I have no words for just how terrible the effects of this climate-change-exacerbated cyclone have been. As I write this, 11 people are confirmed dead, including a two-year-old child, who was swept away as her parents tried to escape the flood.

My son is two. A quirk of location and fate and that could have been my family. It could have been anyone. Horror beyond horror.

I want to say how anguished and sorry I feel for all those who have lost lives and family members and pets and homes and property and precious things. I also want to take this moment to remind everyone that there is a long history of responsibility for our lack of climate mitigation, preparation and adaptation that goes back decades. Those responsible for this crisis aren’t just a nebulous “we;” they are specific people, who through a mixture of cowardice, incompetence and (too often) sociopathic malfeasance have given us the crisis we now face.

In the wake of the latest climate disaster, the malfeasants are already at it, with Act party leader David Seymour already loftily declaring that we need to stop focusing on climate change mitigation.

“Our climate change response needs to shift from mitigation to adaption. New Zealand can’t change the climate but it can better adapt, and unfortunately we’re getting a really big lesson in that right now,” Seymour said.

This is, of course, unmitigated bullshit. New Zealand has both internationally agreed and profound moral obligations to mitigate climate change, especially given we are the world’s sixth greatest emitter of greenhouse gases, per capita. But, more to the point, if the world doesn’t mitigate climate change, it will create a catastrophe that’s impossible to adapt to.

On that note, let’s keep looking into who’s responsible for our lack of both climate change mitigation and adaptation. Last post, I detailed who some of New Zealand’s merchants of climate doubt are. The following post — copied with permission from No Right Turn — shows just how successful they’ve been.

Climate change: The lost decades

Originally posted 15 February 2023 at No Right Turn

Over the last few days Aotearoa was hit by ex-tropical cyclone Gabrielle – the second tropical cyclone to hit us in just two months. Huge chunks of the country have been flooded, 225,000 people have lost electricity (some will be without it for two weeks), and at least two people are dead. The economic impact is estimated in the tens of billions. Before Parliament adjourned so MPs could go and help their constituents, Climate Minister James Shaw gave a speech drawing the obvious link to climate change [video], and warning that we are now entering “a period of consequences”:

I have to say that, as I stand here today, I struggle to find words to express what I am thinking and feeling about this particular crisis. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as sad or as angry about the lost decades that we spent bickering and arguing about whether climate change was real or not, whether it was caused by humans or not, whether it was bad or not, whether we should do something about it or not, because it is clearly here now, and if we do not act, it will get worse.

I’ve been recalling, actually, a quote from a different time about a different crisis: “The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.” And there will be people who say, you know—just as the National Rifle Association in the United States does about shootings over there—it’s “too soon” to talk about these things, but we are standing in it right now. This is a climate change – related event. The severity of it, of course, made worse by the fact that our global temperatures have already increased by 1.1 degrees. We need to stop making excuses for inaction. We cannot put our heads in the sand when the beach is flooding. We must act now.

Newsroom‘s Marc Daalder has talked about this period of consequences – or, as he put it, Alt title: Fuck around and find out. But I’d like to look at the “fucking around” part. Because there is a lot here to be angry about, and people we need to hold to account.

Way back in 1992, the then-National government endorsed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in which they promised to reduce emissions. They followed this up in 1998 by signing the Kyoto Protocol, committing us to a binding emissions reduction target. Environment Minister Simon Upton did a lot of work, developing a fully-formed, all-gases, all-sectors emissions trading scheme, but his National colleagues – farmers and climate-change deniers – fucked around, chickening out of implementing it at the last minute, leaving the problem for future governments.

In 2002 the then-Labour government ratified the Kyoto Protocol. They then fucked around, switching from an ETS to a carbon tax and then dumping it under pressure from their coalition partners. They chickened out of making farmers pay a minimal levy on agricultural emissions, while repealing existing regulatory solutions to reduce emissions in favour of a “perfect” price mechanism which didn’t exist yet. They then switched back to a partial emissions trading scheme (wasting another three years in policy development), which they loaded with pollution subsidies and opt-outs, and did not pass until literally the last days of their term. It was then immediately gutted by National.

Not content with gutting the ETS, the new National government elected in 2008 set up a “review” of climate change policy packed with climate change deniers to undermine policy even further, while repealing the thermal electricity ban and biofuels obligation. They then gutted the ETS even more, adding even more subsidies for polluters. At the same time, they announced a “50% by 2050” emissions reduction target, and ratified the Paris agreement. But they fucked around, and did nothing to meet their obligations.

In 2017, then-Labour leader Jacinda Ardern called climate change “my generation’s nuclear free moment”. In 2019 the government she led passed the Zero Carbon Act, ostensibly committing us to long-term emissions reductions, with plans, budgets, reviews, and all manner of bureaucratic bullshit. And then they fucked around, repeatedly fucking with the carbon market to keep carbon prices low, repeatedly delaying making agricultural polluters pay for their pollution (and then only at the lowest possible level), and introducing even more subsidies for polluters. They’ve now pissed all over their carbon budget by subsidising petrol.

All of these governments fucked around. There’s a common theme of hard-working climate ministers – Simon Upton, Pete Hodgson, and James Shaw – being betrayed by their Cabinet colleagues and having their plans dumped (Nick Smith is a malignant exception to this, being a collaborator with climate change deniers). There’s another of constantly grovelling to farmers, a dirty, inefficient sector which receives more in subsidies than it pays in taxes, and which when you factor in the costs of its pollution, seems to be a net drain on New Zealand. And there’s a common theme of them viewing climate change as a problem for the future, a mess they can leave for someone else to clean up. The consequences of that irresponsible short-term thinking can be seen on the East Coast today.

They all fucked around, and we’re now finding out. And the people who fucked around got knighthoods and big pensions and posh post-political careers with banks and SOEs and crown entities. They got rich, while kiwis got flooded and left in the dark. And it’s time we held them accountable for it.

Can we stop calling deniers “sceptics” now please

Me again. Thanks again to Idiot/Savant for permission to reproduce his post. Please check out No Right Turn; it’s one of New Zealand’s best political blogs.

In related news, journalist Charlie Mitchell is one of Stuff’s most consistently excellent writers and he has a great piece on denial that I encourage you to check out, but that I also take some issue with. Mitchell correctly identifies the role of mainstream media opinionists in driving false narratives about the cyclone and climate change, but he calls this phenomenon “Cyclone Gabrielle scepticism.” It’s part of a long media tradition of calling climate change deniers “climate sceptics,” when they’re anything but.

A sceptic (also spelled skeptic, which I like better for some reason, so I’ll just use that from now on) is someone who suspends belief in any dogma that lacks evidence. Essentially, skepticism is the thinking behind the scientific method. The idea of climate change deniers being skeptics is a joke, as the scientific evidence for human-caused climate change is overwhelming. And if you’re feeling, uh, skeptical, here are the NZ Skeptics on climate change, forced to make a clarification because of misidentification with so-called “climate skeptics:”

The New Zealand Skeptics Society supports the scientific consensus on Climate Change. There is an abundance of evidence demonstrating global mean temperatures are rising, and that humans have had a considerable impact on the natural rate of change. The Society will adjust its position with the scientific consensus.

The news media should stop using “climate skeptic” and similar terms immediately. It confers climate change deniers a legitimacy they really shouldn’t enjoy, as they are demonstrably following a dogma rather than engaging in critical thinking. If they’re looking for a more accurate term, they could simply use “climate change deniers” or if that’s too on-the-nose, why not settle for “climate cynics?”

Thank you for reading The Bad News Letter. If you want to see climate change denial out of our media, please share this piece.

Voices for Climate?

Thanks for the discussion that took place under the last post. A particular shout-out to Tamara who wondered if there could be some kind of “Voices for Climate” who could fight against climate disinformation disseminated via the media. Bloody good idea. I was less stoked to see someone trying to sneak in some climate doomism. Just no. I’m about as tolerant of doom as I am of denial. It’s unscientific and unhelpful, as it drives decent people to despair and helps provide a perverse “well, if we’re all screwed, we may as well keep drilling” social license to the fossil fuel industry. But it’s quite different from expressions of sadness or even despair, which are entirely fine, especially now we find ourselves firmly in the “finding out” stage of climate change. If you feel the need to vent, go for it.

In the aftermath of the Auckland floods and the still-unfolding catastrophe of Cyclone Gabrielle, the media are asking whether New Zealanders (correctly) see these events as linked to climate change. “Does Cyclone Gabrielle have you thinking about climate change? You’re not the only one,” writes the excellent Kirsty Johnston, at Stuff.

These articles always seem to crop up after climate disasters, and as climate change intensifies, we’re seeing them more and more frequently. In them, the physical processes behind climate change are usually outlined accurately, in some detail. Where they fall down is the human causes. In all these pieces is a missing piece: the identification of those most responsible for climate change. They often offer a vague “we” to identify those causing emissions — which is technically correct, in the same sense as the statement “we humans cause war” — and then suggest “changes at an individual level” that can help too.

But it’s not just “we”. The main cause of climate change is emissions from fossil fuel use and agriculture. And the main proponents of the agricultural and fossil fuel industries in NZ are specific people, with names and job descriptions, who lead or belong to organisations who work to delay meaningful climate change action. In this opposition, they too bear an outsize share of the responsibility — for not only the damage climate change has caused, but the far greater damage it will inflict in the future.

In “Will this be the climate crisis that finally spurs action?” economist Bernard Hickey, writing for The Spinoff (syndicated from his fantastic newsletter The Kaka) correctly points out that the current Labour government should shoulder blame for failing to use their absolute majority in Parliament to take action on climate. But as insightful as it is, this article doesn’t mention the ongoing influence campaign against meaningful climate action, conducted almost entirely by right-wing political parties and think-tanks, often in service to agricultural and fossil fuel interests — who frequently work together as one big team.

I feel like that’s a gap that needs filling.

They are Federated Farmers, who have for years successfully opposed meaningful climate action on New Zealand’s greatest source of emissions: agriculture.

Their CEO is Terry Copeland.

They are the Taxpayers Union, who are not a union, and who have an intentionally opaque funding structure that allows them to (im)plausibly deny that they are funded by fossil fuel and tobacco interests, among others. The Taxpayer’s Union is a member of the international Atlas Network, an association of right-wing think-tanks sponsored by the likes of the Koch Brother (formerly known as the Koch Brothers, before one of them went to his post-death reward). This fake union’s hobby is gaming news media by chundering a vast quantity of press releases on contentious topics that editors find irresistible and, in partnership with David Farrar’s polling firm Curia, undertaking expensive political polling activities. They indulge in a form of soft climate change denial, where they weaponise insights gleaned from Curia polling and focus groups to whip up public rage and resentment against climate-friendly projects like cycleways. It is my sad duty to report that they have a podcast, hosted by climate change denier Peter Williams. In its latest, dire episode, it was graced by Federated Farmers’ Mark Hooper and Paul Melville. (In a classic Kiwi 2-degrees-of-seperation twist, I went to Uni with Paul.) His position is Principal Advisor, Water & Environment Strategy. One wonders what his principal advice is, given that dairy farming has ruined New Zealand’s waterways and filled our groundwater with bowel-cancer-linked nitrates.

The director of the Taxpayer’s Union is Jordan Williams, who is perhaps best understood by an opinion uncovered in Nicky Hager’s The Hollow Men: “women: if they didn’t have a fanny between their legs they’d have a bounty on their heads.” Their co-founder is David Farrar, a long-time National Party operative and pollster and fellow star of The Hollow Men.

They are the Act Party, who indulged in outright climate denial for years and now advocate for renewed offshore oil and gas exploration in New Zealand and for the wholesale repeal of the Zero Carbon Act.

The leader of the Act Party is David Seymour.

They are the National Party, who oppose meaningful emissions reduction policies in agriculture and who, along with Act, have sworn they will repeal the New Zealand offshore oil and gas exploration ban.

The leader of the National Party is Christopher Luxon.

They are the New Zealand Initiative, who advocate strenuously against all forms of climate action except the Emission Trading Scheme. (Emissions trading schemes are dubiously effective, and at worst are scams designed to allow the worst polluters to pollute indefinitely.) They too are members of the right-wing, Koch-funded Atlas Network. They too published outright climate change denial for years, and are now wrongly portraying all non-ETS-based climate action as ineffective.

The head of the New Zealand Initiative is Oliver Hartwitch. The chief economist for the New Zealand Initiative is Eric Crampton, who hews to the Austrian / Chicago Boys school of freemarketism and is frequently given a platform by New Zealand media. The author of the Initiative’s Pretence of Necessity report, economist Matt Burgess, is now Chief Policy Advisor to National Party Leader, Chris Luxon. Luke Malpass, who is Stuff’s political editor, formerly worked with the Initiative, helping them right back at their origin — a merger between the New Zealand Institute and the much-loathed Business Roundtable. Here he is working for the Initiative, before he grew his cool hipster moustache and got a job at Stuff sneering at “lockdown lefties“.

They are Energy Resources Aotearoa, a fossil fuel lobby and greenwashing group who recently changed their name from the deeply unfashionable yet far more accurate PEPANZ (Petroleum Exploration and Production Association of New Zealand). They lobby against restrictions on fossil fuel exploration and production in New Zealand.

Their Chief Executive is John Carnegie. Their communications manager is the fascinatingly-named Ben Craven, formerly of the Taxpayer’s Union.

They are NZME, who intentionally and cynically give climate change minimisers, doubters and delayers like Mike Hosking and Heather du Plessis-Allan a rarefied platform to foment conflict and garner listeners by promoting disinformation about renewable energy and climate adaptation and manufacturing consent for the continued and expanded operations of the fossil fuel industry.

HDPA, 14 February 2023: “So yeah, for a lot of people, I reckon this will be the final piece they need to convince them something needs to be done….. Not so much that they need to give up their fossil-fuelled cars, because come on, we all know NZ isn’t going to do much to change global emissions.”

Mike Hosking, 10 February 2023: “The theory was we would use EV’s and batteries and solar and wind and sunflower seeds. But the reality is none of those things are reliable enough or available enough. As they currently stand, they aren’t actual answers. They are alternatives of a temporary nature and, given that, there is no point in getting all angsty about profits and wanting to put a windfall tax on them that is talked about… The zealots are asking us to do something we won’t do, which is go backwards. We will not do it and we are not doing it. Our reality, and its smooth operation, will trump ideology every time.”

Oh and just for fun here is fellow NZME stable-mate and wife of Mike Hosking, Kate Hawkesby, indulging in some deeply unfortunate pre-catastrophe amateur meteorology on Instagram.

The CEO of NZME is Michael Boggs. Its Managing Editor is Shayne Currie.

