This week I’ve been quoting Duane Jones’s 1955 book on marketing and business practices. What would Jones say about Bitcoin and Metaverse and NFT? Facebook is primarily an advertising agency, so it certainly fits inside the topic.

Jones couldn’t have imagined such MAGNIFICENT STUPIDITY. He worked in a period (1930-1960) when businesses functioned on PROFIT, not SHARE VALUE, and businesses and media were strictly regulated to INSURE competition and to REMOVE fraud. Antitrust, SEC enforcement, Fairness Doctrine. Not much room for stupidity.

Idiotic shit like NFTs wouldn’t have made it to the discussion stage, let alone the main pride and joy of a giant corporation. The profit motive requires products to be meaningful and useful. Abstract idiocy can only thrive in a Share Value world where capitalists can suck free counterfeit from the central bank without any penalties.

Another difference is more important. Jones focused most of his advertising on women, who were the primary customers in that era. Women appreciate beauty and glamour as an appeal, but demand functionality in products like soap and food and kitchen utensils and automobiles.

The whole blockchain enterprise, iconized by NFTs, appeals ONLY to young males with little experience of the world. NFTs are anti-beautiful, anti-glamorous, and perfectly anti-functional. There’s absolutely no purpose or value in owning an abstract number that refers indirectly to an UGLY abstract picture somewhere in the ether. Males enjoy thinking and talking in numbers, whether it’s baseball statistics or car statistics or stock trading or bitcoin trading. Bitcoin offers nothing that a 1950s housewife would even want to think about, let alone pay real money to “own”.