And almost every NFT purchase came with access to a Discord community full of other people with the same bad aesthetic taste as you, and that was appealing: not only can you buy this cool picture, use it as your profile picture, then sell it for massive profit years down the line, but you also get a load of new friends as well.
Add the thrill of people in the space getting insanely wealthy in a couple of clicks – a sentence that haunts me like an ancient curse: “” – and you can see how people got suckered. NFTs as we know them might be over for now, but the foundational reasons for hyped-up NFT trading – social isolation, too-online loneliness, the desire for both digital wealth and a better internet – are still lingering over all corners of the internet.
Joel Golby is a writer for the Guardian and Vice, and the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant