“I Wanted an Ape That Reminded Me of Me”: NFTs, Depression, and the Price (and Worth) of Everything
In the current pantheon of late night television talk show hosts, I rank Jimmy Fallon significantly ahead of James Corden and slightly behind everyone else. As I’ve aged and the deep weirdness/borderline punk rock sensibility that Craig Ferguson and Conan O’Brien brought to the mix on a nightly basis fade further into the mists of memory from my college years, the late night crew has become a mostly densely packed group (Corden excepted) of which Fallon is the least palatable, but who is still alright enough at his job that, if the remote is far away and I’m particularly tired, I won’t work too hard to change the channel. I might even laugh at some of his jokes, although not as hard as he is liable to.
That said, the last few weeks I’ve been thinking by far the most about Fallon versus any of the other late night hosts, which I supposed means he’s doing his job. Specifically I’ve been haunted by a clip that I stumbled across on YouTube the week after it aired. In it, Fallon interviews Paris Hilton who, the previous fall, had been on his show to hawk a documentary series about her wedding and to introduce Jimmy to the idea of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. She returned, newly married, in January to complete the obvious arc and to discuss with Jimmy the pair of NFT apes that they had each purchased (likely for more than $200k each). To close out the already odd interview, she awkwardly declared that she was gifting him an NFT of a collage that she made about her new husband, and she then even more awkwardly announced that she was giving one to every member of the audience, an audience who then waited an extremely telling beat before (presumably) realizing that the applause sign was illuminated and proceeding to reach an extremely diluted level of wild.
The whole thing is just kind of uncanny.
Breaking the weirdness down to its constituent parts might lessen the overall effect, but there are a few highlights worth mentioning:
- Hilton says that she wanted an ape that reminds her of herself. She then says “but…” as if to pivot before saying, “This one does.” To reiterate, she says: “I wanted to buy an ape that reminded me of myself, but this [ape that I purchased] does.” For the record, the image in question is a cartoon primate wearing a leather hat.
- Fallon follows up by saying that he also wanted an ape that reminded him of himself. To explain further, he says that, among other things, he also likes striped shirts, he sometimes wears sunglasses “as a joke,” and he “likes being breezy.” The awkwardness is palpable. The audience seems to be as confused as I am every single time I watch it.
Seriously, what the fuck are they talking about? If I had to describe NFTs to someone even more confused than me, I would do so in two steps. The first layer is getting some intuitive sense of the blockchain technology that underpins the claims of ownership associated with digital assets. NFTs then sit on top of this
Imagine that you own a safe deposit box at a bank. The bank keeps a record of the fact that you own this safe deposit box, as well as a record of how much money is inside. This record is kept in a ledger book that the bank keeps.The box also has a window into it, and as long as someone knows which box is yours, they can actually just look right in and see what’s in your box. You alone have the key to this box, which provides the first layer of security: as long as you keep your key to yourself, no one else can access the box directly. This prevents someone from breaking into the box, and it is very secure, provided that you keep your key safe.
But stealing is only one way that someone might steal your asset- what if someone broke into the bank and changed the bank’s records to show that they were actually the owner of your box? The second layer of security that mitigates this threat is actually in the ledger book that records your ownership. Now, imagine that this ledger isn’t just stored at the bank. Instead, it is stored in a series of ledger books all across the world, and that in order to transfer your safe deposit box and it’s contents to someone else, every ledger in the world would need to receive a confirmation from you that not only confirms that you wish to transfer your asset but also that this transfer is occurring at exactly the same time and in exactly the same way in each ledger, an unbroken chain that, when corroborated across all the participating ledgers, proves that no tampering took place and that you indeed want to transfer ownership of this asset. This ensures that if someone were to gain access to one of the ledger books and then try to alter it and claim that your box was actually theirs, the other books could be used to prove them wrong. Your assets will remain in their safe deposit boxes until you opt to transfer them to someone else and when you do, this “block” of information regarding the new owner will be added to the long “chain” of information stored in these ledger books across the world.
The second portion of the explanation is what differentiates NFTs from other fungible digital assets that might use the blockchain, i.e. cryptocurrencies. With cryptocurrencies, you can, at any given point, use any search engine you like to look up the current exchange rate for your digital currency in just about any denominated currency in the world. You can then exchange your digital asset for this amount of money (again, generally speaking). As I’m writing this, I just looked up that Bitcoin is currently trading at $42,120.50 and up almost 8% today. Volatility aside, you can always be aware of what your asset is worth on the open market at least in part because your digital asset is fungible- one bitcoin is functionally the same as any other bitcoin and anyone looking to purchase a bitcoin for the going rate would just as gladly buy yours in exchange for currency (fiat or crypto) as buy anyone else’s. This fungibility is a key feature of anything that might be considered money.