This is not an exhaustive list. There are plenty more.

These organisations, the people who staff them, and the people who run them, are —  whether they outright admit it or not — advocates for continued agricultural emissions, for the continued use of fossil fuels, and the further expansion of the fossil fuel industry. They are merchants of doubt who seed climate delay propaganda, using their enormous resources and platforms to sway New Zealanders against climate action.

This is far worse than the climate change denial of the past. Now that the causes and effects of climate change are impossible to deny, and the coming ravages are clear, these people are committing a far greater evil. They know exactly how destructive climate change already is, and yet they act to make it much worse.

So, name them. Blame them.

An outsize share of future climate catastrophes are their fault, and they must be held accountable.

“Will this be the crisis that finally spurs action on climate change denial?”

It’d be nice if it was, wouldn’t it? A silver lining to the raging cloud the size of half a continent that darkened our skies over the previous week, destroying the livelihoods of thousands. Let’s look at how it could work:

Think tanks

The climate-delay-advocating think tanks work by injecting their message into the media, and from there it is carried to the public. While they do have some public following via social media, the think tanks still overwhelmingly rely on mainstream media manipulation to get their message out. This could be stopped if news media simply agreed to stop platforming people who seek to delay climate change action. When it is necessary — for genuine newsworthiness reasons — to report on a fossil-fuel-affiliated, climate-change-delaying think tank, the piece can be accompanied by heavy disclaimers identifying the known affiliations and motivations of the think tank. As a bonus, it would mean that we would never, or hardly ever, have to hear from that fake union of people who object to even the concept of taxes.

Political parties

On the surface, this is much trickier. Although climate inaction stands to displace, ruin, or outright kill billions of people in the not-particularly-distant future, parties that deal in climate delay or soft denial are still seen as politically legitimate. But this is a flaw in the media lens; journalists and editors could quite easily start telling the truth, which is that failing to mitigate and adapt to climate change is both economically expensive and morally unconscionable. I imagine that in this near future, we may see climate deniers and delayers a bit like we view Nazis now; as wholly illegitimate parasites on the body politic. As things stand, vowing to re-open offshore oil and gas exploration is viewed not as a crime against the future of humanity but in terms of “you may not like it, but it’s smart politics.” Political journalists should not simply repeat what politicians say and assign points; they should frame the statements of politicians by how well they relate to observable reality. In other words, they should tell the truth. Let’s see how that could work in practice, with this story from the Herald. Here’s how it reads currently:

Christopher Luxon has reaffirmed National’s policy of overturning the ban on issuing new permits for offshore oil and gas exploration, saying it is a solution to New Zealand’s energy crisis.

Luxon said gas could be used as a bridging fuel, and said the Government should scrap its 2018 decision to stop issuing permits for oil and gas exploration offshore.

And here’s how it could read if political journalists were interested in reporting reality:

Christopher Luxon has reaffirmed National’s policy of overturning the ban on issuing new permits for offshore oil and gas exploration, saying it is a solution to New Zealand’s energy crisis. However, scientists and expert bodies such as the International Energy Agency say that no new fossil fuel extraction can be carried out if the world is to stay within Paris Agreement goals of 1.5 degrees C of warming.

Luxon said gas could be used as a bridging fuel, and said the Government should scrap its 2018 decision to stop issuing permits for oil and gas exploration offshore. However, the IPCC has made clear that practically all fossil fuel use must stop in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, and the notion of a “bridging fuel” is simply a fossil fuel industry talking point.

There. FTFY. There’s much more to write on the way that political journalism adopts a frame wherein politics is scored like a cricket match, and policies are praised or decried only in terms of how well journalists predict the public will perceive them, but that can wait. In the meantime, the public should demand that the media simply stop legitimising climate change delay and denial.

Media

Here’s an easy one: stop taking fossil fuel industry advertising money and running fossil fuel industry ads. Done.

This will probably not happen overnight, but for meaningful change to occur, it has to. It’s time we demanded it.

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These things aren’t easy to write, and they occasionally seem to upset powerful people, which — as fun as it sounds — can make life pretty difficult. Your support, whether through sharing this article, or a paid subscription if you’re financially able, is much appreciated.

Gidday. So this is more of a personal note than anything, and those that read David Farrier’s Webworm (which is probably a lot of you, and if you don’t, start! It’s great!) are probably already aware of it. But for those that aren’t, here’s the gist: I’m starting a new project called The Cynic’s Guide To Self-Improvement and I’d love to have you as a subscriber.

But wait! you think, in an agony of indecision and betrayal, you’ve already got this newsletter! The one I’m reading right now! And you already hardly ever update it! How will another project improve the situation?

Well, disembodied voice, you make a number of good points. But here’s the thing. The idea of my self-improvement project is —  as well as shining a light on the weird, grift-ridden and occasionally life-ruining world of self-help — to improve my self. Much of what I’d like to improve is my consistency; I’d like to make more art, and do more writing, and publish more regularly. Some of that writing I’d like to go here.

News media ethics is something that, for my sins, I still care very much about. It’s also a difficult and depressing subject to deal with. Writing about the media — especially when it’s stocked with journalists, some of whom are good friends, and nearly all who are doing their best and who individually cannot do much about the systemic failures facing the hallowed Fourth Estate — is hard to do well. And reading Newstalk ZB columns does not spark joy.

All that said, I think it’s an important subject to return to, and I’d like to do so. For the Bad Newsletter, I’m pretty sure I can manage one post a month at minimum. The Cynic’s Guide will update more frequently, at least once a week. It will be a tricky cadence to manage, but if I can do so, I’ll have proved something important to myself, and possibly also to you.

So I’d like to say a very sincere thanks for sticking with me so far. To those who took out paid subscriptions, I appreciate the vote of confidence more than I can really put into words.

So yeah. Hang around, if that works for you. There’ll be more media and media-adjacent Bad News coming soon. In the next one, we will look at the origin stories of someone that everyone’s definitely not sick of hearing about endlessly: Elon Musk.

Subscribe to the Cynic’s Guide To Self Improvement here.

The reviews all seem to agree: Mister Organ, the newest film from journalist David Farrier, is disturbing. It’s strange. It’s unsettling. It’s funny. It’s very, very good. Having seen it myself at a Q&A screening last night, I can definitely attest to how  creepy the film is. But the depth of the creepiness — and the genius of the film — goes a lot further than it’s easy to explain in a normal review, so I’m going to try another way.

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Among Us

A few years ago, long enough now that distance has taken the bleeding edges off the event, my mum and stepdad got in some terrible trouble. At the time, they lived on Russell Island in Moreton Bay, near Brisbane. The island is, and remains, one of the strangest places I have ever been. I’ll write about it at length, one day. For now, it’s enough to say that despite many promises and plans, Russell Island has never had a bridge to the mainland. The only way to get there is by ferry, and this inconvenience meant real-estate prices on the island weren’t soaring the way they were elsewhere around Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Mum and her partner were desperate to sell their house, another piece of land they owned on the island, and get away before prices on the mainland got too far out of reach. And one day, they met someone who said he could help.

His name was Zach Mar, and he — with some help from a local woman — had created a scheme called Display Partners. The idea was, very loosely, that you’d give Display Partners money, and they’d work with a builder who’d use your investment to build a display home, at a very low cost. The builder would rent the home from you and show it to potential clients, and after a few years, you’d have a beautiful home that you could move in to or rent.

Sounds good, right?

