>... all without wasting energy, burning coal, polluting the atmosphere, causing lung disease and cancer, or shilling discussion forums on the internet to prop up the fictional value of your worthless get-rich-quick pyramid schemes.
I agree. Lots of people push back on this point saying it's overblown, and without delving into those weeds I think it's fair to say the energy use is significant enough that people are getting cancer and dying from it somewhere.
That's before you consider the increased demand for GPUs which in turn leads to increased demand in rare earth materials, which in turn are often mined in awful conditions that also kill people. Including kids, who are mining in some cases.[0]
However, all of that considered—I think there's even more damage done by the frenzied adoption of this technology from a sociological perspective, and the prevailing attitudes towards it. It's hard to fully elucidate, but a good description might be that of western society having its head selfishly stuck up its own asshole.
There's many arguments against this line of reasoning, one might say free societies are inherently inefficient and that trying new things often comes at a cost. That said, I view this more as a deleterious social contagion with little point, fueled by a sort of faux-intellectual buying frenzy that social media is all too good at serving as a conduit for.
Then you look at social media itself, its deleterious effects across the entire sociological spectrum, chipping away at any semblance of attention (and thus critical thinking) that people once had—in addition to skyrocketing demand for devices, with carriers and device manufacturers playing right along in the form of planned obsolescence of perfectly good hardware—and you quickly realize this shit's rotten to the core.
I think it's reasonable to view the NFT craze as a second-order effect of modern information platforms failing on a fundamental level. They are bullshit-reinforcing systems.
That incentive turns out to be false for the majority of people, at least with NFTs. Hence the frenzy dynamic. It ends up being deleterious environmental effects for nothing. Nevertheless, it's still perceived financial incentive.
To go off on a slight tangent and play devil's advocate with my prior post that's now past its edit window:
I suppose there's the argument human beings have always been bad at resisting the influence of trends driven by information—however dubious. Propaganda in the 20th century being a great example of this. The internet as it exists today is a sort of hive mind that not only amplifies this dynamic, but injects a good measure of chaos and turbulence into the mix. That leads to a great deal of uncertainty, and in turn a distortion of each person's individual perception of reality.
There's also the argument that good things may arise from the muck of the current technological landscape. I don't doubt this—there's strong historical precedent here as well—that said, things like the NFT craze represent more of a perverse evolutionary outcropping from our current hive mind structure, which is itself corrupted in so many ways. With any luck, hopefully the rotten bits collapse and fall off in due time.