My “volatility aside” comment above does a lot of heavy lifting- volatility in the “crypto to fiat” markets remains a prominent obstacle to any adoption as a viable currency. Still, at least the interchangeability of one BTC for another provides ease of exchange. With NFTs, this type of exchange is by definition not possible- each NFT is unique and different from any other. Your free version of Paris Hilton’s collage that you got from being in the audience at the Tonight Show is “different” from the one that I might someday purchase on OpenSea. Still, we haven’t even touched on what strikes me as the most problematic feature of NFTs, which is that the digital blockchain ledger that records the ownership of these assets does not actually contain the image itself, but instead contains a hyperlink that points to the image, which is also readily and easily copied by anyone who would like to use it. Still, questionable definitions of which kind of “ownership” is actually conveyed by the blockchain aside, the deep abstraction of the whole market drives us ever closer to what seems to be the ecstatic culmination of market thinking, the end of the line as the market slowly creeps into every single aspect of our lives and we have prices assigned to even those things we can only possess in the most bizarre and abstracted sense of the word. It’s like we have finally reached the point where every single piece of this world we occupy and the digital world that we’ve created has an inherent worth that can be measured exactly and immediately evaluated, a single quantitative metric that the market is always willing and able to provide. Everything is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it on the open market.
I’m at least a little bit perturbed by the idea that worth can be distilled down to one number, or perhaps more accurately perturbed by the question of whether or not it should be. As I move through each successive step of the valuation process wherein every possible type of utility that person could attain from anything gets distilled with a finer and finer grain, each step can make sense, but eventually when I zoom back out I wind up wondering why I’m agreeing that a monkey with a stripe shirt that likes to keep it breezy is somehow worth more than what I paid for my entire undergraduate degree or why it is worth more more than a one bedroom condo in a small to mid-sized US city. We’ve taken the final leap and completely severed the end of a value chain from anything remotely physical. It is making me feel insane.
What the fuck are we talking about? Have we broken our brains? I think maybe we have, but then again my brain is already broken.
Let’s start again from somewhere else and work our way back in.
Think about the last time that you were nauseous. Think about it now, about how the feeling was maybe in your stomach but also in your head, maybe diffusing down into your fingers and toes somehow. You knew that this feeling was bad. You did not ever need to learn this fact, did not need to discover the inherent badness of it. You’ve known it from the very beginning, from the first time you felt it to the last time that you were imagining just now, know it in some part of yourself that you don’t ever need to think about, in some core area of your physical body and then consequently in some part of your mental construction of yourself.
There are many things that we know in this way, in a way so visceral that it transcends that process of conscious thought, not because this knowledge is elevated but conversely because it is so base, so deeply wired into the pieces that construct the self. Our consciousness glides over the surfaces that these pieces make up. These surfaces, they are the well worn ground beneath our feet, the basis for all the other parts of our identities, the base upon which we build ourselves. We all contain knowledge that is so much a part of us that it barely has a name. Because of this deep-rootedness, this knowledge is not learned in any kind of meaningful sense, but more discovered, revealed to us in the due course of moving through our lives. We cast our gaze inward and we see who and what we already are, who and what we have always been. Using two different senses of the same word, this unlearned knowledge can never be unlearned. If one must encounter nausea as part of their regular and everyday life, say as part of a chronic illness or as a side effect of a necessary medication, perhaps one can construct a mental infrastructure that might make the experience more tolerable, but it will not make the nausea into a pleasant or even neutral experience. Our conscious selves can only do so much in the face of the immense weight of such ancient, bodily awareness.
In his oft quoted (at least by me) commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, the writer David Foster Wallace described this phenomena in a way that sticks with me. He begins with a joke about two fish swimming along who encounter an older fish who greets them and inquires, “How’s the water?” when one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” I come back to this frequently because it communicates one of the truths that I find most difficult to remember. It reminds me of the fact that, as Wallace put it, “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” I know for me that certain pieces of this deep knowledge feel so obvious that they even escape my notice as being “knowledge” and instead feel like something more essential and thus fading into the background like the baseline hum of the energy of the universe. It can be difficult to realize and even more difficult to remember this knowledge that we possess so deep within our core.
