- If I could teleport into any one person’s living room right now and have a conversation, I would choose Mitch McConnell. I would set up a poster stand with an enormous picture of Trump’s MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT, point to it with a yardstick, and say, “You sold your party out for this. Remember? In January 2021 you decided you’d rather win the midterms than cut this cancer out of your party. And look at you now. A historic 2022 loss and the man you sacrificed yourself for is selling NFTs six months after NFTs stopped fooling anyone. How do you feel?
I just had a staff meeting with one of my departments. Academic chat died down and the meeting chair asked, "Any other business?" Sensing my time had come, I said, "Donald Trump just announced his range of NFTs." All decorum went out the window. "What the fuck.." "He didn't?" "Put it on the monitor!" So I did. Loaded up the page and we spent the last ten minutes of the meeting just looking at those images.
My wife didn't fully believe me that it wasn't parody. Trust but verify, after all. So she did some quick digging and found the NYTimes writeup. And then she chortled (she's not a chortler) and read the following aloud: And really - I don't know that I can come up with a better phrase to encapsulate this era, from the moment David Bowie died to... whenever we make it back to the good timeline. The disbelief was palpable.For a day, Republicans and even some Democrats speculated about what Mr. Trump might have planned for his major announcement, assuming it related to his campaign or even the race for House speaker. The disbelief at the ultimate announcement was palpable.
"This is my first OFFICIAL Trump Trading Card NFT collection" . . He'll do more and more as long as republicans will buy them. It's like limited edition coins, decorative plates, or any other HSW shittery you can imagine... but some of them come with watermarks from where the original art was stolen from.
I honestly think they'll do more to advance the idea that NFTs are serial numbers and digital collectibles are "things linked to an NFT" than anything else so far. 'member this? Hidden in the furor over "ZOMG NFTS are disappearing" was the fact that the "disappearing NFT" was a fake ticket for a flight to the moon on SpaceX. Also hidden in the furor was the fact that the token that actually is the NFT was browsable from any blockchain explorer, but OpenSea refused to serve up the fake moon ticket when you browsed to it. NFTs aren't jpegs. Aren't images. Those things don't fit on the blockchain. What fits on the blockchain is a symbolic link, basically, and that symbolic link goes out to the normie internet, which has all sorts of long-standing, tried-and-true rules and laws about stealing content. Yuga has some dumb shit going with their apes but the Trump stuff is crystal clear: they lifted images from NASA.com, edited them in MS Paint and sold them. If someone wanted to explore the legality of "NFT as serial number" vs "NFT as commodity" I don't think they could ask for a more clarifying use case than that. I suspect we're going to end up with some very clear caselaw around this, and I suspect we're going to end up with a class action lawsuit alleging negligence and malfeasance the minute the first Trump NFT disappears off OpenSea. But what do they care, they made $4.5m.