This is financial advice

In her essay The Ghostchain (or taking things for what they are) published in Paletten #325, Geraldine Juárez identified the creepy quality of crypto and NFTs in the asset form: tokenization is nothing else than assetization. Assetization is defined by scholars Kean Birch and Fabián Muniesa as the process of transforming something (e.g. knowledge or .jpgs or real estate) into an asset that can be controlled, traded, and capitalised as a revenue stream; assetization is not a unique feature of fintech and its associated blockchain culture, but a systemic condition contoured by market speculation. In the following essay published in Paletten #327-328 she continues to reflect on blockchain culture and the logic of asset management. Paletten #327-328 will is released on April 21st 2022 3.30 pm at Studio Giardini, Venice.

Under the banner artists should get paid, the flag of crypto-finance was planted in the collective imaginary a little more than a year ago: down with gatekeepers, decentralise the art world. Very soon after the sale of a digital file in .jpg format for the equivalent of 69 million dollars in .eth, the promise of getting rid of the gatekeepers and their canon fell apart. In the year following, auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s reported over 100 million dollars in profit from NFTs, Beeple hangs printed images on blue-chip gallery walls,  brick and mortar NFT museums opened their doors across the United States, and NFT marketplaces debuted booths at Art Basel Miami, marketplaces routinely collaborate now with legacy brands to launch fashion drops for the metaverse, and informal Discord groups are transforming into membership clubs and business ventures organised as a new type of business formation, decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), attracting the attention and seed capital of legendary venture capitalists like a16z. And finally, the world has its own $APE cryptocurrency.  Now, crypto-winter might come: the Financial Times reports that $41 billion worth of NFTs have lost fifty percent of their value.

The familiar and overwhelming speed of networked post-politics has flourished in blockchain culture: both a populist, i.e. networked (cyber) and elitist, i.e. financial (punk) space, where new hyper-dynamic cultural derivatives were initially deployed against a “dying world”, successfully turning economic resentment into a productive asset. Often, this old world order is just “the art world”, other times the “web2”, or “the music industry” or “the financial crisis”. The list of reasons to lash out against these culprits is very long and well deserved but the system in which these entities are embedded, capitalism, is never an object of reflection. This is a slightly better capitalism according to a new type of crypto-influencers profiting from the promotion of risk management. Their advice, they stress, is not financial advice.

FIRE

As with other software (the most glaring example being enterprise productivity software, where the licencing and subscription models slowly diffused outwards from the largest corporations to precarious media artists), Ethereum makes use of blockchain technologies to insert itself or re-intermediate – disrupt – institutional financial technologies and “democratise” the production of profit without production. As such, the ownership economy – being built and deployed under the brand of Web3 – is an environment in which the asset, not the commodity, becomes hyper-fetishised and where self-interest and ownership are less reactionary ways to express the libertarian ethos of self-sovereignty that underlies blockchain culture.

In words of Colborn Bell, co-founder of one of the most publicised collections of crypto-art, MOCA or The Museum of Crypto Art, the strategy is to “continue telling people that art is important, that self-sovereignty is important [because] crypto-art is the visual language for the crypto-financial revolution and how we display and disseminate this culture that we have now is how we will spread crypto-currency mass adoption”.

To be clear, blockchain culture is the “space” of cultural production operating under the belief in digital scarcity, that understands code as law, that engages in transactions through immutable and trustless methods powered by blockchain computation to further foster “self-sovereignty”.

Artists using contracts to harness the autonomy of art of course isn’t a new thing. Artist Joshua Caleb Weibley notes in his article A Non-Fungible Treatise, that contracts in fact were one of the preferred artefacts of conceptualists to both deal with and critique the mythical dematerialisation of art, they would lawyer up while at the same time engaging with the poetics of contractual law. The difference now is that the “market scepticism that drove early conceptualists'' is completely missing, something that perhaps can be explained by the fact that artists themselves now too collect and invest in crypto-assets. Thus, it is not surprising that one of the most common rebuttals used against the acknowledgment of the exceeding negative effects set in motion by the assetization of network culture, is that everything is already financialised. The rationale is that artists will be better off by taking control of their artistic property, by turning it into assets and making an exit to speculative communities able to capture the upside. Apparently there is no time to waste, blockchain culture has a lot more in common with communism, we are told: in fact, “we are all marxists”. The metaverse is nothing but a pluriverse, a political cocktail borrowing from neo-zapatismo, syndicalism, cybernetics and sprinkled with dust of pattern languages and financial astrology. It is strange, sure, the ownership economy thrives on vibes and lorecraft as opposed to marketing. The promise is nothing less than FIRE: financial independence, retire early.

