The tech industry reintroduced scarcity into the internet’s supposedly abundant space

Evidence

In a time of perceived economic scarcity, the metaverse had an underlying utopian promise: to create a new world where everyone had access to everything. The “meatspace,” or physical world, was constrained by limited resources and endless debates over their distribution; the metaverse could provide humanity with the ultimate egalitarian playground, free from scarcity and inequity. Yet before this virtual utopia could even take shape, the tech industry’s first move was to reintroduce scarcity into the system. NFTs became the digital frontier’s version of private property, assigning ownership to otherwise infinitely replicable digital goods. With NFTs, anyone could download the same JPEG, but only one person could “own” it. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 723

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the omnivore monoculture thesis: the internet promised universal access yet reintroduced status-marking through ownership of scarce digital goods. — connects to: The internet’s egalitarian founding promise hardened into corporate libertarianism — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 34; The early internet was built as a non-capitalist, non-market commons — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 283; Cryptocurrency’s engineered scarcity converts success as a currency into a pyramid scheme. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 688 (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: NFTs as the clearest proof that status dynamics survive any abundance of access — artificially-scarce digital property as the signature of the omnivore era.