The invention of NFTs was meant to give artists more control over their work, but that dream didn't come true and only led to commercially exploitable hype
The only thing we'd wanted to do was ensure that artists could make some money and have control over their work.
The AtlanticAnil Dash
Context & Ripple Effects
This Atlantic piece is the retrospective on a debate that ran all spring: in February, Andreessen Horowitz argued NFTs remove intermediaries and let creators tier pricing — but that piece sits outside the candidate set's arc, and the record that follows is darker. By late March, [[a:964648|artists chasing NFT marketplace payouts were hitting scams, environmental criticism, and crypto hype]], and a New York Times history showed celebrities and major brands, not the artists who kickstarted the boom, capturing the frenzy.
The Atlantic's verdict — that the artist-control dream collapsed into commercially exploitable hype — reframes the whole cycle as a cautionary case, and it connects forward to the same publication's broader examination of newsletters, NFTs, and tip jars reducing expression to commerce.
First-order effects
Artists who entered NFT marketplaces on the promise of direct income are the immediate losers: the coverage documents them absorbing scams and environmental backlash rather than durable control over their work.
The marketplaces and platforms that NFTs were supposed to disintermediate remain the gatekeepers, since the hype economy runs through them.
Second-order effects
Celebrities and major brands, as the NYT history shows, out-compete individual artists for the speculative dollars, shifting NFT value away from the creators the technology was built for.
The failure gives skeptics a template: every future creator-monetization scheme now gets measured against NFTs' gap between promise and outcome.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, creator-empowerment tools tend to be captured by speculative and commercial forces — a structural risk the Atlantic extends to newsletters and tip jars, where monetization reshapes what creators make.
The episode argues for scrutiny of any 'disintermediation' pitch: the intermediary tends to reappear as the marketplace, the platform, or the speculator.
The trend: Creator-monetization technologies promising disintermediation are repeatedly absorbed into speculative hype economies that re-concentrate power away from the creators they were built to serve.
When we created the first NFTs back in 2014, @mccoyspace & I were trying to support artists and center their needs as blockchain technologies took off. In my first time writing for @TheAtlantic, I explain how things didn't go exactly as planned since then. https://www.theatlantic…
“If NFT prices suddenly plunge, these investors will try buying polo horses or Davos tickets with cryptocurrencies instead. Think of a kid who's spent the day playing Skee-Ball and now has a whole lot of tickets to spend. Every toy looks enticing.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ..…
The pairing of @anildash and @mccoyspace for 7x7 2014 is a key origin story in the rise of NFTs. Seven years later, Anil deeply questions the entire system, while Kevin remains eternally optimistic. 7x7, it's like that sometimes. Here's Anil's look back: https://www.theatlantic.c…
This article seems short sighted for someone who helped pioneer such a revolutionary idea. This is still the beginning. BBS boards and AOL chat rooms were a shit show too. NFTs might be about investing now but there will be a crash and what's on the other side is exciting. https:…
“But these changes left creators at the mercy of companies far more powerful, far more ruthless, and far less accountable than the record labels and publishers they'd disrupted. Artists were the original gig economy.” #IRespectMusic https://www.theatlantic.com/ ...
“One major challenge is that the blockchain has, at present, approximately zero uses for the typical consumer.” Inaccurate. +13M Rewards user wallets created to utilize @AttentionToken in @Brave to date, with +1M Creators verified & accepting $BAT. https://twitter.com/...
this piece is in and of itself an artistic masterpiece manages to to spaghetti toss every shortcut, ill thought out criticism of cryptocurrencies against the wall while demonstrating zero insight or understanding of the benefits and real usage occurring https://www.theatlantic.co…
“When we invented non-fungible tokens, we were trying to protect artists. But tech-world opportunism has struck again.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ...
Artists/art is utterly incidental to NFTs, whose primary goals - crypto marketing, speculation and grifting - are adequately served by the hype and bubblegum engineering underneath at the moment. @anildash is just nostalgic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ...