900 World Exposition after the second industrial revolution, countless new things appeared in people’s sights, carrying new ideas and technologies and providing novel directions for human civilization.
Again, we are touching on the eve of significant change, where the NFT is prepared to be the climax. We have already known it would be the key to change, and we just have to see how this climax will go.
