Stress in the rabbit hole

· 4 min read
Stress in the rabbit hole

Most NFT creators are using different NFT platforms and marketplaces, need to use various tools for social interaction and self-promotion and of course they mint, swap and burn. Sometimes they burn out.

The Rabbit Hole

When you discover the NFT space, perhaps especially if you are trying to discover the Hic Et Nunc universe, you quickly find yourself digging deeper and deeper. This produces a strange kind of motivation, because you are discovering new things, you learn about new platforms and a lot of tools, you connect with dozens of people in the space and perhaps you get impressed by thousands of artworks and creative experiments.

The rabbit hole is the entrance to unknown worlds and you might experience a lot.

The journey into the unknown can be wild, interesting and reminds you of the early internet times, where you had absolutely no clue of what’s coming next or even where to go.

Stress

Because of a natural fragmentation of the ‘new world’, especially in a decentralized space, there is no single place which you could call the ultimate home base. The Hic Et Nuncers and many other NFT people adapted to this lack of mature social platforms (which we all knew from the web 2.0) by re-using what they had, Twitter for instance. Because Twitter is not avantgarde any more, you will find also a heavy use of discord or other tools.

Marketplaces like OpenSea or Hic Et Nunc have not established a real substitute for the old social platforms of the Web 2.0. In consequence people continued to use Twitter, Instagram etc. to connect, to promote and potentially even to collaborate.

Twitter was a very intensively used channel for any kind of NFT talk during the last months. And you will find the same hashtag usage on Instagram as well, like #cleanNFT, #NFT etc. The platform-community specific exchange of Hic Et Nunc is happening on discord, but most of the individual promo and shill-posting happens on Twitter.

If you are looking out for ways to present your stuff as a whole, then you need to consider first, which platform is supporting which blockchain (so that your NFTs can be loaded), and then – how you want to present you work. Are you going to buy some virtual land to place a gallery on the ground or would you like to have a classical website experience? Perhaps you are planning to create some voxel artifacts for the metaverse and like to sell on a specific platforms like Sandbox or Decentraland? Or are you looking out for a classical art community (like DeviantArt in the early days)? Right now, you will find plenty of options, a lot of different flavors and many tools for certain uses cases. So creating and promoting art today is connected to permanent research and exploration.

Many NFT guys are using words like ‘stress’ or ‘burn-out’.

Not only because all NFT creators do the Beeple, but also because the attention span of the audiences for a Tweet can be surprisingly short. That’s why people are tweeting very often to not drop out of attention. The sales success of NFTs correlates with social media activities (at least if you are not a rockstar). So the promotion of own artworks is needed to reach and attract collectors or to point existing fans in the direction of a new work. So that’s why many NFT artists work, post, work, post, seek shill posts, comment, like, work, post, sleep, eat and repeat. This can be stress!

The stress-level obviously got intensified by circumstances of the pandemic scenario of course, in which many people were finally glued to their computer.

On Twitter people say that they took some weeks of as a break, they used a few days for meditation or enjoyed nature as a counter-activity. I think it’s fair to say, that there is stress in the rabbit hole and that communicative / promotional pressure connected to art should be handled in smarter ways perhaps.

Environments in transition

Things are moving fast these days, nothing is for granted.

The nihilistic and fakeful Trump-Twitter could be transformed into an inspiring art-Twitter (which is a massive improvement for the entire world and good news for each individual soul connected). So change happened. More change will come. Old platforms might erode, new platforms might lead to new layers of complexity and fragmentation at the same time. But then some platforms are beginning to re-connect the silos again (for example based on cross-chain or social media integrations). New capabilities and traditional features of the collective past (of a web 1.0 – 2.0) got merged in some places already to bridge audiences and to lower barriers. New curators, blogs (not only like this one) and community-driven working groups are trying to aggregate relevant information, to sort and summarize what’s going on. So perhaps the rabbit hole can be entered more easily based on some personalized guidance.

We are all moving along the hype cycle, but it seems that we passed the first peak.

Hype cycle by Jeremykemp at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10547051

After the phase of inflated expectations, after the disillusionment things will stabilize and the requirements for tools and platforms will shape new environments.

So relax …

By definition, the rabbit hole is the beginning of a journey