WTF Is an NFT, Anyway? And Should I Care?
This week we talk about non-fungible tokens, digital art collectors, and what it’s like to sell one of your tweets….
KK: I literally have written freelance stories for $60. So, yeah.
GE: Yeah.
LG: Well, I just have to say, Kate, I think your tweet was excellent. Not just a fine tweet, and absolutely worth the 0.3 ether you got from it. And also we should note that WIRED has since banned us from selling our tweets for understandable, ethical reasons.
GE: I’ll say this and I hope our bosses are listening. I think that’s baloney. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be able to monetize our tweets. I mean, I play saxophone. I’m allowed to go play a gig and why he can’t say like, I’m not allowed to make money playing saxophone. Well, I guess maybe they could write that into my contract, but it’s not in there. I don’t see why a goofy tweet is something that we can’t monetize on the side.
LG: Well, Twitter is supposedly going to roll out a service for people to monetize their tweets in a more direct way very soon. So maybe you’ll have to experiment with that. Ask forgiveness, not permission.
GE: No, but you’re forgetting, Lauren, the problem is my tweet suck, so I can’t really monetize them.
LG: All right. Let’s take another quick break, and then we’re going to come back with our recommendations, and I’m sure Gilad is going to stun us yet again.
[Break]
LG: All right, Kate, as our guest of honor this week, what’s your recommendation?
KK: My recommendation is a book that I spent a long time last night reading. I haven’t stayed up reading a book until 1:00 AM for awhile, so I was just delighted by how good it is. And it’s Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun. WIRED actually did ran an interview with him recently, so people should check that out. But you should also read this book. It’s a really amazing story about a humanoid robot who is the caretaker for a girl in the near future dystopia. And it’s funny, and sad, and lovely.
LG: That’s the second recommendation this week I’ve heard for this book. I happened to tune into a talk with Jia Tolentino from The New Yorker the other night, and she recommended this book as well.
GE: Kate, have you read Ishiguro’s other novels, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go?
KK: Never Let Me Go is one of my favorite novels. So I was definitely sort of primed to enjoy this one, but it’s when a book actually meet your high expectations.
LG: That’s an awesome recommendation. And I’m definitely going to add that to my reading list. Now, Gilad hit us with it.
GE: So I know that you have come to expect a sort of unorthodox recommendations, but since I’m subbing for Calore I have a kind of basic one.
LG: Oh, no. If you’re subbing for Calore, it’s going to have to do with like pickling your vegetables or some kind of like obscure fungi. Like this true story, the other day, I went to San Francisco to drop something off to Calore and I asked to use his restroom and he let me use it. I mean, this is kind of a dicey proposition in a pandemic, right? I mean, you ask someone to use the restroom, but he graciously let me in and he stayed outside and we were masked and the whole thing. And there was-