It all started so innocently.
Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of tech publication Semafor, tweeted a screenshot of a text exchange between himself and a sports magazine editor earlier this week. The subject: The pickleball craze currently sweeping the country.
“Meanwhile, because the tennis establishment is so petrified and beset by infighting, all the VC money wanting to go somewhere has perpetuated a garbage psy-op-NFT.”
“Wait, did you just call Pickleball a ‘garbage psy-op NFT?'”
“[Venture capital] took a backyard hobby for retirees and is trying to turn it into a professional game with leagues and TV rights, even though it’s about as appealing to watch as darts.
Since this exchange was published on X, formerly Twitter, and did quite well in terms of virality (nearly 100 quoted tweets and 600 likes), I assumed Crypto Twitter would be all about this. I flipped through the comments and quotes, looking for some funny NFT one-liners to use as a starting point for this week’s op-ed.
But I didn’t find anything.
In fact, in an unexpected twist, it’s the darts community that has been fighting back. While some darts fans cited TV darts championship ratings, another wrote: “This is way too mean for darts.” Another darts enthusiast took the text exchange even more to heart, writing that calling darts boring is like believing in ‘flat earth shit’.
I had to think for a moment.
Ben Smith, EiC at Semafor, former New York Times media columnist and editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, is (what I thought) a relatively important person on X for crypto news. Moreover, I would have thought that anyone who had anything to do with crypto would show up on the timelines of the crypto-obsessed people, who were always ready for an online battle over the merits of their virtual money and digital art.
But this criticism of NFTs passed over the head of crypto. I read all of the nearly 100 quoted tweets, and while one commenter made a subtle remark – “Pickleball is the NFT/MLM of the sport” – only one person actually said it outright.
Web culture newsletter writer Ryan Broderick wrote, “I think using the NFT as a shorthand for every microtrend for outlandish rich people (which has always materialized like a pyramid scheme to the rest of us) is very, very good.”
With all the talk of crypto about wider adoption already taking place, it’s sometimes easy to forget that we’re all in an echo chamber. Because even NFTs – which are arguably the most mainstream part of the crypto ecosystem – are apparently viewed by the normie public as just another trend for rich people.
But I’m actually not too surprised that anyone reading the comical pickleball text change gets the joke, that they already understand implicitly that NFTs are a “bad rich people” thing.
Because despite the many use cases and artists and even cool stuff I see in the NFT space, you have to think about what the rest of the world sees: a bunch of celebrities buying and selling multimillion dollar apes.
Read more in our opinion section: If you’re in crypto, you’re an Allan
Just look at how easily “NFT” entered the wider lexicon as equivalent to “scam,” at least according to liberal media readers, pickleball players, and darts apologists on X. I’m not sure when that happened — and I’d be right on this kind of thing to watch out for in my role as the Blockworks crypto skeptic!
Admittedly, it’s not an exact science to postulate what the entire world thinks of NFTs based on comments made about X. And maybe now that we’ve given some space to this journalist’s NFT pickleball joke, the crypto community will retaliate against his tweet to prove everyone wrong. (But probably not, since the tweet is ages old in internet age.)
Or maybe the real reason Crypto Twitter went silent in the face of this NFT facelap is because the hype cycle is over: the real builders don’t want to spend time in a silly internet brawl. They must avoid all distractions in their search for a new way of dealing with art.
But that probably gives them too much credit. The NFT community was probably all about playing pickleball and just completely missed out on this round of internet drama.
I don’t care much about technology, I don’t care much about finance either. I like writing stories and watching strange things happen. And that’s why I got into crypto.
But because I miss that passion for what crypto and blockchain are all about — finance, technology, privacy, yadda yadda — I’m going to write about what I’m actually interested in instead. Everything about crypto that has very little to do with crypto.
That’s what this column is about. All the tangential stories emerging from the blockchain and crypto space, what I think about it, and how I navigate through it as a skeptical former Russian literature major.
It’s exactly my place as an outsider that lets me do what I do: express an opinion on any crypto issue from all sides, with no strings attached, no involvement whatsoever.
If you want to talk about crypto with me, let’s go off-topic.