Perhaps a little too good?

You know where this is going.

I only found out about my mum’s involvement with Display Partners through unnerved reports from my brothers, and Mum’s own Facebook posts. Those were the first warning signs. When I asked her about it she was uncharacteristically cagey. Something seemed off, so I got digging.

A year or few earlier, I’d picked up some odd skills from hanging around a motley group of people I knew online and IRL. We’d recently become obsessed with a rapidly-deepening rabbit hole on the topic of “Competitive Endurance Tickling.” Comprised of David Farrier, Dylan Reeve, me, and a several other people, the Tickle Friends would unearth a lot of the material that ended up in the documentary Tickled. Now, I put what I’d learned about internet sleuthing to use, prying into Display Partners.

I learned that Zach Mar aspired to a playboy lifestyle, with a yacht and other rich-guy amenities, and that he ran charity events for disabled children. That he’d only recently arrived in the Bay Islands, that he’d convinced many people into investing in Display Partners. That he used several other names, all variations on the Zach Mar theme, and that no-one seemed to know who he really was or where he came from.

And I found that he’d run real estate scams all over Australia.

I was terrified for my mum. I let my brothers know what I’d found and called her. To my dismay, she was angry, and distant. She implied that I didn’t trust anyone, that she’d known I would try to interfere. But during the call she let slip that my sister and her partner had got involved. The idea was that Zach, a real-estate genius, would help them buy a house.

I nearly booked a ticket to Australia on the spot, which would have taken all the money I had at the time. Instead, I called my sister, who didn’t sound pleased either.

“They’re just helping us buy a house!” she said. “Zach knows so much about it, you should hear him talk. He knows a way we can do it without having to pay all this money up front.”

“That’s fine!” I said. “If he’s just helping you get through the process of buying a house, there’s no trouble! The important thing is that you don’t try to get around the law, or give him any money up front.”

My sister went silent.

“Have you given him any money?”

She didn’t say anything. I panicked.

“These people are evil!” I yelled. “They’re scammers. Don’t give them a single cent. If you give them money, you’re going to lose it all! You have to believe me!”

I shed a few angry tears after the call. I didn’t know what else to do. I was sure my sister had given these people her money, and that they would steal it. But what if I was wrong and had wildly overreacted, slandering someone who was actually trying to help my sister out?

It wasn’t until months later, when I finally made it over to Australia for a visit, that I learned what had happened.

My sister had indeed trusted the people behind Display Partners with some money. After another panicked call, this time from my brother, my sister got in touch with the woman Zach Mar was working with, and demanded the money back.

That wouldn’t be possible, the woman said.

I wasn’t present, but I know what happened next. I’d witnessed my sister get properly angry a few times as a kid. I was older than her by two years, but I got the hell out of the way when it happened. She turned into a fucking Valkyrie, all ice and fury and razor edges.

She told the woman that if the money wasn’t back in her account by the following morning, they’d be hearing from her workplace’s extremely competent and high-priced lawyers. She hung up.

The money was back in her and her partner’s account by the deadline. The amount: their life savings. An entire house deposit.

This event was a domino that helped topple the Display Partners scam, as it did indeed turn out to be. I could go on for a whole documentary’s worth of madness and skullduggery, but I’ll just give you the finale. My mum couldn’t brook the threat to her daughter and told Display Partners she wanted out too. They turned nasty. Battle lines were drawn: believers versus skeptics, with believers terrified that the scrutiny from skeptics would torpedo their investments. The tight island community seethed at each other. Lawyers, journalists, state officials, and detectives all got involved.

Mum and her partner eventually got out, having lost a few thousand dollars. They escaped with some of their savings, and their house. Others were not so lucky. A number of people — mostly older, mostly retired — lost everything they had.

Afterward, my family and I put things together again. My sister was grateful. My mum was too, but she and her partner felt terrible shame over the episode. “We just feel so stupid,” her partner told me. But they weren’t. They were trustworthy, kind people, which made them think other people would be trustworthy too. The scammers took full advantage.

Zach Mar disappeared.

Despite some real effort, I never managed to speak to Zach or see him in person. After he vanished, the closest we got to closure was a rumour that he’d crossed the wrong people and got beaten to a barely-alive pulp. Hearing this made me feel sick. I wanted to see him pay, but not like that. Real life is messy. It doesn’t often offer satisfying endings.

I’d always meant to write a proper story about this, but for a long time it felt too close. Gradually, I let it go, along with the thought of writing it up. Then I watched Mister Organ, and it brought the whole terrible episode roaring back.

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You don’t just watch Mister Organ. The character is described as a void, and that’s the thing with voids: they watch you right back. Don’t misunderstand — the film is really funny, full of the kind of odd folly that can’t help but make you crack up. It got more audience laughs than a lot of comedies. But it stays with you in a way that’s not comfortable. Leaving the theatre, I felt like I’d come away from Mister Organ with a little bit of Michael Organ in my head. Lurking, peering, giggling, talking.

It’s not a spoiler to say that Michael Organ talks a lot. Like, three hours at a time, without stopping. Of course, this isn’t in the film, which lasts a swift 95 minutes. (At the Q&A, I was tempted to ask if there’d be a DVD extra that’s just footage of Michael Organ talking non-stop, for three hours. David, if you’re reading this, this is a really good idea and you should do it.)

The talking at length thing fascinated me. After the film, I thought about all the other times I’d seen similar behaviour. Marketing copy for sketchy products on weird websites that go on forever. The endless screeds of QAnon and anti-vax conspiracy theorists. The droning babble of scammy pastors and preachers. “Nigerian” 419 scam emails filled with capslock and dubious claims of royalty. Tickled star David D’Amato’s ranting, furious, constant emails, and the many websites he created, full of wild claims and slander.

Talking at length in this way is not just something that scammers do because they love the sound of their own voices (although that’s part of it). Dismissing it as ranting is a mistake, because con-artists do it for a reason. If you find yourself being talked at in this way, there is a chance you are a mark. You are being tested, probed, winnowed. 419 scam emails are long and loaded with nonsense to filter out skeptics. If you still maintain any belief by the end of one of their rambling screeds, they’ve got you. Even if you’ve never read a scam email, you’ve seen this behaviour before — in the strange, rambling, self-obsessed droning of the incredibly dangerous narcissist who starred in The Apprentice and would later serve time as the 45th President of the United States.

Zac Mar loved to talk too, my mum told me. He’d come and drink her tea and coffee and talk and talk and talk. The people he preyed on thought he was a real-estate genius who was going to either help take away their troubles, or make them some much-needed money. Mister Organ reminds me of him, and of the fact that there are Mister Organs everywhere.

It’s this that makes Mister Organ the most powerful film I’ve watched in a long time. Everyone should see it. It’s a case study in disturbance, and an explainer on how dangerous people operate, how they prey on others. How they’re so hard to pin down, so hard to stop. It’s also a brilliant example of journalism done right, of its remarkable power to shine a light in dark places, to protect the innocent, to give dignity to victims — and to warn the unwary.

I wish the film had come out ten years ago, and that my mum had seen it back then. Witnessing Organ’s tactics and the effect he has on other people might have saved her a world of hurt. Instead, I’ll settle for telling you to watch Mister Organ as soon as you can.

Find session times and buy tickets for Mr Organ at flicks.co.nz.

I’ve been on Mastodon for about five minutes now and it’s safe to say I like what I’ve seen.

