A leading legal scholar offers a compelling new theory to explain the
meteoric rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their impact on art,
business, entertainment, and society, and explains how they are
revolutionizing our understanding of ownership.
If you buy an NFT, do you own anything? Critics say no. Then why are
people spending so much money to own them--to the tune of $27 billion in
2021? And why are big businesses and venture capital firms investing
hundreds of millions to develop NFTs for people's use in the metaverse,
a purely imaginary world?
In Creators Take Control, Edward Lee offers a compelling new theory he
calls "Tokenism" that answers these perplexing questions. Using vivid
examples, Lee lucidly explains how NFTs operate--and how they
fundamentally change our understanding of ownership. Tokenism is an
artistic, cultural, and technological movement that creates value in a
new kind of ownership of a new type of property--symbolized by a virtual
token--through a process of technological abstraction and artificial
scarcity effectuated by NFTs. Ownership becomes virtual. What Cubism did
in radically changing the twentieth-century perspective of creating and
viewing art through cubes, Tokenism does today in altering our
perspective of owning art and other things through tokens. Both
movements radically reimagine what's possible.
Creators and businesses have seized upon this profound transformation.
In a short time, they have developed a new market for digital art,
important new rights for creators, innovative business models based on
decentralized collaboration, and a new type of interactive ownership
that enables identity, community, and patronage through NFTs. These
innovations are just the start of revolutionary changes to society. Lee
shows how NFTs create a new form of decentralized intellectual property,
or De-IP. Comparable to the movement to decentralized finance (DeFi),
De-IP empowers creators to take control of their artistic productions
and livelihood.
Lee's intellectual tour de force is filled with practical insights--and
hope--for fostering creativity and a Virtual Renaissance for the ages.
