News/Research

Kaitlin Forcier Reviews Surfing with Satoshi

02 Apr, 2023

Kaitlin Forcier Reviews Surfing with Satoshi

Alum Kaitlin Forcier reviews Domenico Quaranta's Surfing with Satoshi: Art, Blockchain and NFTs in Media-N in her prescient article "Can Art Save Crypto? Domenico Quaranta’s Surfing with Satoshi: Art, Blockchain and NFTs."

From the article:

Reflecting on the influence of the recent blockchain boom, media theorist Ian Bogost wrote that “the internet is just investment banking now.” If the last two decades of the internet have been defined by what has variously been called the attention economy, the app economy, platform capitalism, and surveillance capitalism — thebusiness model that uses addictive free platforms to yield data and advertising revenue from their users — we are now entering a phase in which digital capitalism profits not from attention and information, but from speculation. Blockchain, a distributed encrypted database used to authenticate individual digital assets, whether a unit of currency or an artwork, generates value by turning these assets into securities to be traded. Over the course of ten years, the value of one Bitcoin has mushroomed from one dollar to roughly $43,000, the result of enormous amounts of financial speculation. As Tressie McMillan Cottom succinctly put it, blockchain-enabled technologies are essentially “parking lots for venture capitalists.” Numerous questions surround blockchain technologies: How do they work? Is the market in cryptocurrencies a speculative bubble,and if so, who will benefit and who will lose out when it bursts? What are you buying when you purchase a piece of cryptoart? Is it even art?

Read the article here.