<nettime> The ecstasy of ownership

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

The ecstasy of ownership

I'm still stuck with the whole NFT thing. But I want to move away from
context of art, which has such a long history of conspicuous
consumption, speculative bubbles, and dubious objects that it's very
tempting to see this basically as the continuation of all of that, a
bubble, inside another bubble, inside yet another one, pumped up by
fraud. And there is probably much to that way of reading it.

But what about Jack Dorsey's first tweet? Worth $2.5 millions. What kind
of object is that, and what is driving the desire to own it? I think
it's fair to say that it's a historically significant document and that
it makes sense to preserve it for posterity because it symbolizes
something larger. But why buy it? In this particular case, there was an
element of a charity-auction to it, people buying overpriced stuff in
order to raise money for a worthy cause. So, there is that. Rich people
patting each other on the back so that some flakes of their "net worth"
can fall off the table. There probably also some fraud in there. But
even if you take all of that into consideration. Don't think it can
explain everything.

There is more to it, and that "it" has to do with ownership raised to a
kind of metaphysical category. Or, to be more precise, it's an
expression of a culture -- let's say libertarian tech bros -- in which
all relationships to the world, and possibly to the self too, are
expressed as private property. In which all different forms of social
value are expressed through paying lots of money for a title of
ownership. The "ownership society" is an old conservative phantasy, in
which everyone acts like a little proprietor, and here it's realized in
its most extreme form. It's the ultimate flattening of human desires
into a desire to own. Making fun of the fact that by buying an NFT one
barely acquires anything is kind of besides the point, because the
desire to own does not express a desire to control (the standard
privilege of ownership), but expresses a desire relate, a desire to be
recognized as part of history. Bragging rights, as they call it. An
earlier generation of very rich people has expressed a similar desire by
donating money to worthy institutions and then having a room or an
entire building named after them.

The difference is not between digital and analog, though, but between
different ways of imagining human relations (mediated through objects)
and the degree to which ownership as the only imaginable type of social
relation has come to dominate certain sectors of society.

As a contrast, take something like ubu.com or monoskop.org. These are
also projects in which someone -- Kenneth Goldsmith or Dusan Barok,
respectively -- expresses an unusual degree of attachment to, and
valuation of, certain digital artifacts that are meaningless to most
others. They also invest significant resources, decades of their own
labor, to realize their desire. But the desire towards these objects is
not expressed as ownership, but as care, as a self-appointed obligation
to create an environment in which these objects can unfold their
potential for which they are so highly valued.

I think there is a kernel of that desire also in some of the NFT
purchases, even if buried under piles of bullshit. And they stand for an
existential poverty, a poverty of imagination, of language, and of
sociality. It's an ecstasy of ownership, and it anything good is to come
out of this, it is to render the very notion of ownership meaningless.



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