Fox and Dan Harmon are getting into NFTs with blockchain "curated" animated series
As reported by Deadline, Community creator Dan Harmon’s new Fox animated series Krapopolis—which we learned back in February would be some kind of mash-up of ancient Greece and modern culture/politics—is going to be the first-ever animated series “curated entirely on the blockchain.” Fox and animation studio Bento Box are also going to establish a dedicated digital marketplace to sell goods related to the show, “ranging from NFTs of one-of-a-kind character and background art and GIFs” to “tokens that provide exclusive social experiences for super fans.” (Super fans of a show that does not exist yet, for the record.)
But what does that all mean for you, the future super fans of Krapoplis? Fuck if we know! We’ll give it a try, though: The NFT thing is relatively easy to grasp, in that there’s literally nothing to grasp because NFTs are made-up computer things that only exist in the computer, but Fox will sell you a “one-of-a-kind” Krapopolis GIF that is only one-of-a-kind in the sense that you believe it’s one-of-a-kind. There’s nothing stopping anyone else from downloading the GIF and telling people that they also own it, except for the fact that there’s a computer somewhere in the world that knows that you really own it, and you and the computers are the only beings in existence that give a shit.
That computer is the blockchain, but it’s actually a network of computers that track transactions involving cryptononsense like NFTs and bitcoins (this is called “mining”), which requires massive amounts of electricity to function. According to a New Yorker story, the amount of energy used for bitcoin mining annually is the same as the electricity consumption of Sweden, and one bitcoin transaction “is responsible for roughly a million times more carbon emissions than a single Visa transaction.” Using electricity comes from generating electricity, which often involves stripping the planet of natural resources, which is the sort of thing that is going to destroy the planet and kill us all in the long-term.
A lot of things we do are destroying the planet (even the internet, which you need to read this very news story, uses electricity!), but the thing about NFTs and blockchains destroying the planet is that they’re being used so you can tell people you “own” a GIF from a new Dan Harmon show called Krapopolis that isn’t even out yet. Krapopolis is also the very first new show created and fully owned by Fox Entertainment after Disney bought 20th Century Fox, but apparently that’s not buzzy enough on its own.