I’ve written before about how it seems to me that the physical roots of my depression can be traced all the way down to the entropic forces that pull at the molecules that make up my body. This disease is deeply rooted into my physical being and this is why I cannot consciously unlearn it. There is no cure for this essential bug in my system, my eternal and terrifying passenger. Acknowledging this essentiality is helpful in keeping me on my guard. And yet, I cannot always stay ahead of this invisible companion that I carry with me always.
Lately I’ve been thinking about notions of worth, and I think it’s because of what my essential bug weaves into my core personhood: I know, in the same way that I know that nausea is unpleasant, that I am worthless. In my core, I know that I lack inherent value. I want to be clear that I do not think I am worthless on any real conscious or cognitive level. I can consciously acknowledge that this is not the case in the same way that one might consciously train themselves to weather severe nausea caused by necessary or life saving medicine, but I cannot unlearn this fact, cannot remove my inherent sense of my lack of worth. I might not, and indeed do not, think that I am worthless in my mind. My brain knowledge is one thing. Instead, I know it somewhere deep and ancient within my heart. My body knowledge carries this “truth” with me always.
I also want to point out that considering whether or not this deep, bodily knowledge is “true” in any kind of real way immediately leads to incomprehensibility. What would it mean to say that it’s not “true” that nausea is unpleasant? Or that smiling is an expression of happiness? These pieces of knowledge are rooted directly in biology. They are “facts” in the sense that I cannot alter the ways in which I will always perceive them, chemical processes in my brain telling me I am nauseous and that it sucks, chemical processes telling me that I lack inherent worth. Medication, therapy, etc. these things can help prevent this body knowledge from creeping into the realm of brain knowledge where it might threaten my health and safety. They can help keep my terrifying passenger in check, but again, they are not a “cure.”
I think it’s also important to note that I write and share this publicly not seeking any reassurance that I am in fact worth something. Again, I do not cognitively believe it to be true that I am not. On most days, my conscious habits and deliberately formed cognitive patterns are sufficient to keep me in balance, but there’s something missing for me that makes me vulnerable to being knocked off balance unexpectedly. I think comedian Neal Brennan in his special “3 Mics” actually gave the most accurate description of mental illness, particularly mood disorders, that I’ve ever heard. It’s so accurate that the first time I heard it, I had to stop watching the special because I couldn’t stop crying. It was probably the first time in my remembered life when I didn’t feel an extremely specific and brutal type of loneliness. See I had known that I was sick for some time but it’s almost impossible to grasp that anyone else is feeling what you feel until you hear someone else fine the exact words for it. As I sat in my den watching Netflix by myself and I heard those words, I recognized the voice of someone else naming a core piece of myself for the first time. I was thirty years old. I wept and could not stop because someone else had found the words for what that I saw whenever I turned my gaze inward. As Brennan puts it:
Like, to say I have low self-esteem is not true. I have no self-esteem. I don’t have the architecture for good feelings. You could give me a trophy, it will slide right down. I just don’t have the shelving.
Like Brennan, I just don’t have the shelving. Yes, you can try and build your own shelving. Yes, you should do this. I do all the time, every day. You can do what I do and try to build it with therapy and journaling and antidepressants. But that shelving will always be built on a foundation that seemingly has an active interest in not supporting it. After a COVID quarantine that left my self-built shelving in shambles and had me rapidly spiraling back into the depths of my illness, I’ve been thinking about this core bug that still occasionally creeps from the realm of my body knowledge into my brain knowledge. I’ve been considering again how it can slowly eat away at the mental bulwarks that I seek to construct and maintain to keep myself secure. I’ve been thinking about how misguided notions of worth can change or threaten everything that we build on top of them.
I took my first economics class in high school and it was a revelation to my young brain. There it all was, the chaotic world explained in a series of elegant graphs, a grand theory that linked the individual decisions that we make every day up into the grand sweeps of history and geopolitics, and all of it explained by that purest form of human knowledge, mathematics. It was genuinely kind of intoxicating. I went on to study econ in college as well, and I continued to find solace in the clear and compelling logics that offered explanations of everything from birth rates in developed countries to my own decision of where to attend college to the decline of the Catholic Church of which I was and still am a member. I also studied English literature, and when I got tired of feeling as if I was sliding across the face of a particularly complex work of fiction, there was a certain solace in the apparent anchoring effect of the numbers and charts that my economics classes provided in spades.
