The NFT boom reduced culture to pure speculation, the endpoint of poptimism.

Evidence

Proponents, however, framed NFTs as a democratization of culture. Meme stars like Zoë Roth of Disaster Girl and the owner of the dog Kabosu from the Doge meme used them to monetize their virality. But the NFT boom was, at its core, forged in the cauldron of financial speculation. In this, NFTs embodied the end form of poptimism: Raw commercialization was now treated as culture. The entire appeal of NFTs was in establishing ownership for future profits. This found a receptive audience in a new generation of Zoomer creators, who, as art journalist Hiji Nam put it, “don’t want to be broke and obscurely cool artists; they want to be rich and legibly cool entrepreneurs.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 731

Categorization

• SEED: The Zoomer-creator quote — ‘rich and legibly cool entrepreneurs’ not ‘broke and obscurely cool artists’ — is a precise generational-incentive statement usable as a counter-case datum when arguing whether the era’s signature is really blankness or simply a commercialization Marx read but mislabeled.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘end form of poptimism’ as raw commercialization treated as culture, a building block of the omnivore-monoculture concept.