Simply stated, creativity may be defined as the ability to make or produce new things using skill or imagination. This is the cutting edge and distinguishing feature of all human endeavour. Therefore, what sets us apart from the animal and plant kingdom to make us quintessentially human is our relentless will to test the boundaries of our experience and ability and pose the problems to be resolved for tomorrow.
For we excel, indeed feel alive, only when we undertake, as American psychologist Doctor E Paul Torrance so perceptively said, “a process of becoming sensitive to problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies, and so on, identifying the difficulty, searching for solutions, making guesses, or formulating hypotheses about the deficiencies, testing and retesting these hypotheses and possibly modifying and retesting them, and finally communicating the results.”
As a species, we are nothing if not possessed of a restless energy, and nature in combination with some inexplicable essence demands that we channel this restlessness into the creative instinct. And nowhere is this visceral human urge to push the intellectual boundaries of our existence more manifest than while colouring the canvas represented by the global economy of today.
We have pondered on the transformation in the experience of the average individual while participating in the sale and purchase of goods and services; the phenomenon of the payment gateway and its concomitant of the payment processor; the on-line conversion of significant swathes of the “old economy” ; the facilitation of sale and purchase by a ubiquitous and constantly-evolving information technology; and the overall “digital revolution” that piggy-backs on the binary ether of an internet whose depths we have not, or perhaps dare not, even begin to explore.
Dear reader, you might not be immediately familiar with the concept of the Non-Fungible Token, or NFT for short, but you would have encountered this term that appears to have caught the imagination of the promoters and partakers of cryptocurrency exchanges as the next frontier of what could constitute the intangible asset. An NFT, like cryptocurrency, is a unique non-interchangeable data unit stored on a digital ledger which relies similarly on block-chain technology. Let us set the context by way of example.
Presume for a moment that I am the fortunate owner of a cricket bat signed by Kapil Dev. The item of memorabilia occupies pride of place inside the cabinet situated along the living room wall. Almost four decades later, with the release of the movie 1983, I am advised by a canny friend of the potential windfall if I were to choose to auction the bat because of a perceived increase in value of the bat.
Yes, but once the physical bat is sold to the highest bidder, it would be all but impossible to fill the empty space in my cabinet with any comparably memorable item. Granted, but what if there was a method by which an intangible version of the cricket bat could be auctioned to the highest bidder while the physical bat continued to remain in my possession? This is the novelty of the latest method of creating value which is gaining currency in leaps and bounds.
NFT is, thus, a separate and unique digital asset, and constitutes the exclusive property of the owner. It is the on-line, or virtual, mirror of the physical asset which remains in the possession of the original owner. The digital assets are listed on the various digital platforms, and interested parties bid for them.
The crypto-exchanges manage the marketing, sale, and transfer of the digital asset, and all for a fee. Although technically nothing prevents several replicas of the same physical object to be in circulation, this typically does not happen because the fundamental principles of economics dictates that a multiplicity of digital versions of my autographed cricket bat renders the corresponding digital versions less valuable. So laissez faire demands that the digital asset remain sole and exclusive.
The more perceptive among us have been bitten by the creative bug at the commercial opportunities that hover tantalizingly on the horizon. Influencers, character merchandizing, digitization of physical memorabilia, videos, stationary images, antiques, the crusade to establish the “underlying asset” in each such “property in the ether,” -- this, dear reader, will be the trend of 2022.
And why should our creative ambition rest at this juncture? Perhaps the time will come when governments of nation-states will identify and digitize their national assets, monuments, towns, heritage centers, and historical areas and sell them as NFTs to private parties. Imagine owning a piece of a country, albeit in the ether.
And it goes without saying that the practical limits of our tangible life must inevitably intersect with the “economy on the net” that we appear to be hurtling towards. How does one recognize and identify an NFT? How will the authorities identify the NFT for the purpose of valuation and subject the same to the inevitable statutory levies? Will the fine mesh of today’s jurisprudence and legal framework suffice to regulate NFTs? Are NFTs just the beginning? Can they be integrated and put to use as part of the legitimate wealth of a nation?
Dear reader, the variables in the quest for creative expansion of the economy appear limitless. Prepare yourself for the opportunities that unfold. Who knows, you might one day be so bold as to digitize your persona and sell it to the highest bidder.
Money, after all, speaks the loudest.
Sumit Basu is a freelance contributor based in India.