Of course, because it’s Mastodon, I’m not on “Mastodon.” That’s like saying “I’m on email.” As far as I can tell, Mastodon is just the protocol for a whole bunch of different social networks that can all talk to each other. I’m on mastodon.nz, which looks like a good, welcoming community. It’s raw, a bit clunky, scattershot, off-kilter. Already, it’s striking how different it feels from Twitter, or at least, what Twitter has become.

I never really fit in on what everyone is now calling “the bird app.” It became clear, pretty quickly, what you needed to become big on Twitter. If you had a following from outside the app, like being an author or a Kardashian, it was easy enough. Or if you had a specialism, like actual deep science or tech knowledge, your following tended to aggregate around those wellsprings of knowledge. But to become a big deal on Twitter via Twitter itself, you needed to Post. You needed to adopt a personality or posting archetype and double down on it. A lot of the time, the personality adopted was, well, kind of horrible, or at least it was in the political and journalism circles I followed. An post-ironic, world-weary, ultra-supercilious personality dominated. Permanently angry, yet arch and distant. You could be mad about stuff at the same time that you were flippantly dismissing everyone else who was actually mad about it because, You, the Poster, were Above All That.

I didn’t like it but at the same time, it molded my online personality. It affected everything and everyone on Twitter. If you wanted your stuff to get seen, you had to Post, and even if you were genuinely earnest or enthused about something, the precedent of coating it under pearlescent layers of post-irony was almost unavoidable.

And then there’s the other kind of Poster, which is the sort that finds the worst stuff in the world and signal-boosts it for clout.

It’s an understandable instinct. We all want to avoid being associated with bad out-groups, right? And to know who the bad out-groups are so we can avoid them? And of course journalism is often highlighting bad things. But, importantly, journalism offers context — or at least, it does when it’s done right. On Twitter, simple virtue-signalling was immediately weaponized, often by sociopaths who recognized that outrage was a perfect path to acquiring a following. They made great use of it. For a while, I tried to spend my time online suggesting that signal-boosting your political and ideological enemies was wildly counter-productive, but this was never popular. People just got mad at me. “But this guy! Look how bad he is! Look at the terrible thing he just said! No-one should have to see this! I’m going to show it to everyone!” Arguably, this behaviour is what ultimately gifted the world President Trump. On New Zealand Twitter, with its blessedly lower stakes, look-at-this cloutposting reached its nadir when terminally online lefties started screenshot-mocking the National Party social media pages for making memes incorrectly.

They’d been played. National, utilizing the either the services or the tactics of Tory-friendly agency Topham Guerin, was committing design crimes like poorly-labelled graph axes or using uncool fonts specifically to wind up terminally online lefties who would then signal boost their political ads for free. It was brilliant. Instead of articulating their actual ideas or values, which might win allies, an online army of lefties had been deputized as water-carriers for their own opposition.

One of the reasons I like Mastodon is because there are specific mechanisms and server rules that might help to disincentivize this infuriating, self-defeating habit. For example — with the obvious disclaimer that I am new and don’t know much about how it works yet — it seems that on mastodon.nz, you’re encouraged to hashtag political stuff, or chuck a content warning on it. It’s about choice. If using hashtags is standard, users can filter out stuff they can’t be bothered with, or specifically zero in on it. If very specific content warnings for controversial content that go beyond just “NSFW” are normalized, it’s always up to a user whether they want to see it. It might finally be an end to oh my god, this stuff is disgusting! Let’s show the world!

The federated nature of Mastodon instances is also looking like a real boon. In the Dawn of Everything which has become my “no, really, you absolutely must read this, ideally yesterday, but I’ll settle for right now, look, here are some bits I’ve highlighted or memorized” book of the moment, authors David Graeber and David Wengrow make the case that indigenous societies in pre-colonization North America featured vastly more social mobility than our world does today. There was constant, radical experimentation and flux across different nations or tribes. If you didn’t like the way a given nation did things, that was (often) fine. You could leave, and find a new nation that was more to your liking. The authors suggest this happened frequently, and that, fascinatingly, many indigenous people traveled far further than it’s common for people to do today. Then the hegemonizing, colonizing forces arrived. There was now one way to do things and you couldn’t leave. My way, without so much as a highway. In Margeret Thatcher’s infamous words: there is no alternative.

Just like we’ve got used to living in extremely similar nation-states where we can’t easily experiment with new ways of doing things, we’ve become inured to an Internet world where there is no alternative. The corporate consolidation of the Internet has given rise to an often-joked-about status quo (posted, of course, on Twitter).

I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.

— Tom Eastman (parody) (@tveastman) 7:28 PM ∙ Dec 3, 2018

We’ve all become used to how bad Twitter is, like frogs broiled in a collective pot of Posting. It’s taken Musk’s terribly-executed takeover as Main Character-in-Chief to shock a lot of us into looking for an alternative. Plenty of people, including me, had already drifted away. I’d deleted the app on my phone and only dropped in occasionally on the web interface where adblockers and other plugins made the experience sporadically tolerable. But now, instead of drifting apathy, there’s a real mood to look for alternatives.

Naturally, people are worried about what that might entail. I’ve seen prolific Twitter users who use the platform to advertise their livelihood worry that their reach will be circumvented on a federated platform like Mastodon. And that’s understandable, but you also need to know that if you were on any of the big platforms, your reach was already being artificially curtailed. If you built a platform on a Meta property, like Facebook and Instagram, your ship sailed a long time ago. Want people to see your stuff? Pay up. The last major platforms where unmonetized virality is possible are YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok (and, email, sort of). YouTube is already a morass of a few top creators trying ever more desperately to game the algorithm and trust me, you’re not as good as they are. Also, making videos is hard. Reddit is a double-edged sword: it sometimes works for creators who need to be discovered, but the site’s culture and moderators have an inherent, bizarre hostility to creators sharing their own stuff. These rules are enforced sporadically and the fate of your self-promotion will often fall to the whims of whoever is modding a particular subreddit on a given day. Redditors moan constantly about a lack of original content, somehow missing the point that much of the site has rules against posting original content. If you make stuff, your best bet for being seen on Reddit is for one of the site’s many semi-professional content thieves to steal it, post it without consent or attribution, and for someone in the comments to recognize it and drop a link to your Instagram or YouTube.

I have no idea what the deal with TikTok is. I’m too old for that shit.

But if you are a creator on Twitter, chances are your reach has been bounded for a long time. No matter how many followers you supposedly had, if you were posting there, your content was being algorithmically curated, and was probably being shared and signal boosted by one small set of people who the algorithm had pegged as liking your stuff. If you that set was big enough, you were probably doing fine, but if not, well. Unless you are a very successful Poster, you have probably got nothing to lose by going to Mastodon, where the lines designating the borders of different communities are clear, instead of invisible and arbitrarily enforced by proprietary algorithm. A small audience that’s 80 percent engaged is, potentially, much better than a large audience that isn’t engaged at all.

I’m not sure why I’m writing this screed, which has turned into more of a missive, or possibly even a treatise. I suppose it’s because discovering Mastodon has me wanting to write and share stuff again. The idea that there might be an audience (however small) that is interested in anti-inflammatory discussion of the things I’m interested in is intoxicating. I love the idea of making things without feeling like my creativity is being invisibly shaped by algorithmic necessity, the thought that I can post without Posting. I have this FDR quote knocking around in my head: “Bold, persistent experimentation,” and the feeling that it’s what I need, what the internet needs, and what the wider world could do with. It feels like there’s once again a welcoming wall against which I can throw stuff, and see if anything sticks.

