<MoneyLab> MoneyLab NFT Essay Price

[Geert Lovink]

Sorry to keep everyone of the MoneyLab community waiting for the outcome of the MoneyLab NFT Essay Price (https://networkcultures.org/moneylab/2022/01/21/moneylab-nft-essay-prize/ <https://networkcultures.org/moneylab/2022/01/21/moneylab-nft-essay-prize/>). In the end, we only received five essays. After taking time for reading and reflecting on the submissions we have received, we, the jury members (Max Haiven, Ela Kagel & Geert Lovink) now want to share the outcome of our deliberations:

There will be no MoneyLab NFT essay prize this time. 

We were disappointed and perplexed by the (lack of) response to our provocations and it led us to a number of questions.  Had we framed the problem inaccurately? Were our questions irrelevant? Were we betraying our age in the way we approached the topic? Were young people too busy to genuinely respond? Is the format of the "essay" going extinct? And if so, what is the future of "rhetoric" in a digital age? Was our framing of NFTs as "a generation's empowerment of a capitalist trap" too stark and binary? 

On an even deeper level, we were alarmed by the narrow horizon of vision in the essays we read. It felt that the authors, in spite of being well-read and capacitous in their understanding, often seemed to see very little future, good or bad, beyond the confines of the present. Does this represent the triumph of capitalist realism, the vivification of the "slow cancellation of the future"? But then maybe it is simply that we, of a generation who remember a time before digitalized financialization, no longer have the sensitivities to see the forms that hope might take among a younger generation, who do not enjoy such memories. To paraphrase a now-famous meme, should we question our own expectionations? No! It's the children who are wrong!

Yours,

Max Haiven, Ela Kagel & Geert Lovink


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