Notwithstanding art’s longtime development of its status as an asset class, in the new ownership economy, smart-contracts turbocharge its speculative character, successfully disconnecting the generation of revenue from artistic production, or in other words, incorporating cultural production as one of the main activities of retail-trading. Artists relying on sales and fees to generate income rather than wages is nothing new either, however the incorporation of a sizable group of artists into day-trading is a new important development in the organisation of artistic labour.

Leigh Claire La Berge uses the term decommodified labour to describe a “new configuration of value-extraction, in which the wage is diminished but the formal organisation of work, its rhythms, commitments, and narratives remain” . Here it must be emphasised that among artists and cultural workers, there is a great deal of artistic labour that is decommodified. Fees exist but these are usually the side-effect of much larger amounts of unremunerated work. With this backdrop it is not hard to see how unwaged artists were low-hanging fruit, ready not only to be picked and eaten by the aggressive market mechanisms of the ownership economy but also ready to be instrumentalized as the perfect promotional tool. The fictitious ownership of art – the NFT– makes up for non-existent wages for artistic labour, or what La Berge also refers to as “wages against artwork” .

Digital scarcity must be in the self-interest of artists. Who would oppose the type of economy that can finally pay us?

Blockchain computation as Negative Commons

Much as the intellectual property battles through the 1990s and 2000s opened the door to think about the digital commons and collectively give shape to open source, free software, open access and specifically piracy as a political practice against private property; NFTs, too, now  offer the opportunity to think about decommodified labour, assets, asset rights management – in this context a more accurate term for DRM – and blockchain computation as a negative commons.

The negative commons is a way of understanding the shared and unwanted excess and waste produced by society, developed by philosopher Alexandre Monnin. Instead of the positive images of open green fields with trees and cows eating pasture in a pre-climate crisis or enthusiastic programmers contributing to GitHub pre-Microsoft acquisition, the negative commons presents the notion that certain “resources” are negative in material and immaterial ways, that might also be more familiarly described by orthodox economists as “negative externalities”: Landfill sites, polluted lakes, decommissioned nuclear power plants, and perhaps cryptomining farms fit here. The negative commons also encompasses social structures like economic models, technologies, and supply chains. In this category we might fit financialisation and blockchain computation.

For Monnin, negative commons lack a sustainable or viable future and our time presents few tools for damage-control or discussing them, so they must be politically contested in the present, first for a form of recognition, and then to politicise its treatment as such in a way that groups extending beyond those immediately affected can participate in the response to these negative legacies by also questioning the system that produces and reproduces them.

Being recognition an important step towards the politicisation of negative resources, crypto-art could be seen precisely as an aesthetic manoeuvre to mystify and depoliticise these digital negative commons: artistic production becomes the legitimating sign under which the real waste of blockchain computation occurs. Every problem in the cultural sphere, like the recent purchase of Bandcamp by Epic Games, becomes another opportunity to promote some aspect of crypto and blockchain technology, apparently an answer ever in need of a question. While all this goes on, asset manager capitalism itself promises to absorb the negative commons in its own perverse way, through the fact that having a stake in capitalism as such means that externalities are no longer quite so external.

Asset Manager Capitalism

Capitalism is never a static thing, and has passed through several dominant regimes of ownership and corporate governance. The “shareholder revolution” of the 1980s was the way the neoliberal revolution appeared from within the structure of the firm, bringing new power to finance over the hitherto powerful institutions of management and labour.

Now, we are in the epoch of asset manager capitalism, described by political economist Benjamin Braun as a regime of “asset dominance”, which entails that “asset prices, rather than wages, drive investment and consumption, and therefore become the main targets of macroeconomic policies" . Where inflation and “overheating” might once have been the cause for central banks to tighten up the money supply with interest rate increases, meeting inflation targets at the cost of inducing recession, the centrality of asset prices suggests this is no longer the priority it once was. The  trade-off is that the centralisation of a vast proportion of capital under passive management has only intensified speculative, fictitious growth, not calmed it. As David Harvey recently commented, “money is being created and it doesn’t know where to go, except into speculation and asset values."