At last, there is an alternative. But not just one. There are lots of them.

See you there. And also here.

I’ve always wanted to make a living as an artist, but so far, life hasn’t found a way.

What’s frustrating is not that I’ve had no success; it’s that I’ve had some. Just enough for a taste. When I marshal my scattered attention for long enough, I can mix my humour and limited painting ability into some weird blends that people seem to genuinely dig and that I’m still proud of.

Over several years, I painted and auctioned weird portraits of New Zealand politicians the rest of the world is lucky enough not to know about, which went a tiny bit viral. Partly because of this, I managed to finagle a place at an illustration convention called Chromacon. The only problem was that I didn’t have much to exhibit.

Birds with Hats:

What to paint? I like birds, but I needed to differentiate myself from hundreds of other Kiwi artists who like birds too. I also like Lord of the Rings, and silly puns. As an experiment, I painted a Riroriro (Grey Warbler) wearing a wizard hat, and called it Gandalf the Grey Warbler.

I enjoyed the joke and the painting so much I did three more just like it, quadrupling my last five years or so of art output in about two weeks. I got some prints and an online shop made in time for the exhibition, and as an afterthought, I put some pics up on Reddit. My post got popular enough that quite a few people bought prints. Success!

A real live human:

A few years later, having painted several more birds, I started a YouTube channel where I painted scenes from video games using techniques learned from watching living meme Bob Ross. This was just starting to get a bit of traction when my wife and I received my best excuse yet for not making art: a baby. I didn’t paint or draw anything for about 12 months — until David asked me to do some illustrations for the Webworm I wrote about climate change.

That’s most of the highlights from the last ten years. While it’s fair to say there’s been some success on the art front, my artistic inconsistency — plus the opportunity cost of leaving a job that pays for one that mostly doesn’t — have tanked the idea of doing art full-time.

So when I saw a Webworm article on how some artists were making a living from NFTs, I was genuinely interested.

The only problem was that NFTs are built with the same technology that powers cryptocurrency. And I know just enough about crypto to hate it.

---

Pollution, monetized

To my mind, cryptocurrency is explained most brilliantly by The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Typically, author Douglas Adams managed to do this despite having died eight years before Bitcoin first appeared. The scene: a bunch of humanoid aliens (comprised of the “useless third” of their planet’s population, which includes marketers, management consultants, and documentary makers) have crash-landed on prehistoric Planet Earth and are looking to set up a new society. Here, let me plagiarise:

“If,” the management consultant said tersely, “we could for a moment move on to the subject of fiscal policy. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”

Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their tracksuits were stuffed.

“But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut.”

Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down. “So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.”

Critics who actually lived to see crypto have been even less kind: it is, they say, valueless except as a greater-fool investment; a truly colossal, tech-driven Ponzi scheme that gets by on market manipulation and an endless supply of newbies hoping to get rich.

You could, of course, make a similar claim about the global financial system, neoliberalism, or even capitalism. Banks create money from nothing, leverage crisis for record profits, and lobby against regulation. Wall Street is a corrupt casino run by byzantine financial interests with extraordinary wealth and influence on power. We’re entering a new monopolistic era where there are a few dozen hyper-corporations driving inflation through rampant profiteering, and a million minnows fighting over scraps.

Those who profit most from this fundamentally unjust system face no consequences; instead they squirrel away their multi-billions in quasi-legal tax havens or blast themselves into space for kicks. Meanwhile, the exhaust gases from this great, mindless machine are setting our only home ablaze as increasingly panicked millions try desperately to puzzle out what the fuck to do. It’s not hard to see why people are so emotionally invested in what looks like an alternative.

But cryptocurrency is just another head of the same hydra, and contrary to its name, it doesn’t really work as currency. As corrupt and unjust as the financial system is, at the end of the day, I can buy food with the fiat currency that appears in my account each week, sent in exchange for the labour I put in at my job. The transactions flash through in seconds – from my job to my account, from my account to the supermarket. This is not true of crypto. The biggest currencies have decentralized databases so big and so unwieldy that transactions can take hours, or days.

Of course, there are use cases for cryptocurrency. It’s fantastic for speculation, scams, blackmail, unregulated market manipulation, and buying illegal products on the dark web. While those things are obviously problematic, it’s made much worse by the fact that all those transactions don’t just take a long time; they use an incredible amount of energy. As of 2021, Bitcoin alone used more electricity than a country the size of New Zealand.

A proof-of-work cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum relies on cracking harder and harder math problems in order to verify transactions. While the actual mechanics of this are beyond me, this is roughly what “mining” is: computers compete to verify transactions, and winners get thrown a crumb of coin to incentivize them to keep going. All this computing activity requires enormous amounts of electricity, which comes from either a) burning carbon or b) using renewable energy that could be powering homes, but is instead powering a rack of gaming GPUs.1

Here’s the simplest way to put it: Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are monetized pollution. They might be the most asinine example of late-stage capitalist absurdity yet invented. I wasn’t always this cynical about it; years ago I even did a bit of freelance work for some really good people at a crypto outfit that used a less environmentally ruinous approach called “proof of stake”. But after watching the field for a decade or so and seeing the technology produce nothing useful, I just kind of tried to ignore it.

Enter NFTs

When NFTs appeared, it appeared that crypto might finally have a decent use case. Even more fascinatingly, that use case seemed centered on enabling artists to make a living from their work. When David’s Webworm about Richard Parry – an artist I’ve admired from afar for a long time, thanks to our overlapping interests in art based on puns, birds and video games — appeared in my inbox, I was fascinated to see he was making an absolute killing. Others were doing even better. Mike Winklemann, aka Beeple, sold a single NFT for $69 million. Nice.

I had a look online to see what people were saying. My Twitter bubble, made mostly of artists and journalists, hated NFTs. But Twitter hates everything — cynicism is currency and a great way to gain followers is to look savvy by being a snide know-it-all. So maybe that wasn’t the best source. I checked elsewhere. Some tech sites were cautiously optimistic, others dismissed NFTs as a grift.

It seemed I couldn’t find an off-the-shelf opinion I was happy with. So I tried to purge myself of preconceptions and go in fresh. I would do my own research.

This… may not have been a good idea.

I’ll talk more about what I found shortly, but first I should explain what NFTs actually are. An NFT is a receipt. Simple, right? But because the blockchain adds layers of needless complexity to even simple concepts, I guess we’d better dive into yet another crypto rabbit hole.

Needless Fucking Things

The acronym “NFT” stands for “non-fungible token.” What does that mean? While it sounds vaguely mycological, all it means is that it’s a record of a transaction that lives on the blockchain, that can’t be altered, and that can store a small amount of data. Which, in itself, means nothing. It’s just a string of numbers and letters. Look, here’s an NFT. Gaze upon it — this thing last sold for $25 million USD:

0xb47e3cd837dDF8e4c57F05d70Ab865de6e193BBB

Like leaves, or snowflakes, every NFT is unique. They’re also like leaves in that they don’t have any inherent value. In fact, you could argue NFTs have even less inherent value than leaves, because leaves remove carbon from the atmosphere and NFTs do the opposite. They differ from leaves in one important respect: unlike most digital properties, which are designed to be copied, NFTs are made to be scarce, because they’re on the blockchain. (As in Douglas Adams’ prescient example of burning down forests to make leaves more valuable, the blockchain creates artificial scarcity by burning carbon.)

