Amplified Publishing Category
What an NFTease
by James Wheale
This is the third, maybe fourth draft of this blog. It’s been a real brain-scratcher. NFTs, the blockchain, DAOs etc are so controversial, and opinions so divided between the best brains I know, that I have whiplash. I really don’t mean that in a bad way - but I’ll come back to this.
Hi I'm James, I'm the co-founder of a new start-up called Stormjar supported by Bristol + Bath Creative R+D, Audience of the Future, Arts Council England & The Studio in Bath. We're creating new horror experiences and researching the utility of NFTs as part of that - you can follow our progress at stormjar.studio
Right off the bat, I’m going to be frank: there is information overload in this space (some of it deliberate and malicious) with which to fry your brain. There are strong arguments for and against. Here’s the best of both I’ve come across: for & against.
We have an idea of how to use NFTs in an interesting way for storytelling. I have no interest in them as high worth artworks particularly. I’m not a gambler by nature, I own no stocks or shares, no NFTs, no cryptocurrency, I’m not interested in making highly sought after collectibles or engineered scarcity. I’m purely interested in the potential utility of the blockchain to rethink some of the issues that are present in immersive storytelling. If I sound a bit coy, it’s because we’ve only just started and don’t want to let the cryptocat out of the bag until we know whether it works. What I do believe in is testing with humans, design thinking, and iteration, so if it turns out that NFTs don’t work for our use case that would be just as good a result, and of course, something I’d want to share back with the community.
ID: James is with NFT artists Fat Baby, Gimme Gargoyles and Waxbones delivering an inspiring panel discussion about the opportunities NFTs bring creatives.
Couple of caveats here too. We have strict self imposed guidelines around EDI, environmental impact, legality and kindness that are driving our decisions here. These guidelines are crucial for our success - we are working with an EDI specialist to review / impose processes throughout our business and techstack, same for environmental impact and are approaching specialist lawyers to understand what ownership and reward look like for our NFT vision. Our values of kindness come from a few places: the ethos and ethics of the Pervasive Media Studio and my role as a Samaritan & trustee for men’s mental health charity Talk Club. We already know we will use Proof of Stake rather than Proof of Work to avoid energy consumption issues. In essence, Proof of Work requires a significant amount of energy compared to Proof of Stake, the former is what Bitcoin and Ethereum were built on, but many new coins and processes are emerging in Proof in Stake. It might be that NFTs / crypto satisfy our utility needs for our design but fail on ethics. That too, would be good to know.
One concern I have from our use case is just how much of a pain in the arse it is to open and use a crypto wallet for the non-tech person. That might scupper our use right there. Everything comes down to testing and experience.
One consensus I can give you, whether you love or hate the idea of NFTs, is that the conversation is brimming with exciting, disruptive and dangerous ideas. To be part of that conversation, even as a naysayer, is fascinating and thought-provoking. I feel like the grey matter of my brain has been wrung out to dry a number of times today just from chatting to kind souls with strong opinions on this stuff.
One consensus I can give you, whether you love or hate the idea of NFTs, is that the conversation is brimming with exciting, disruptive and dangerous ideas.
I work in innovation. I have done for years, from street games where zombies chase you, to storytelling chocolate, to VR training platforms in prisons, to supporting creative businesses through Innovate UK Edge. In all my time doing weird and wonderful things, the conversations around crypto and the blockchain are the most challenging and inspiring.
A friend, who is ardently against crypto and the blockchain, stated ‘the crypto community are asking the right questions, but they have the wrong answers.’ Whether you subscribe to that view really depends on what you make of the litany of opinions and work being created in this space.
For me, being part of this conversation and community is proving invaluable. As I said, we might arrive at the conclusion that NFTs and crypto aren’t for us, they don’t serve our underlying goal of creating meaningful experiences for an audience, and that would be fine. However, I know I won’t regret investigating NFTs and the crypto world because of that. It is a lens with which to rethink every element of our business and product, politics and trade. The whiplash I referred to earlier is all the challenges and provocations we’ve received around ownership, company structure, product design, audience interaction, IP, futureproofing content, production methodologies, community/audience engagement, ethics, morality, politics and business theory. It's a lot of spikey, big questions.
We might arrive at the conclusion that NFTs and crypto aren’t for us, they don’t serve our underlying goal of creating meaningful experiences for an audience, and that would be fine. However, I know I won’t regret investigating NFTs and the crypto world because of that. It is a lens with which to rethink every element of our business and product, politics and trade.
Our goal is to make new spooky things as a sustainable, kind business and we have new ideas about spooky experiences that excite us. That's what we’re working on, and yet I find myself knee-deep in arguments about the perils of embracing neo-liberalist crypto-ideas or how nation states might form entirely on the blockchain. It’s wild and challenging. We are keeping an open mind and savouring the permission to think differently but, ultimately, it's down to the audience testing whether any of our ideas land.
I think the conversation is valuable. I think it’s good to have an open debate about this stuff and think differently. That feels like progress in and of itself, even if NFTs aren’t for you, or me for that matter.