prokopetz:

If it seems baffling to you how major tech companies keep getting taken in by NFT scams, yes, some of them are in fact running their own scam on the side and know exactly what they’re getting into, but another big part of it is that, in my experience as an IT contractor, the upper management of your average tech company is considerably less technologically savvy than your average Tumblr user.

That might sound implausible, but the thing you need to understand is that we’re talking about people who are perfectly willing to pay someone to read their emails for them. Many of them are so insulated from the day-to-day reality of modern information technology infrastructure that they’re functionally computer illiterate. You know that gag about the guy who’s so rich, he doesn’t know how to dial a phone call? It’s literally that, except a hundred times worse, because these people are so invested in presenting themselves as tech experts that they’ve bought into their own act and truly, honestly believe that they are tech experts. They get to the point that they’re not even consciously deceiving anyone – they’re so deep in their own bullshit that they’ve fooled themselves.

The upshot is that a great deal of the critical decision-making regarding online infrastructure falls to people who are very good at repeating buzz-words, but have only a vague and mostly incorrect notion of what the Internet is and how it operates. It’s completely true that many of the efforts to cram NFTs into everything are happening due to complicity, but my read is that at least as much of it is happening because the people in charge simply have no idea what an NFT is or does – indeed, lack the capacity to understand what an NFT is or does – and have no more concrete plan behind them than a pathological need to keep on top of the latest buzz-words.

The only saving grace is that most of the proposed NFT integrations that are ostensibly looming on the horizon probably won’t actually happen, because announcing that you’re totally on top of the next big trend and spending months grandly talking up your Vision For The Future™, then not actually doing it because it turned out to be slightly challenging is also standard operating procedure for these guys.