As humans, we’re used to assigning value to random things. The paper my New Zealand dollars are printed on isn’t really worth anything, but because we collectively agree that money is both scarce and representative of the value created by economic activity, worthless paper acquires value (signified by some special artwork) and I can exchange it for goods and services.

Because an NFT is just a string of numbers corresponding to a blockchain file, its value comes not from scarcity alone, but also the information it stores. Individual Ethereum entries can only store a small amount of data, so NFTS are often just links to something else, usually a digital file stored on a server. These files can be pretty much anything — jpegs, video game assets, documents, you name it. An NFT says: “see that thing? Well, this guy has an NFT of it.”

This is where it gets thorny. Having an NFT isn’t in itself proof of ownership of the file it’s linked to; it’s just proof of… having an NFT. Ownership in society is usually assigned through a central authority: the law and its enforcers. For example, if I nip into the Louvre and grab the Mona Lisa, the local centralized authority — the French Government — will be unhappy, and they will express their sadness by throwing me in jail. But if I copy a file linked to an NFT, no-one can do jack shit. Even if I steal someone’s actual NFT, by hacking or trickery, the legal remedy is often unclear. The blockchain itself has no answer for this, because it’s very hard to undo transactions and is decentralized by design.

To date, few in the NFT scene seem to care about the philosophical plot holes underlying the technology. The attitude seems to be: if enough people agree something has value, ipso facto, it does.

Mad world

Does all that make sense? Of course not. But what people are doing with this technology is even weirder. If you want a headache, you can go and dig all this stuff up yourself, or simply visit the acerbic NFT disaster documentation site Web3 is going just great, but here are some high points of a journey I’ve now spent months on, increasingly bewildered by the new absurdities our cyberpunk dystopia creates.

• A bunch of techbros had an artist create a bunch of disgusting ape jpegs which they released as collectible NFTs that also get you access to a Discord server. In a less cursed world this would have earned yawns, or derisive laughter, but instead the Bored Ape Yacht Club has made them all bajillionaires. Not long ago they got former indie music darlings The Strokes to play an exclusive party for ape enthusiasts. Formerly reputable magazine Rolling Stone even did a puff piece on them (which was also sold as an NFT.)
• AMC, Gamestop, Ubisoft, Meta (aka Facebook) and many other large companies are cashing in on NFTs and the nebulous term “metaverse.” Even Funko Pops, those ugly vinyl collectible toys, now come with NFTs — even one debasing the memory of my favourite kitsch-art mentor, Bob Ross. Quick-moving start-ups have beaten the big companies to market, with games like The Sandbox, where you can make shitty low-poly yachts with entirely fictional features and sell them for $650,000. People from low-income countries toil in these virtual mines, earning crypto to buy bread.
• Celebrities, smelling a quick buck, have gone all-in on NFTs. Musician Grimes, former partner of a crypto enthusiast called Elon Musk, sold $6 million realdollars worth of the things. Melania Trump, partner of a frequently-bankrupted real-estate grifter, released her own line of NFTs. Absurdly, some people saw fit to buy them.

All that is just skimming the top of the crypto-NFT cesspool from the last year or so. Every day there’s some new absurdity, some ridiculous boondoggle. Just look at this dire low-energy digital “rave” that some poor cryptobro has to pretend is fun, probably because it cost an ungodly amount of money.

This is the #metaverse… A live rave happening right now in @decentraland for the upcoming @LightbulbmanNFT release by #BjarneMelgaard. Music from @feedelity @prins_thomas @mightbetwins #NFTdrop #rave #virtualevent #NFTCommunity

— Alex Moss (@alexmoss) 12:18 PM ∙ Jan 20, 2022

Then there’s the infinite horror of the promotional video for a thing called Cryptoland.

The best way I can describe this video is: in the movie Event Horizon, Sam Neill’s character gets a glimpse of hell. Cryptoland is what he sees.

Perhaps it was madness kicking in, but as I squinted harder into the seething migraine glare of the NFT scene, I began to see a bigger picture — a meta-picture, if you like.

The more I looked, the more NFTs seemed to have in common with another unreal scene populated by quick-buck entrepreneurs, grifters, fantasists, money-launderers, and the elite: the world of contemporary art.

Ce n’est pas une scène

To call contemporary art a grift is unfair to grifts. It is an all-encompassing, money-spinning, massively-multiplayer game of The Emperor Has No Clothes. To explain it in detail would take a few years, so you’ll have to settle for the short version: Contemporary artists compete to be platformed by a shifting roster of ultrarich patrons and insufferably smug critics who act as taste-pimps. To attract attention, artists deliberately court controversy. This race to the bottom ends up creating and celebrating ridiculous shit, offensive shit, or sometimes actual shit. And the most important rule of Contemporary Art Club is this: no-one involved in propping up this tottering edifice of absurdly overvalued literal garbage can ever admit that it’s anything less than 100 percent serious.

The real art is in making the absurd seem valuable and important, and very few artists succeed at it. This doesn’t matter, because it’s not really about artists. The system exists for the near sole benefit of the One Percent, who are incentivised to take up art appreciation by the substantial speculation opportunities, tax benefits and/or money-laundering opportunities it provides. Here’s arts patron (and former Act party branch chairman) Chris Parkin, explaining why the 2020 Parkin Drawing Prize went to an entry that was not a drawing. It explains the fundamentals of the grift better than I ever could.

“The judges are always looking for something innovative, something that’s gone a bit beyond … it almost invariably [was going to be] something that doesn’t look in any way the conventional sense like a drawing.

“It’s totally unpredictable … it’s a recognition that nothing in art succeeds like recognition.”

There are essentially two tiers of art: real, serious contemporary art, and everything else. Artists who prefer to focus on craft — often making “genre” art that normal people like and elite gatekeepers hate — are usually denied entry to the potentially lucrative contemporary art world. Sometimes, they’re lucky enough for their work to be co-opted (frequently without consent and/or after death) by critics wielding the demeaning term “outsider artist.”

Being unwilling to prostrate yourself before the contemporary art establishment usually means either working a day job or scraping by selling originals, prints, and merchandise, or setting up a Patreon. Success in this part of the art world is rare, is usually very hard-earned, and doesn’t even begin to compare to the fortunes amassed by successful contemporary artists like Damien Hirst.

I’d argue that NFTs are a permutation of the contemporary art model, but with a much bigger pool of participants. The world is awash with the newly crypto-rich, who can be anyone from actual investors to the lucky people who bought Bitcoin when it was cheap for shits and pizza giggles. For those who bought early and managed to “hodl,” NFTs represent something new: the ability to actually do something with your crypto.

Instead of buying black market goods, trading for other forms of cryptocurrency, or cashing out for actual money (and being taxed accordingly), you can now speculate on artwork. Both contemporary art and NFTs are a boon for money-launderers and greater-fool grifters, but NFTs make it faster and easier. If you need to instantly hose down some dirty money, just buy an NFT! And if you have a bunch of crypto burning a hole in your wallet and you’d like to make some more, just follow these four easy steps:

1. List an NFT for sale
2. Create a new crypto identity and buy your own NFT for a ridiculous price. Congratulations, you’ve just artificially inflated its value!
3. Now you can set any price point you like for your NFT. Make it look like a bargain. “Wow, I just bought a million-dollar NFT for ten grand! What a deal!”
4. Profit.

