I’ve now seen multiple variations of a tweet that goes something like, “The original internet vanguards were obsessed with making information freely accessible online, while current internet vanguards are obsessed with crafting spheres of ownership online.” It’s a stark contrast: Innovation then, tearing down walls; Innovation now, putting up walls; all in the same digital arena. In high school, we were assigned articles comparing the internet to the printing press. Today, there are NFT’s, where you can “own”/own a picture even while everyone can look at it.
I saw one of those tweets this morning, and a few hours later saw a link to a Pete Buttigieg blogpost that begins, “Millennia ago, some unnamed innovator created humanity’s most famous early invention: the wheel.” To be honest, I skimmed the blog. But that sentence made me think about the internet. Which then brought me back to the wheel.
There are various motivations for invention, right? There’s intellectual stimulation. There’s practical benefit. There’s financial gain. There’s the feeling of public service. These are, of course, not mutually exclusive. Thomas Edison’s lightbulb was a challenging project, mentally. When completed, it allowed him to see better at night. It made him money. It gave others light as well. Certain breeds of naturalists might disagree with how much of a public service the lightbulb’s invention was, but it’s undoubtedly saved plenty upon plenty of lives, directly (streetlights deter crime, etc.) and indirectly (our standard of living is higher because we can continue being productive after sunset, etc.), and returning to our motivation question, it’d be hard to fault Edison for perceiving it as helpful to humanity.
Getting back to the wheel, then:
Did the people who invented the wheel (and I’m allowing, with the plural here, for the possibility that the wheel was invented simultaneously or at least independently within a few different cultures) make money? Was it a fun project they worked on off the side of their field of wheat? Did they use it frequently themselves? Did they make a lot of money, or what stood in for money in their time? (Rather, what money stands in for in our time, I suppose.)
Those four motivations, as we’re defining them for the sake of these thoughts, presumably appear in different proportions behind different inventions. The wheel, one would guess, was heavily influenced by the practical benefit it offered the inventors. The lightbulb, as our history romanticizes it, was about intellectual stimulation. mRNA vaccines stand tall right now in the realm of public service. But there’s always that financial gain piece, and maybe that’s the thing about NFT’s and the metaverse and things of that ilk that’s rubbing people the wrong way.
There’s nothing wrong with making gobs of money. There are some shitty ways to make gobs of money (Ponzi schemes!), and there are some shitty ways to handle gobs of money once you have it (lobbying!), but the act of accumulating currency isn’t an inherently evil thing. Far from it, in fact (those behind the mRNA vaccines will likely die quite rich). I suspect that for those NFT ape guys, there are heavier weights on the intellectual stimulation and the practical benefit (entertainment is a massive practical benefit in the 2020’s) than it perhaps seems from afar, and that at least some part of Mark Zuckerberg really believes that the metaverse is going to make the world better (maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but we’re just talking about Zuckerberg’s brain here). But the associations these things have with cons and cash grabs (NFT scams, Facebook’s research on how it hurts the mental wellness of its users) makes that fourth motivation, the financial motivation, stand out in the eyes of the critics, and stand out illuminated in the worst of lighting.
We love and we hate a get-rich story. One of the variables that impacts that relationship is the obnoxiousness of the story. NFT’s are obnoxious. They feel like moneygrabs. They are moneygrabs. We, or at least some of us (I don’t really give a shit about NFT’s in practice, and I suspect most of you are with me on that), hate them. Another of the variables is the quality of the narrative. Mark Zuckerberg is not relatable. Facebook has been rocked by multiple scandals. We, or at least some of us (he could be better, others are worse), hate him. Maybe that will all change over time. Maybe we’ll revere him the same way we revere Edison. But at the moment, he’s not exactly viewed with the highest of regard at the moment, and as for the NFT ape guys…it’s likely unfair to the crypto world to cast them as the Edisons or Zuckerbergs of non-fungible tokens.
Innovation serves different purposes in all its different appearances. It opens up. It closes off. It operates on planes far different from that dichotomy. Its motivations are shaped in those planes, but the planes are shaped in part by the motivations. To each era its own, and to each innovation its own, but to each era the same, too. That wheel guy probably made some good money off the cart rides.