The structure of these asset management firms is both very simple and complex: they own a huge diversity of things with the simple aim of replicating the performance of the market as a whole. This means you can simply invest in one of their maze-like index funds, and as the whole stock market grows, your money does too. It turns out that simply investing in capitalism as such, rather than picking one or other company, industry, or sector, gives the best returns over the long term. These asset managers wield all the power of ownership on behalf of the real owners, (institutional investors like pension funds or wealthy individuals), voting at shareholder meetings and often effectively controlling entire sectors of the economy. Braun describes this as stewardship, an “ownership without ownership”. This fracturing of the traditionally monolithic concept of ownership has its mirror image in NFTs (and DAOs adopting the language of stewardship), where the token grants no real power or rights over the associated image or resource, but takes on the asset-aspects of speculation and investment, producing future returns.

These two models of fictitious ownership are inversions of each other – mediated and unmediated–  the mediated is disinterested, investors have no skin in the game as the vast bulk of the asset manager absorbs risk, while in the unmediated financial intermediaries, the managers, are stripped away in the service of self-interest with crypto-investors taking pride in just how much skin they have in the game.

Thus we can understand the socio-financial collection of phenomena that seem to weave together like so many strands of a tapestry: meme stocks, crypto speculation, NFTs, scams, the boom of retail trading assets. These all rely, more or less, on the new environment of eternal asset growth promised by the new attitude of central banks and capital markets, while at the same time presenting themselves as rebels against this monumental, monolithic, all-encompassing system of “universal ownership” of another type of FIRE – Finance, Insurance and Real Estate – and that trillionaire firms like Blackrock and Vanguard represent.

Spectacular Assets

"What we want to be able to theorise is a modification in the very nature of cultural tokens and the systems they operate in” , wrote Fredric Jameson in 1997 while examining the visual expressions manifested by financialised capitalism at the end of the 20th century.  While previous cultural forms represented “the economy” either as finance (such as the friendly attitude of the Young British Artist towards disaster capitalists, culminating in the spectacle of For the Love of God by Damian Hirst in sync with the 2008 financial crisis), or the internet (manifested by a post-crash hyperactive networked production, notably through meme culture and the post-internet art movement), the combination of finance elitism and internet populism suffused during the global pandemic literalized in blockchain culture and made operative the very concept of cultural token.

The hyper-dynamism of NFTs is not symbolic, capital and network are bounded by a technical contract, a non-fungible token, yet infinitely reproducible and overwhelmingly generic. For Guy Debord, the spectacle was not only capital accumulated in the form of ape-images, but also a common language of separation , a separation that can be found at the core of the asset and its force generating profit without production, ownership without ownership, trust without trust, scarcity without scarcity, work without wages.

As blockchain technologies streamline processes of assetization and popularise the ability of minting assets, it is important to stress that an asset is a resource that has been stripped out of its resourcefulness in the real economy, in order to acquire value, even if volatile, in a fictitious economy (as in detached from real production), where the priority is given to spectacular and individualised returns on the future over housing, healthcare, pensions, wages, education, leisure and, more generally, the collective labour needed to improve and maintain social life in the present.

That this messianic choice for speculation and separation has an aesthetic dimension comes as no surprise. By the same token, no one should be surprised by the widespread aversion among artists to participate in a cultural economy where the price of paying artists means to intensify the logic of asset management.

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Thanks to Julian Duane for listening to my musings on whatsapp, readings and suggestions to help me shape this text. And to Greg Allen and Bhavisha Panchia for their images.

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About the author: Geraldine Juárez (b. Mexico City) is a Mexican-Swedish artist working with time-based media, sculpture and performance about the histories, imaginaries and materials involved in the social production of technological culture. Her work has been exhibited and performed in Casa de Lago, Jeu de Paume, Skogen, HKW, transmediale, Fotomuseum Winterthur and the 57th Biennale in Venice. Her texts have been published by Constant, Continent, Scapegoat, Sink, Paletten and K.Verlag.  She lives in Gothenburg.