Naturally, the contemporary art machine has embraced the new grift with its many sinuous arms. Sotheby’s, one of many high-priced auction houses favored by the ultra-rich, partnered with auction site Nifty Gateway to sell The Pixel, which is literally just an NFT of a single grey pixel, for $1.3 million. The emulation of this controversy-first aspect of contemporary art might also explain why many NFTs are valued highly despite being hideously ugly.

As an artist, I…

Let’s take a step back. If artists are benefiting, does it really matter that NFTs have devolved into hype-driven memetic profiteering? To answer this question, let’s consider what an artist actually needs. We’ll do this in the time-honored form of… user stories.

As an artist, I need my work to be recognized and popular.

Can NFTs help? Maybe. If there are a bunch of cryptobros hyping up your art because they hope it will help make them rich, you’ll get popularity by proxy. However, many in the art community hate NFTs and the spammy, toxic atmosphere they generate. For a lot of artists, it may not be worth getting involved. But it’s clearly working well for some: an artist called Seneca used their profile as lead artist for the Bored Ape Yacht Club to sell NFTs of unrelated art for 23.7 ETH — at the time of writing, about $57,000 USD.

As an artist, I need for my work to be protected from theft or appropriation.

Can NFTs help? Lol, no. Art theft is rife online, and NFTs may be making it even worse. Before NFTs, one of the best ways to make a quick buck off someone else’s artwork was to put it on a t-shirt and hope you sold a few before you got caught. Now, anyone can grab your jpeg, mint it as an NFT, and make off with the proceeds. This has already happened to many high-profile artists who want nothing to do with NFTs.

As an artist, I need to be able to make a living / money from my work.

Can NFTs help? As we’ve seen from the cited examples, the answer is very much yes — if you’re very lucky. Evidence suggests that most artists are not making a killing, much less a living, from NFTs. Most sales bring in a mere pittance. To succeed, you need either an existing profile, or a unique hook that gets you noticed by someone with a lot of cryptocash to burn. A time machine might also be necessary: since the initial media frenzy, a lot of the heat has gone out of the NFT market.

NFTs also claim to make it possible for artists to profit from not only the first sale of their work but subsequent sales as well. I love this idea. While the notion of royalties has been around forever, and some countries have resale royalty schemes, it doesn’t apply to many artists. An easy, accessible alternative would be huge. But on closer inspection, it doesn’t seem to hold up. Royalties can be skipped altogether if future buyers simply switch blockchains.

So, where does this leave us? The utility of NFTs for artists seems mixed, at best. What’s more, the tide of public opinion seems to be turning. Proposals by Ubisoft to shoehorn NFTs into one of its videogames were met with fury from gamers, who are already sick of being nickel-and-dimed with real-money microtransactions. Even Beeple thinks that NFTs are “an irrational exuberance bubble.”

Then there are signs that crypto itself is tottering. While the death of cryptocurrency has been reported many times, only for it to rise again, it still has a potentially fatal flaw. Ultimately, cryptocurrency only has utility if you can cash it out for actual money. There are only a few ways to do this, using crypto exchanges and “stablecoins” pegged to a fiat currency like the US dollar, and these are coming under increasing regulatory scrutiny. China and several other countries have banned crypto outright, and other nations are toying with the idea. As I write this, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies are tanking, with the market falling by over $1 trillion, in just a few days.

Despite all this, and despite being explicitly decried by the originators of NFT technology, the gold rush continues. Corporations are pivoting to crypto. Randoms are hoping to get rich. And artists are still trying to make a living from what they love. Some are even succeeding. Me? I’m going to stick to my principles and stay right out of it.

Just kidding.

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For sale: my integrity (and artwork)

The one piece of advice I’d be prepared to offer other artists is: if you don’t want to sell a given piece, put it up for sale anyway — but at an intentionally, ridiculously high price. It’s a rare win-win for the cash-strapped: either you get to keep the thing you want, or you get enough money for it that you don’t mind. I’ve done it before with a couple of my paintings. Now I want to try the same thing with NFTs.

It’s long been my broadly-held belief, exacerbated by reading some libertarian dickhead called Nozick at law school, that everyone has their price. The theory goes, broadly, that while there remain some things that no amount of money will compensate for — your own life, the lives of your loved ones, etc — there’s a lot of stuff in life for which, when the chips are sufficiently down, you’ll take a payout. It’s definitely true for me. Ultra-wealthy mega-corporations like Block (Twitter) and Meta (Facebook) are embracing the ridiculous crypto-NFT-metaverse nexus. Why should I abstain, when just one good deal with the crypto devil could set my family up for life?

The idea of selling out is also motivated by a growing frustration. I’ve got just enough art experience and skill to know I could do a lot more. I just lack the time. Before I start to sound too self-indulgent, I should stress that being able to pursue art as a hobby is highly privileged, in the scheme of things. I have a good job and an incredible family. I don’t regret prioritizing a more traditional career over art for their sake — I have pretty strong childhood memories of food bank Christmases — and I’m well aware that being a working artist is, well, hard work. But I still want to do more. I just need the time, and to buy time, you need money. I’d settle for some kind of decentralized sugar daddy.

This is compounded by the fact that all the ridiculous things I see succeeding in the NFT scene are things I can do. Perhaps incorrectly, I think I could do many of them much better. Making up ridiculous meta-narratives to sell art? I did that with my viral-ish auctions, and each of my bird artworks already has a goofy little story to go with it. Exclusive communities? Sure, why not. I’m pretty sure I can set up a Discord server. As for creating art that’s worth a lot of money? As we’ve seen, it’s subjective, but I can sure as hell make stuff that looks better than these horrible fucking lions.

I don’t like NFTs or cryptocurrencies. Nor do I like the global financial system, or neoliberalism. But — for now — this rigged system is the only game in town. Without money, I can’t play, even if my only reason for wanting to is creating positive change, or having some kind of security for my wife and little boy. And I’m starting to see how tenuous that can be. The Covid-19 pandemic continues. Climate change continues. When it comes to these and other crises, governments the world over have sacrificed human lives on the altar of business continuity for wealthy power-brokers. The message has never been clearer: you don’t matter — unless you have money.

So I’m trying one last Hail Mary, with the biggest project I’ve ever attempted. I’m taking everything I’ve learned about NFT success and applying it to the most popular thing I’ve ever made: my paintings of birds wearing hats. And along the way I hope to either:

a) help prove NFTs are mostly useless for artists, or
b) eat humble pie and admit NFTs are great, actually.

The price of this humble pie? It starts at the low, low cost of… my mortgage.

That’s right: in the finest NFT and contemporary art tradition, I’m creating something utterly ridiculous, and putting an equally ridiculous price on it. Does it have any real value, any actual artistic merit? Of course not — unless you think it does. In which case, happy bidding.

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This story originally ran on David Farrier’s Webworm and a follow-up piece (or two!) is edging ever-closer to completion, so I figured it was time I exposed my readers to Part One. Last time I wrote here I said I wanted to do something different and, well, this is about as different as it gets. I’m turning on comments so let me know what you think: I’m always interested in people’s feedback and — especially on this topic! — good-faith critique.

If you liked this piece (or hated it) the best way to show your support (or furious opposition) is to share it far and wide. Show your friends or bring all your mates in for a furious denouement; every little helps.

And if you really liked it, or you want to foster my lifelong dream of doing strange and/or helpful things for a living, the below button will help you give me your hard-earned money.