Jordan Topoleski discusses how crypto and NFTs reshape ownership of digital art. Community curation and tokenization let people move from passive consumers to active producers with real stakes in collections, creating emotional bonds similar to a museum curator's relationship with displayed work.
And then you think, what does it mean to actually own something in the sense that right now if I write something on my phone, it's mine, but also it's on my phone which is stored on the cloud, notes are owned, like someone is handling that for me. So it's not like I really own it that much, but if someone took that away from me, I would feel like it took a part of me, right? So I think there is a sort of blurring of the lines of access and owning, which is Which is really interesting in my eyes.
Yeah, so many, so many different pathways to kind of, kind of take this down. Um, I think there's this very interesting thought, and we think about it a lot at Archive, of what it means as we, uh, you know, collectively as an organization, um, own different works in our collection. And a big piece of this, it's almost like thinking about if you are a curator of a work that's on display at a museum, you probably look at it very differently. So say, you know, you're walking down a wall of works and, you know, maybe stopping to look at each piece for 15 or 30 seconds. But if there's one that you've been a curator of, you're going to go up to it and say, I made this decision. Me as a member of Archive who owns this work actually has put this on loan. Maybe even my name is on that as being one of the people that was in the community and participated in the process of actually acquiring this into the collection. Probably going to look at it longer than 30 seconds. In fact, you might even walk right back to where that piece is displayed with your family, with your friends, and say, yeah, I was actually a part of this, and let me tell you a 15-minute story of why it's significant. I think this piece is tapping into is, uh, we're in a society right now where you can start to actually tap into these pieces that tie you closer to something. And I think that's a large reason why Web3 and crypto has taken off in a very interesting way, because it's allowed people to feel a more intimate connection and It's kind of this principal-agent problem piece where it's turned a lot of people who were previously agents or people who felt like they were part of someone else's system to now say, no, I'm a main character, I'm a part of the system, and I'm maybe exposed to equity, quote unquote, in the system by being a token holder, by being an NFT holder, something like that. It's changing those dynamics in a really interesting way.
But I think the mere fact of contributing to the selection process is already something really powerful that creates something that previously really wasn't possible. And I mean, I haven't participated in any of the creation process yet.
Yeah.
But I wonder what the emotional feeling is for someone to have been part of that and then going to see that art piece. And it's like, does this really increase and create more emotional connection?
Yeah. I mean, imagine like this. Imagine you're the kid in middle school who's never been able to sit at the cool kids' table or never been able to sit at a table with friends and you eat lunch alone in the corner. And then one day someone says, oh, we actually have this really new interesting table that allows a lot more people to sit at the table, be a part of the conversation, sit with the, sit with the cool kids. That is kind of exactly what's being done now. You're saying, hey, this is something that in the past you have never been able to be part of. You are going and you are a consumer. What if you're now a producer? What if you're part of telling the story?
Do you think that's something that we're going to get used to? Like, do you hope that's something we're going to get used to in the sense that if you sit every day at that table, you're going to be like, yeah, I belong here. I'm part of this group.
Yeah, it's empowerment. I think it's people allowing to think about who they are as an individual in a lot more advanced of a way almost. It's allowing people to say, oh, I'm not just maybe unimodal. I have these different components to me and I'm able to contribute in very meaningful ways to society more broadly. I think that's a really inspiring and interesting concept. Honestly, at the end of the day, I think it's one of the most promising concepts of technology in general. It's like if you go back to the philosophy of technology, I think a lot of the earliest ideas of it were thinking through allowing people to have more time originally, more ways to express who they were in the most human form, in the most human essence, and art just plays such a big part of that conversation.
