Thread by @doctorow

Having coined a few terms in my day, I revel in new coinages that capture something really gnarly and interesting. 1/

If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/11/08/tin… 2/

Take "bezzle" - JK Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." 3/

So much of our contemporary economy is captured by that delicious term!

pluralistic.net/tag/bezzles/

Recently, I happened on another coinage that is marvellously apt for our current moment: #RightClickerMentality.

vice.com/en/article/5dg… 4/

The term comes to us from the world of #NFTs, which have blown up into a massive, fraud-ridden speculative bubble that is blazing through whole rain-forests' worth of carbon while transfering billions from suckers to con-artists. A bezzle, in other words. 5/

The creators of NFTs envisioned them as a kind of bragging right that described the relationship between a creator and a member of their audience. When you paid for an NFT, you recorded the fact that you had made a donation to the artist that was inspired by a specific work. 6/

That fact was indelibly recorded in a public ledger - the blockchain - so everyone could see it.

Instantly, the idea of supporting artists with NFTs was converted into a financial bubble. 7/

The point of an NFT wasn't to support an artist - it was to acquire a tradeable asset that would go up in value because the buyer thought they could unload it for even more. 8/

In this age of stock markets that boom in response to mass unemployment, supply-chain collapse, monopoly and runaway climate emergencies, NFTs aren't really *that* weird. 9/

They represent the dream of "retail investors" to participate in the rigged lottery that minted 412 new billionaires during the covid lockdown. 10/

In the NFT bezzle, NFT "owners" deliberately blur the distinction between owning the right to say you helped an artist and the right to say you own their work. 11/

They treat the NFT as equivalent to the image it refers to, rather than a bit of metadata that relates to that image. That's not surprising, as speculators are far more interested in inflating, tradeable assets than in arts patronage! 12/

In response, NFT skeptics are wont to troll speculators by right-clicking the NFT image, choosing "Save As..." and making a copy of the image. 13/

Then they taunt NFT bros with the copy, driving home the point that their speculative bubble is trading in something even more abstract than a digital image. 14/

On Oct 26, an NFT bro calling himself Midwit Milhouse coined the term "right-clicker mentality" to refer to these spoilsports who insist on pointing out the inconvenient truth of his white-hot ponzi scheme. 15/

Milhouse used the term to disparage an amateur chef who made his own version of a $2,000 "Salt Bae" steak for $90. 16/

Salt Bae is a trendy London chef who charges tens of thousands for gold-leaf-covered steaks that he showers with salt in a kind of tableside piece of performance art. 17/

Milhouse called this person "a great example of right-clicker mentality," whose homemade steak didn't deliver "the satisfaction, flex, clout that comes from having eaten at Salt Bae’s restaurant."

https://twitter.com/kenlowery/status/1455662848345055232

18/

Milhouse went on: "The value is not in the cost of the steak. Go ahead, make yourself a gold-coated steak at home. Post a picture of it on Instagram. See how much clout it gets you." 19/

And then, displaying galactic-scale lack-of-self-awareness, "Salt Bae’s dish costs around 1500GBP because people want to pay 1500 GBP to show off that they can afford to pay that much. It’s all about the flex." 20/

You really couldn't ask for a better encapsulation of the NFT bezzle: buy an NFT to "flex" and "show off you can afford to pay that much." Ignore the intrinsic value or satisfaction of the underlying work. You're doing this for "clout." 21/

Right-clicker-mentality is a value we should all aspire to. As @mjgault wrote on @motherboard: "Sometimes a word or phrase comes along that’s so perfect it almost makes you angry." 22/

"To right-click is one thing, but to have a right-clicker mentality implies an ontological break between crypto-fans and critics. Indeed, it implies the person saving the JPEG to their hard drive isn’t just wrong, they’re broken in some way." 23/

Image:
Nenad Stojkovic
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hand…

CC BY:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.… 24/