Felix Stalder, a professor of Digital Culture at the Zurich University of the Arts, Geraldine Juarez, a Mexican-Swedish artist and writer, and Andrea Baronchelli, an associate professor in Mathematics at University of London, discuss NFTs and blockchain culture which emerged around the non-fungible tokens. In the early days, blockchains held the promise to transform monetary systems. Nowadays, the promise is that of returning the power back into the hands of digital artists and makers, against the hierarchy of platforms. They also fuel corporate plans over the web3, and drive the hallucinatory dream of the metaverse. NFTs are indeed surging as the new building blocks of techno-driven societies, affirming the potential of a decentralized and tokenized, crypto future for digital cultures. This panel aims to offer a critical perspective on the matter by discussing the individualistic, self-entrepreneurial capitalist nihilism of NFTs and the technopromises of a blockchain future and culture.
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