As handy a metaphor as the Emperor's New Clothes is about speaking truth to power, I feel like the relative ease of conning people who are desperate to be seen as wise and in the know is an under-discussed aspect of it.
In the story, it's not just the threat of going against the Emperor socially that keeps the crowd going along with the illusion. The core of the swindle is that the ability to see the miraculous, magical garments is held up as a test of the viewer's intelligence and competence.
NFTs and crypto currency generally grow via cult-like dynamics, one of the key ones being the appeal of secret knowledge that elevates the holder and makes them special and powerful.

"But just insulting your critics isn't going to sway them."

Yeah, but trying to win over critics is hard. They're not talking down to their critics, they're talking down *about* their critics, in hopes of making the critics' side less appealing, and their side more.
A couple of things about NFTs that many of us have remarked upon critically are actually in their favor here.

Like, many of us went through a phase when learning about NFTs where we felt like we *must* be missing something, because they just made no sense otherwise. Remember?
The people who are still in that twilight realm are the ones who are targeted by this "Maybe this is more of a Shelbyville idea." routine from Ubisoft. The people who feel like they *must* be missing something... that implies the boosters know something they don't, doesn't it?
And maybe right now it seems like there are more critics than there are people on the sidelines waiting to pick a direction to break in, but... the people on the sidelines haven't had any reason to make any kind of unified noise.
I suspect it's a pretty safe bet that the number of people who don't know what to think about NFTs (including people who don't know there's anything to think about) outnumber the people who hate NFTs, and I suspect that's the bet Ubisoft is making.
None of this is to say that it's the NFT-based future of gaming is a done deal or that we should stop making noise. The boosters aren't going to stop boosting. The pushers aren't going to stop pushing. The scammers aren't going to stop scamming. Critics should keep criticizing.
"But Ubisoft's customer base is orders of magnitude higher than the NFT userbase so it makes no sense to cater to NFT users against the wishes of the majority of their customers."

My point is the majority of their customers don't have discernible wishes in this area yet.
The backlash against NFTs was loud and forceful but it isn't anything close to a user census. A person with little knowledge of NFTs and no strong opinions has no reason to have participated in the backlash, and is also a potential NFT customer that Ubisoft can market to.
Honestly, the NFT-agnostic existing Ubisoft customer who can be made susceptible to NFT hype is a better target than someone who is already into NFTs because their emotional investment is in Ubisoft, not the idea of NFTs. All they'll know about NFTs is what the marketers say.

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More from @AlexandraErin

Jan 30
So that "own a color on the blockchain" thing is less of a pipe dream and more of a pipe nightmare. It's a system you have to opt in to. This dude has created a pseudo-financial ecosystem where joining it means you have to agree you'll pay money every time you create art.
The thing is, there isn't a "smart contract" that's smart enough to know every single time you use a color. Even if you've opted in, you could use whatever colors you want and mint them through an unconnected protocol. It requires voluntary cooperation every step of the way.
Which, I mean, it's good. It's good that this joker can't actually use arbitrary code to lock you out of using a digital color combination freely whenever you want.

But it demonstrates how every promise made by NFTs and crypto is a lie. "Smart contracts" require participation.
Read 12 tweets
Jan 30
Clarifying reminder:

Spotify "losing $4 billion of value" doesn't mean they lost $4 billion or that $4 billion worth of business was taken away from them by cancelations.

It's referring to the market valuation of the company. It's not nothing, but it's also not quite money.
Like so many tech companies presenting as media companies, presenting themselves as a solid choice for investors is a big part of their strategy. "Line go up" = success. But the line going down is temporary until it's not.
If you've been wondering why Spotify isn't panicking or why "spending $100 million to lose $4 billion" doesn't immediately trigger a reversal, it's because they don't yet have any reason to fear their share price won't recover.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 30
Every time I'm not watching Star Trek Discovery, I forget that Tig Notaro is on this show as an ascerbic lesbian Star Fleet engineer named "Jett Reno" because this information is too awesome to retain.
Like, "Jett Reno, hotshot engineering genius from the future" is obviously a character she made up after casually wandering into a shoot one day.
...oh, actually, my mistake, she's not one of the "from the future" characters. I mean, she's from the 23rd century, which is the future relative to us, but she's not one of the characters from the future of the future.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 28
No, YOU spent an hour yesterday researching heraldic tinctures and attitudes to make a "blazon code" (cf. handkerchief code) for a sci-fi Omegaverse setting.
It's like... okay, the gender-equivalent dynamics of this world require people to be able to signal multiple statuses to each other, along with what they're looking for, in a way that's distinct and visible at a distance outside of pheromone range, and it has to be standard.
And then it's like, oh. There is an already existing visual language with standardized vocabulary that incorporates animals of different orders/ranks, postures, directional movement, with a limited but expressive color palette and room for additional notations.
Read 9 tweets
Jan 27
This is not the first time that Donald Trump's liabilities have outweighed his assets to the tune of 9 digits. This is a "rich" man who has had negative wealth for decades at a time. Anybody reading this has probably been richer than Donald Trump for most of their life.
He's been able to live the lifestyle of a wealthy man even while having negative tens or hundreds of millions of dollars because he understands on a blunt force level how "wealth" functions in society. He knows how to act in order to be given access, assets, opportunities, etc.
He has spent decades following the same basic plan: get piles of *other people's* money in the form of loans or investments in business ventures that he has no idea how to run, live large on that money, let the chips fall where they may, and abandon ship.
Read 9 tweets
Jan 26
One of my new interests on YouTube is watching "van life" videos, where people go on tours of the tiny houses they have crammed into old FedEx trucks and ambulances.

I can't drive and don't aspire to that kind of life. So why do I watch them? For spaceship design ideas.
Not "These are the voyages" type starships but what the inside of a ship owned by a solo spacer who had to fit their whole life into the biggest vessel they could fly (and keep flying) on their own.
One thing to bear in mind if you're designing a semi-realistic space vessel is that the craft is a closed system wrapped in nature's most perfect insulator. With a person inside, it needs a way to get rid of heat and humidity or it will just get hotter and damper all the time.
Read 5 tweets

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