NFT: Capitalism on steroids and the commodification of everything

NFTs: capitalism on digital steroids

After the FTX implosion and the Trump trading cards circus, it’s time to revisit NFTs. Because if we’ve learned anything in the last two years, it’s this: behind all the buzzwords—decentralization, democratization, revolution—NFTs are just another financial grift, a digital-age scam designed to squeeze more profit out of thin air.

Forget all the talk about “revolutionizing ownership” and “democratizing access.” NFTs do none of that. What they do is financialize absolutely everything, turning even the dumbest internet ephemera into speculative casino chips. This isn’t about empowering artists or creating digital trust. It’s about extracting wealth from the clueless and concentrating it even further into the hands of the already rich.

But let’s take a closer look at the mechanics of this financialized circus, where markets are manipulated, speculation is the default mode of operation, and hype is manufactured on an industrial scale.

A financialization of everything and anything

NFTs don’t “change” ownership. They turn everything into a tradeable token on a speculative market. Your meme? A financial instrument. Your artwork? A tradable asset. Your social media post? A blockchain entry waiting to be flipped for profit.

Karl Marx saw this coming when he said capitalism would commodify everything.

“The things which until then had been communicated but never exchanged given but never sold acquired but never bought—virtue love conscience—all at last enter into commerce.”

If something has no price, capitalism will slap one on it. NFTs are the purest expression of this logic, injecting Wall Street into every aspect of online life.

For all the talk about “ownership,” what NFTs actually sell you is a receipt. A digital certificate that says, “You own this JPEG, but not really.” What they don’t sell you is the actual file, copyright, or any legal enforcement. You just get a blockchain link that could disappear the moment the hosting site goes under—which happens a lot.

And yet people bought into this. They paid millions for pixelated monkeys because the market said they were valuable. Then the market collapsed, and suddenly those pixelated monkeys were worth about as much as a Chuck E. Cheese token.

NFTs and the video game hellscape

Video games were once about playing them. Then came microtransactions, loot boxes, and pay-to-win mechanics. NFTs took one look at that mess and said, “What if we made it worse?”

The idea is simple. Instead of just playing a game, you now get to “own” in-game items as NFTs, which can be traded, resold, or hoarded by investors. This means that instead of designing games for fun, developers now design them for speculation. Every item, every weapon, every piece of virtual land becomes a financial asset waiting to be flipped.

This isn’t innovation. It’s the financialization of play, the transformation of gaming into an unregulated stock market where players are the product. It creates digital sweatshops, players grinding away in the hopes that some whale will buy their loot. Instead of leveling up through skill, the game world becomes just another market, where those who can afford expensive NFTs dominate and those who can’t are locked out.

The result? A dystopian future where games are no longer about escaping reality but about monetizing every second you spend in them. Welcome to casino capitalism for the digital generation.

The sharing economy: a branding masterpiece in exploitation

Over the past decade, the so-called sharing economy was sold as a way to democratize access to resources, allowing individuals to share rides, homes, and labor through platforms like Uber and Airbnb. The rhetoric was seductive. It promised efficiency, flexibility, and financial empowerment. It framed traditional ownership as outdated and inefficient, replaced by a sleek new model where goods and services could be dynamically allocated according to need.

It was, of course, a lie.

Rather than enabling a utopian form of cooperative exchange, the sharing economy functioned as a massive privatization scheme. It offloaded financial risk onto individuals while centralizing wealth and power into the hands of platform owners. Uber did not empower drivers. It turned them into underpaid gig workers with no benefits, no labor protections, and no control over the algorithm that determined their income. Airbnb did not make travel more accessible. It helped turn housing into a speculative asset class, driving up rent and displacing local communities.

The genius of the sharing economy was its ability to disguise corporate extraction as social good. By calling itself “sharing,” it masked the fact that nothing was actually being shared. Everything was being monetized. What was once an informal or communal practice—carpooling, hosting guests, renting a room—was repackaged as a financial transaction, brokered by a tech company that took a cut of every exchange. It was, in many ways, the commodification of trust itself.

NFTs as the next phase of commodification

If the sharing economy financialized real-world assets, NFTs took the next logical step. They financialized digital nothingness.

At least Uber and Airbnb had tangible things behind them—cars, apartments, services. NFTs, by contrast, have elevated speculation to its purest form. They take things that should be freely available—images, memes, cultural artifacts—and turn them into financial instruments. They apply artificial scarcity to digital objects that are, by nature, infinitely reproducible.

This is not the democratization of ownership. It is a deliberate and aggressive expansion of the market into previously uncommodified spaces. The internet was once seen as a domain where ideas, culture, and creativity could circulate freely. NFTs are an attempt to reverse that, to create new enclosures in digital space, where access to content is no longer defined by its intrinsic value but by its ability to be tokenized and sold.

The language of empowerment plays the same role here as it did in the sharing economy. Just as Uber convinced drivers that they were “micro-entrepreneurs” rather than disposable gig workers, the NFT market convinced artists that they were finally seizing control of their work. In reality, they were being funneled into yet another system where market logic dictated their survival.

Financialization disguised as progress

The rise of the sharing economy and NFTs follows the same pattern of capitalist expansion. Both were packaged as revolutions, framed as new ways to distribute wealth and opportunity. In reality, both simply accelerated the logic of financialization, pulling more people into precarious, high-risk economic arrangements under the illusion of empowerment.

The core mechanism is the same. Take something people already do for free or at cost—whether it’s driving, renting a room, or sharing art—and turn it into an extractive market. Create a digital infrastructure that inserts a middleman into every transaction, ensuring that a small group of platform owners capture the majority of the profit while participants bear the financial risks.

For Uber drivers, the risk was debt, unpredictable wages, and algorithmic exploitation. For NFT buyers, the risk was financial ruin when the speculative bubble burst.

Both models shift economic power away from individuals and toward platform owners, market makers, and speculative investors. Both normalize the idea that everything should have a price and that financial speculation is somehow synonymous with progress.

Rejecting the NFT narrative

NFTs were sold as the next step in digital ownership. In reality, they were the next step in financializing the internet. They took one of the last semi-free spaces of creativity and interaction and turned it into a stock exchange.

Behind all the talk about revolution, decentralization, and digital trust, NFTs were just a repackaging of the same predatory system. A system that doesn’t innovate. It extracts. A system that doesn’t empower. It concentrates power.

The real question is not whether NFTs will disappear. They already are. The question is how many times will we keep falling for the next financial scam wearing a futuristic disguise?

If we want a different future, we need to stop mistaking financial speculation for technological progress. We need to reject the myth that everything must be a market. Because if we don’t, we’re just one grift away from paying for the right to breathe.

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