For Valentine’s Day — a holiday, which, in the office of the state treasurer, is inexplicably celebrated on February 11th — Treasurer Zach Conine released a series of “NNFTs” (“Non-Non-Fungible Tokens”) to Twitter, each promoting various programs and duties of his office. In and of itself, the “NNFTs” were an ephemerally amusing social media gimmick, one which rested comfortably in the same vein of government-sponsored awareness raising social media entertainment pioneered by the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission.

But then, a few hours later, someone with an equally droll sense of humor turned each of Conine’s “NNFTs” into actual NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) — well, sort of. Like most things relating to crypto and blockchains, what actually happened to Conine’s memes was a little … cryptic.

The tokenization of Conine’s tweets, the advertisements for cryptocurrency trading platforms aired during the last football game of the season last weekend (the name of the game, alas, is legally non-fungible), and the recently announced recovery of billions of dollars of stolen cryptocurrency from the creator of this truly cursed music video reminded me that it has been a while since I did my best Grandpa Simpson impression and yelled at (distributed) cloud (computing). I’m thankful Reno is more serious these days about fixing up the Space Whale than it is about selling an NFT of an image of the sculpture — there’s no point pitching Reno as the next big thing when there are no workers to hire and nowhere to house workers moving into the area — but, with candidate filing just around the corner, it’s only a matter of time before aspiring politicians in this state start pandering to Hodl-Americans.

An organizer of a recall petition against Washoe County Commissioner Vaughn Hartung identifies himself as an “avid believer in cryptocurrency (and) blockchain technology.” Sooner or later, some candidate is going to want to pander to him, if only to keep him from filing a recall petition against them once they’re elected.

Now that NFTs and cryptocurrency are mainstream enough to purchase advertisements during major sporting events, we’re almost certainly going to enlist this nonsense into the interminable Culture War that defines modern American existence. With that charming thought staring through us from the void, let’s wade once more into the intentionally murky world of NFTs and cryptocurrencies more generally.

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A couple thousand years ago or so, Greek philosopher Plato and his students had arrived at what they believed to be a simple-yet-clever definition of a man: a featherless biped. Diogenes, who was basically “The Dude” Lebowski of Greek philosophy, reportedly responded by bringing a plucked chicken to Plato and his acolytes and declaring, “Behold! I’ve brought you a man.”

I bring this up because, philosophically speaking, non-fungible tokens are the featherless bipeds of John Locke’s property theory, which has served as the basis for natural-law justifications of private property for centuries. According to Locke, people have a natural right to both their bodies and the work of their hands. Consequently, people also have a natural right to anything removed out of the state of nature using their bodies and their hands. By mixing one’s labor with something removed from nature (say, by cutting a tree down), the products of that labor become that person’s property.

In other words, according to Locke, labor is entitled to all it creates — an insight which led directly to Ricardian socialism in the early 19th century. Just don’t tell the conservatives and libertarians who quote Locke’s proviso as proof existing private property arrangements are the product of natural forces — but I digress.

NFTs, however, are a reductio ad absurdum of Locke’s proviso — take a digital asset from a “state of nature,” like, say, a JPEG shared by a state treasurer’s Twitter account, apply some computationally difficult digital labor to mark its existence on a blockchain, and, “Behold! I’ve brought you digital property.”

Missing from the featherless biped of a digital property claim, however, is, among several other things, proof the initial asset belonged in a state of nature to begin with. Anyone can download a picture, upload it to OpenSea (“the world’s first and largest NFT marketplace”), mint it as an NFT, and then claim it’s their digital property whether they were the ones whose labor created the original picture or not.

The philosophical, practical, and technical issues with NFTs don’t end there, though. 

Another property missing from NFTs is a defense of the digital property claim, beyond the “mixing of labor” involved in computationally adding another block on a blockchain (a labor product, by the way, which has nothing to do with the production of the actual digital asset in the first place). Owning a piece of real property usually means you get exclusive access to the property, minus easements and other exceptions. NFTs, however, can’t guarantee exclusive access to digital property.

In fact, NFTs, as designed, don’t even verify that the digital asset linked to within the digital property claim is the same digital property made available at the moment of purchase. One artist, for example, changed the digital artwork they sold as NFTs into pictures of rugs. Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, a privacy-focused chat service, created an NFT that displays different images depending on which NFT platform you view it through. This is possible because NFTs themselves merely contain a bookmark to an internet-accessible data source, not the digital asset itself. NFTs don’t even include a checksum — a method of data verification that has been in existence for decades and is silently used every time you visit a website.

Consequently, NFTs don’t even provide an intrinsic justification for their own existence. NFTs don’t intrinsically provide exclusive access to content and they don’t guarantee the integrity of the content they link to — so what’s an NFT good for, exactly? 

The answer is not much. Some video game developers tied NFT purchases to in-game content, only for the market for in-game content to crash as soon as the underlying cryptocurrency the in-game NFTs were written to crashed as well. This would be akin to Willy Wonka’s golden ticket losing value because of a sudden drop in the price of gold. Somewhat more positively, the Bored Ape Yacht Club has found some success using NFTs as purchasable proofs of membership in its online organization. If you own a Bored Ape NFT, for example, you can participate in Bored Ape parties (the right to avoid said parties remains blessedly free). 

Trouble is, purchasable downloadable content in video games has been around for years, and paid-for exclusive memberships have been around far longer than that — what does burning enough energy to send Marty McFly back to the future nearly 100,000 times each hour add to that?

According to OpenSea, the answer, it seems, is absolutely nothing, at least until an NFT changes hands — and that brings me back to the NFTs of Conine’s tweets. New NFTs on OpenSea are lazily minted, which means OpenSea doesn’t try to write the NFT to a blockchain (nor does it charge the NFT creator for the effort) until after an NFT is purchased or transferred. Because the NFTs created from Conine’s tweets were never purchased nor transferred, they were never written to a blockchain. That means, at least for now, those NFTs are every bit as much a cryptographically verified NFT as the tweets themselves — namely, not at all — which makes them every bit as valid of a property claim as me drunkenly pointing at Treasurer Conine’s home one evening and claiming it’s mine.

If NFTs were created by Center for a Stateless Society-reading market anarchists who, like Diogenes poking a thumb in Plato’s ego, wanted to demonstrate the practical limits of Lockean property theory, it would explain many of the obvious technical deficiencies plaguing NFTs. Unfortunately, Plato’s students were considerably more rational than modern proponents of NFTs. When Diogenes vividly demonstrated that their definition of man was incomplete, they amended it to include “with broad flat nails”. Proponents of NFTs, meanwhile, continue to hold their digitally plucked chickens in their hands and decry our “cannibalism” when we either try to cook their birds or throw their spoiled meat into the trash.

David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered non-partisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].