So somebody paid $69,346,250 for a JPEG yesterday.
I want to say that number again because I don't think it's sunk in for me yet. Sixty-nine million, three hundred forty-six thousand, two hundred fifty dollars. Christie's auctioned off a digital collage by an artist called Beeple (real name Mike Winkelmann, a guy from Wisconsin who has apparently made a piece of art every single day for the last 13-plus years, which is its own kind of insane commitment I can respect even if I don't get the rest of it) and the final hammer price puts him up there with Jeff Koons and David Hockney in terms of most valuable living artists sold at auction. The file itself is a grid of 5,000 small images, one for every day since May 2007. It's called "Everydays: The First 5000 Days."
I've been trying to explain this to my brother-in-law over text for twenty minutes and I keep failing, mostly because I'm not sure I understand it myself. The "NFT" part - non-fungible token - is a receipt on the Ethereum blockchain saying you own this specific version of the file. Not the copyright. Not the exclusive right to display it. Just a cryptographically signed piece of paper, essentially, that says the real one is yours, even though anyone on earth can right-click and save an identical copy in about four seconds. I did it. It's saved to my desktop right now next to a screenshot of a router config I've been meaning to deal with since December.
Look, I've run this blog since 2011 and in that time I've watched a lot of things get called revolutionary that turned out to be, at best, a new coat of paint on an old idea, and at worst a way to separate people from their money faster than before. I'm not saying NFTs are that. I genuinely don't know yet. But I also remember being extremely sure Bitcoin was a fad in like 2013 when it was trading for something like $100, so my track record on "is this a bubble" calls is not great and I'll admit that upfront. Somewhere out there is a version of me from eight years ago who could've bought a stack of BTC for a few hundred bucks and instead spent that money on a Kindle Fire. That Kindle Fire is in a drawer. It doesn't turn on anymore.
What I keep coming back to with the Beeple sale isn't even the money, it's that the whole art world just watched a guy who spent a decade posting daily doodles online (some of them genuinely striking, some of them, respectfully, look like a screensaver) get validated harder than most gallery artists ever will be. There's something there about internet-native output finally getting taken seriously by institutions that used to sneer at it, and something else there about how "taken seriously" apparently means "a hedge-fund-adjacent buyer spent tens of millions of dollars," which isn't quite the same thing as the work being good, but try explaining that distinction to anyone at 2am on Twitter right now. I tried. It did not go well.
Small unrelated thing that's also eating my week: if you or anyone you know runs their own on-premises Exchange mail server, I hope you've been paying attention to the patches Microsoft pushed out a week and a half ago, because the exploitation of that vulnerability set has apparently gotten a lot worse than it looked at first, and it's not slowing down. A friend who does IT for a small law firm spent his entire weekend on this instead of, I assume, anything resembling a weekend. I run my mail through a hosted provider specifically so I never have to think about this stuff, and moments like this remind me why that was the correct call even though it costs me nine bucks a month I complain about every single time the card gets charged.
Anyway. I don't have a tidy point to land on here. A JPEG sold for enough money to buy a very nice building in most American cities, the concept of ownership on the internet got weirder overnight, and somewhere a guy who used to post a daily doodle for basically nobody is now richer than most museums. Make of that what you want. I'm going to go stare at my saved copy of the file some more and feel nothing, which I think might be the whole point.