From my studies in economics, I either learned or came to recognize a few ideas that became deeply (or perhaps just more deeply) embedded into my thinking: my deeply rooted instinct that efficiency is always the most valuable end to be pursued, my sense that if you any problem can be solved scientifically if you can collect the right data and parse it the right way, the idea that every human decision can be broken down to the utility that a given person generates from the outcome of any decision, meaning you can directly compare the real value of two things as disparate as spending time at the bedside of a dying loved one and buying a new car. I think it’s this last one that has perhaps become embedded most deeply and I operate generally with these (and countless other ideas) as my baseline. The market really does eat everything, even in my own brain. I have this deeply rooted sense now that if someone is choosing option A over option B, it must be because on some level they are deriving a higher level of utility from choosing A than they would if they had chosen B. I like to think that I’m intellectually flexible enough and morally resolute enough to adapt my thinking in the face of compelling arguments to the contrary or when confronted with obvious ethical quandaries that emerge from the models of understanding that I build on these foundations, but your baseline is important.
Our starting point matters. We can only ever travel so far from it.
So what is anything worth? How can we evaluate the agreed-upon value of any two “things”? We can look at your choice between two alternatives to evaluate their value relatively. When you face a choice between two different ways to expend any resource, whether it’s time, energy, money, etc. you reveal both to yourself and to others what you really value and we are given a crystal clear understanding into which option gives you, as the economic decision maker, more utility. For example, do you:
- Make your car payment, or
- fly to Florida to sit by the bedside of your grandmother during her last moments on earth as she lies dying of metastatic bone cancer in the hospice room she won’t ever leave alive
Whichever option you choose clearly is the one that you prefer.
We can also evaluate them by how much they cost. For example, let your car payment costs be X while we let the cost of a last minute plane ticket be Y. Is X>Y? Vice versa? We can quickly evaluate the worth of each option using money as a proxy for the utility that can be gained from each one. So by evaluating price, we can judge whether or not your car is more valuable than the time spent with your grandmother as she prepares to pass from this world into the next.
What the fuck are we talking about? Are either of these comparisons fair? They might credibly pass for fair if you don’t think about it too deeply or, more accurately, if you are not living through this decision making process. They are not fair, almost as a matter of course, when you are considering this scenario as a real human being or if you are living it out personally. This is why your baseline matters. Relative valuations feel obvious from the outside, even when closer examination of context reveals that any quick comparison between the two options will yield nothing in terms of deeper knowledge. Money is, at the end of the day, an apparently unbiased way of keeping score even when it should be obvious that there is not even a game being played. So I know this, and yet I still frequently find myself defaulting to monetary value as a kind of shorthand for worth, even when this kind of reductive view jeopardizes my own moral and mental fortitude.
Another story. I think about the value of my house a fair amount. I am passively subscribed to a few different websites that send me monthly estimates of how much my house is worth and so at least a few times per year I actually open one of these emails and then I think about how the value of the house has changed since we purchased it and what that might mean and how much equity we have now and what that might mean and how much we’ve invested in upgrades and repairs and what that might mean, and so on, and so on. Then I close the email and I just continue to live in my house in exactly the same fashion as I did before all that musing. If something breaks, we repair it. If it’s cold, we turn the heat up.
There are probably a few reasons why I remain subscribed to these emails that tell me the dollar value of my home despite it not really changing anything about how I live my life. The most pertinent is probably that I am endlessly fascinated by real estate. It tickles a certain part of my brain to keep an eye on how the real estate market is performing, what’s being built where, how housing stock is being maintained or repurposed in a given geographic area, why is the western world doing such a fucking terrible job maintaining a viable market for middle class people to purchase homes, etc. I think one of the things that I find fascinating about the housing market is that for all it’s various inefficiencies (and there are many), it still performs the most essential and basic function of a market: to distill all of the various types of utility that might be derived from the purchase of a piece of housing into one number. Although I mentioned before my ambivalence about this function, you cannot argue that, at least in one very important respect, at the end of the day, a house is worth what someone will pay for it. The market can always tell you what your house is worth.
We bought our house in December of 2020 after months of talking long walks mostly to see houses in our neighborhood. This all started largely as an activity to pass the time during the early days of the pandemic but as we considered growing our family and the logistics of getting two kids under 2 up and down the stairs to our third floor walk-up condo and as we tracked the trendline for prices in our neighborhood, it became clear that it would probably be in our best interest (both financial and logistical) to move earlier rather than later. We found our house and we loved it immediately. We closed on it shortly after we lost our second child in a miscarriage. The home we imagined filling with our growing family would stay a little emptier for at least a little longer. Was it worth less to us then, because one of the reasons that we wanted it had changed in dramatic and deeply unpleasant fashion?
