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Today I will talk about blockchain and semiotics. Maybe some of you don't know what semiotics or semiology is, and in short it's the study of signs and the things that they signify. In fact in semiotics there's this concept of a "signifier" and a "signified" and this ties in neatly with things such as language, but it can also apply to pictures, and it even applies to computer programming.
If you have a word, for example like the word "house" - that's a sound that I've just made there, you can write it down then you have the letters h-o-u-s-e, and behind it there's the concept that it signifies, namely a dwelling in which people can live - and that itself is a concept. But then you can actually have a physical reality, namely an actual building, so you can point at it and say "this house" and the person you're communicating will understand the meaning behind it, provided you both speak the same language and have the same concepts. And we build these concepts in our culture.
So why have I talked so much about semiotics in a blockchain? Well because blockchain is, as far as I can tell, inherently tied into semiotics - it's all about producing signs that signify something, and one of the things that that allows us to do is analyze what has gone wrong with art NFTs. You've probably heard me banging on about it quite a bit at the beginning of this year that when people are buying NFTs they're not actually getting what they think they're getting, and you can see this in the language that is used. I was just thinking yesterday that people use the phrase "I'm going to make an nft of a tweet", which makes it sound as though this message that has been put on twitter.com is somehow going to be encapsulated or captured inside an item, a unique indivisible non-fungible object on a blockchain, but in fact that's not the case. The NFT is a pointer to the tweet rather than the tweet itself - it's a signifier rather than something that is signified, and it's that breakdown in understanding in current communication that I think causes a lot of problems when people are dealing with NFTs, and I've even seen this in articles where people are pointing out that an NFT of a song does not give you the rights that would come with true ownership of that song, or that an NFT of an art piece does not give you the rights that come with that art piece, and then in the very next sentence they tell you that therefore you can't put your NFT on display.
Well an NFT is just a bunch of ones and zeros on a blockchain, and nobody would - well maybe no, not nobody but very few people having bought an NFT of an art piece would then want to display a bunch of ones and zeros, and actually they would be allowed to display those ones and zeros if they wanted to - it's just that it wouldn't signify the art piece that they believed that they had bought, and so this is why things like NFTs need to have contracts that actually explain that the NFT represents an ownership of the abstract concept of having some kind of right over the artwork associated with it, and that's what's sadly missing from so many of these NFT art sites.
Similarly if you look at cryptocurrencies, again the cryptocurrencies are signifying something - they're signifying value, the ability to exchange something for something else, so there's a whole bunch of research and study that the semioticians out there with nothing better to do could actually be engaging with. No doubt we're going to start seeing PhDs about blockchain and semiotics appearing sometime in the not too distant future when academia catches up.
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