Symbolic misery and digital media : how NFTs reproduce culture industries

Kurzfassung/Abstract

This contribution will attempt to propose a critical and philosophical engagement with the discussion around NFTs, by focusing on the articulation of materialisms and digital media in artistic practices. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler argued that culture industries led to the formation of a symbolic misery, disrupting aesthetic experience through the creation and imposition of practices of consumption; a process reinforced by the technological reproduction of works of art. In recent years, the discussion around Web 3.0, blockchain technologies and their implementation through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) also reformulates the question of digital reproduction and distribution of works of art. Indeed, in a market dominated by centralized streaming platforms such as Spotify, many artists see in NFTs a way to regain control over their own works and tools, by creating a form of artificial scarcity, mimicking the limited quantity and binding ownership of physical artefacts, as a kind of magical individuation, to paraphrase Simondon.

The authors ask to which extent those technologies, although often posited as a liberation from corporate giants, might lead to an exacerbation of the process of proletarianization which is at the core of Stiegler’s thesis on symbolic misery, even if they are being procured in an ethos of social justice and responsibility, thereby functioning as what Michel Serres called a virtual object. Moreover, it will be argued that by trying to reproduce an artificial idea of scarcity, NFTs also tend to reduce materiality to the object being sold and possessed, consequently reproducing the constitution of ‘art’ as a market, where new practices of consumption and competition are being championed as commodities at the expense of aesthetic experience.