It becomes readily apparent that while your house might be worth what someone else would pay for it, there are other factors at play that might determine it’s worth to you. The most important of these other factors is that we live in our house. Every day I come home to my house and then I spend time in it, eating dinner, reading books, brushing teeth, and so on and so on. Then I go to sleep, and the house largely keeps me warm and dry while I do these various activities. It has walls and doors that keep out cold wind and which, while I am at work, keep other people from coming and taking away other things that I own that I keep inside the house. It does these things largely independently of the value of the house as listed in my emails. If we do not take care of the house then eventually it will decrease in value, sure, but to pretend that there is some kind of tight relationship between what the house does for us on a daily basis and the worth of it per those emails that I receive would be dishonest.
All this to say that per these emails that I receive, my house has appreciated anywhere from 10–15% since we purchased it 14 months ago, which is quite a bit of money. This change in price almost entirely reflects changes in factors external to the house itself. These factors, per people who know more than I do, include things like: shifts in demand toward housing with more space to allow knowledge workers to work from home; increases in the appetite of institutional investors to buy up single family homes and carry them as part of a broader income-generating rental portfolio; a housing stock that has not managed to keep up with surging demand as the largest generation (the much maligned millennials) comes of house-buying age; housing policy that has de-emphasized the kind of high density urban environments which can generate economies of scale in housing stock; etc.
I say all of this to point out that my house does not perform the various housing related jobs that I ask of it on a daily basis 10–15% better than it did when we purchased it. The house might be worth a larger sum of money to some hypothetical buyer but to me, it is still worth the same thing, which is to say that it is worth a house, which is to say that it is very valuable. I enjoy living there and being kept warm and dry and having a place to put the other things I own such that they do not get taken by other people while I am at work. It is also very valuable because it is a place to spend a great deal of time with my family. Asking if that time is worth 10–15% more now that it was 14 months ago again pushes the question of valuation into red-lined incoherence.
So what’s my point? My house is worth a great deal to me because it is my house, but ultimately the market will also tell me that it is worth something else, some dollar value to someone else who might purchase it. This all seems fine, but as I said before, the market eats everything, and the same drive to insane abstraction that nearly toppled the housing market before hasn’t actually gone anywhere. Is my house doing anything 10–15% better now than it was 14 months ago? Is it worth any more or less to me? Or is this new valuation being pushed upward by the same drive for institutional returns that inflated demand for mortgages in the run up to the 2008 housing collapse and that has now moved on to seek its returns not from mortgage interest payments but from renters?
It is.
Has anyone asked if this is actually good?
Sure they have, but not anyone who is actually in a position to do much about it, it seems.
And so what then? What of our broken systems of valuation?
What then of the domestic debate over gas prices and the potential trade-off costs that place Ukrainian lives across from folks struggling to buy gas to pay for transportation to work that they need to feed their families?
And what then of the relative value of the life of a Palestinian woman killed by a rocket fired by a US ally onto the ancestral lands where her family has lived for literally centuries compared against the haunting image of a white, pregnant Ukrainian mother, killed by a rocket fired by a hostile international force into a maternity ward in a civilian hospital? Can we evaluate their relative worth by the news coverage they have received and further by the cost of producing that coverage?
And what then of NFTs, what of the digital collages of Paris Hilton’s husband and the jpeg images of monkeys who like keeping it breezy and who share Jimmy Fallon’s affinity for wearing heart-shaped sunglasses as a joke? Is it really possible that they are worth something?
I’m closing here with a lot of questions because this is certainly a case where I don’t have any answers, even after all this digital spilled ink. Mostly it seems to me that we haven’t actually learned our lesson. We’re apparently no closer to understanding that there is no real wisdom in the short term pressures, monetary and otherwise, that drive wild valuations that are seemingly completely decoupled from any other kind of value. I’m afraid, ultimately, that we all are making the same mistake that I still sometimes fall victim to, the same mistake that I worry constantly might be the thing that kills me: poisoning our ideas about ourselves and who we can and should be by building these gestalts on top of foundations which contain stunted or incomplete notions of worth. In the same way that I am perpetually impoverished by my own inability to ever fully integrate some notion of my own self worth into my worldview, I’m left wondering: have we all become impoverished by our own lack of moral imagination in the face of seductive, quantitative arguments about the relative worth of everything around us from the house we live in to the life of a human being thousands of miles away?
To put it another way, what the fuck we are actually talking about?
