We don’t often run short-stories here, but we were rocked by the SF writer Tim Maughan’s fiction “Line Go Up” in Noema magazine. Maughan dramatises a near-future scenario where traders who see their world through smart glasses (they’re coming) manipulate and game the value of digital artworks (NFTs). “Line go up” refers to the rise and fall in value of each artwork, as waves of hype and speculation crash over them.

Tim doesn’t do happy endings… but we wanted to share some quotes here, as they make concrete what the all-too-human (maybe also all-too-blokeish) use of a “metaverse” or “web3” might feel like. We’ll be on the look-out for some more optimistic fiction around this tech soon, we promise (and we’re open to suggestions…)

From Tim Maughan’s “Line Go Up”

…Like every artist that got in after the initial goldrush, Fragileman had realized there was no real money in tokenizing your work when you were starting out. The days of buying any tokenized art you saw just for the novelty or some mystical potentials were long gone; now only established artists, artists with connections and influence and a recognizable brand, made serious money selling their work.

No, as a new artist there was little point wasting money and carbon on having your work minted when you could tokenize something far more valuable: yourself. Pay an exchange to mint you into an NFT, split it into thousands of shards, and then put those up for sale. Suddenly you were there, legitimately part of the real art world: a line on a chart.

The artist as tradable financial product, your artistic value ranked by the automated exchanges, subreddit day traders, stonks hustlers, hedge fund analysts and high-frequency trading algorithms. They — the critics, the holdouts, the no-coiner ludds — they keep telling us we’d finally destroyed art, reduced it all to nothing but stocks and shares, meaningless toy money for the world’s rich to play with. Of course, the truth was that’s what art had always been, for centuries if not longer. We just made it more ubiquitous, more efficient, more technologically mediated. We made it faster.

…Now I am looking at social media data, at trending terms and engagement metrics. I am watching a previously unknown street artist go viral in real-time. I am watching his name spread through networks like a virus through an unvaccinated immune system, jumping from influencer to influencer, from subreddit to subreddit, from bot network to bot network. Minutes pass, then hours. Guided by invisible hands — of both the market and NyftEX’s automated influence metric trackers — Fragileman is up seven points. The infection grows, turning everything into organic, almost botanical details and simple, urgent geometry. Fragileman blossoms with big main character energy.

And now, here come the big fish, the sharks in the dark pools, the celebrity-branded investment funds. Cyrus Capital, Swift Finance, Knowles & Carter Investment. The pop stars fronting hedge funds, the people that finally brought trading to the masses, that helped them see that side-hustle culture and financial speculation went hand in hand, selling them a dream where they can actually own a tiny sliver of their anointed significance, that asked them to prove their fan loyalty via direct investment. They are all over Fragileman now, tweeting and reposting, slipping his work into stories and mentioning it on livestreams. Hashtags trend. Fragileman to the moon. Line go up. I wonder where he is right now, what he’s doing, what he must be thinking as his phone blows up with notifications. Up 17 points now, and still rising.

First we pump, and then we dump.

It’s all about timing now. It’s all about holding the line until you feel it’s right. Between us, Dave and I now own — via various proxies and shells — about 2,000 of the initial 5,000 shards Fragileman had minted of himself. We got them all for around a buck each. Pocket change. I’ve a figure in my head, maybe. A number that I’m holding out for. Or I might just go with my gut. Either way, at some point I know it’ll be time to sell every Fragileman shard I’m holding, to cash the fuck in. To flood the market and take the money while everyone else rushes to follow us and do the same, and to watch Fragileman’s artistic value fall like a stone. Line go down.

I’m staring at Fragileman’s work again, at the good use of color and bold lines. For a second I actually feel guilty. I’m not sure why. He’s an unwitting pawn in this, but he’ll be ok. It’ll be a wild ride, but he’ll survive it. Fuck, he’ll come out of this pretty well off, if he’s sensible — he’s already got a hundred times the followers he had this morning, and he’s sold a bunch of minted images. He’ll come out of this with a profile he never had, probably richer than when we started. I minimize his IG page with a flick of my hand, and the guilt with it. What’s the worst that could happen?

The full story on Noema is here. Interesting to read Tim’s work alongside sensible advice and explainers of NFT’s like this.

A world where digital "shards" of your art are traded on wild markets, hyped, pumped and dumped... Tim Maughan's short story is a warning

From Tim Maughan’s “Line Go Up”