Reality as Luxury in the Metaverse
NFTs of whiskey and luxury handbags say a lot about our possible future.
In the 1992 film Leap of Faith, Steve Martin plays a traveling evangelist preacher who lies, cheats, and cons his way across America as the face of a revival show…until he is thrown for a loop when an actual miracle happens onstage during one of his performances.
A faithful boy, praying in earnest to Jesus, is genuinely cured of his need for crutches. But when he later thanks Martin’s character for the miracle and offers to work for his revival show, the conman replies that - as a conman - he has learned he needs to avoid reality at all costs. Or, as he puts it:
“That’s what you’ve got to watch out for. Not the cops, you can always get around the cops. But the one thing you can never, ever get around is the genuine article.”
He turns the boy down, and soon disappears into the night. He may find another con, and can even feel good about the miracle that happened through the façade of his powers, but he’s smart enough to know it’s time for a new line of work.
It got real.
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“Does It Even Have a Point?”
The quote in the subtitle above came to mind this week when one of our directors was meeting with a distillery owner in Ireland. Tomorrow marks the release of a once-in-history bottle of Irish whiskey - the Midleton Very Rare Pinnacle Vintage - which blends together samples from all 40 of the Midleton Very Rare annual whiskey releases, plus an additional sample from a 1984 single pot distillation.
It is literally whiskey history. But it isn’t just the bottle for sale. The whopping price tag of $130,000 is for the non-fungible token (NFT), and therefore the bottle, too, which will be stored in the NFT sales platform site in Singapore until such time as the new or future owner desires to claim it.
Obviously, all brands involved get a boost from this type of marketing. Midleton gets to remind the world of its whiskey’s value while making a clear statement to collectors about investment potential. And the NFT marketplace, Blockbar, gets to spread awareness of its services: providing a digital chain of custody for an expensive bottle from distillery to owner, and storing/insuring the asset meanwhile.
It’s really just a digital version of a certificate of authenticity, with what they hope will prove a stronger case for provenance down the line. There’s nothing wrong with that. The folks at Jameson (owners of the Midleton brand) own their whiskey and can do what they like with it. (That puts them far above many NFT creators.)
And if, in ten years time, they sell a new bottle that contains all 50 such releases, then the owner of the current one can hardly claim too much surprise. After all, we are plagued these days with advertisements and experiences that are superlatives only in the moment.
But for one owner of a small distillery, the NFT angle seemed the absolute opposite of the approach he wanted to take with his business. He wanted to bring people closer to the land and product, not turn a bottle of his whiskey into ‘theory’ by letting folks buy and sell it without ever laying eyes on it. (Of course, there are plenty of ways to do this with luxury goods non-digitally, but that was outside the point he was making.)
“Does it even have a point?” he wondered aloud as he looked down at a bottle of his own. “If you don’t drink it?” It seemed a fair question as we stood there, the smell of malted barley in our nostrils, and the cool breeze from an Irish February wafting through a nearby door.
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A Digital-First Life
Fast-forward to a conversation our director had with a college student later that same night. In response to seeing pictures of the distillery visit, the student said that while it was ‘cool’, it confirmed for him his complete lack of interest in travel.
The gist of the student’s argument was that travel just involves paying money for a different reality. He can do that now online in games - and they are cheaper than travel, can be revisited any time on demand, and involve (by his way of thinking) a lot more input and control from the observer.
Why go buy some spices from the famous market in Morocco, when you can buy the spice online, have it shipped to your home, and digitally run amok through the market in a video game? (Or, as an internet fable holds, know a city better than a tour guide who lives there, thanks to Assassin’s Creed?)
“Is that it?” our director asked. “Is it because, in the real world, you won’t be in control?” If we view cars as extensions of our bodies, it makes sense that we would view our digital selves that way, too.
And sure, that was part of it. How much value could spending all that money to go to the spice market really add, on top of what had been experienced in a game? But interestingly, when the student was pressed on the fact that there was a difference between seeing a historical place in real life, and meeting the people there; and seeing how it smells; and making memories of it; his response was simple.
Time. Money. Other things to be done.
He was fine with the digital version. The reality was a luxury he just couldn’t afford.
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A Digital Handbag is Still a Handbag, It Seems
This isn’t new, anymore than buying luxury goods as an investment - and keeping them in storage - is new.
But it is on our minds of late, and for good reason.
Just two weeks ago, Hermès won a landmark court case against artist Mason Rothschild in which it was held that NFTs are subject to intellectual property claims from those who hold IP rights over the thing they depict or represent.
This is very good news for luxury goods makers who want to ensure control of their iconic designs, as well as for artists who were finding their work digitally absconded with by newly styled 'digital artists’, some of whom were likely genuinely trying to express themselves, and many of whom were simply profiteers and thieves.
The article quotes the CEO of a virtual reality (VR) fashion platform as saying, “This will probably be followed by brands jumping into the web3 game a bit earlier than planned, ensuring their own, authentic brand identity is being properly represented, telling their own story through virtual experiences.”
We agree. And we also agree with those in the industry who believe that allowing people’s digital avatars to carry around a digitally authentic Louis Vuitton handbag is more likely to cause some of those folks to want to mirror that behavior in real life.
For many people, their digital avatar is a more perfect version of their identity, glossing over the many errors and inefficiencies introduced by real life. So it is not a far cry to imagine a situation where a student has no interest in visiting the spice markets of Marrakech, while carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag, until such time as doing so is a reference back to something they did in their digital life - and therefore, a thing they can identify with. A sort of meta-reference; fan service to themselves.
And lifestyles can certainly be propped up on the digital side before reality catches up. We already know that there is a problem of established and wannabe “influencers” faking wealth and status just to try and bootstrap their own digital image.
Apparently they aren’t heeding the meme-famous advice of Canadian politician Norm Kelly, who advised people, “Don’t go broke trying to look rich.” But for many, the messy affairs of real life are fine, so long as it gets ‘cleaned up’ for digital existence.
Life is just the sausage factory, and the image is what matters.
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“We Paper Over the Cracks”
“Life is just the sausage factory, and the image is what matters.”
Also not a new concept: just ask Queen Elizabeth in her “Jubilee” scene from The Crown. Her sister, Princess Margaret, explains that the Queen must go through with the whole show because the façade isn’t just an important thing - it’s everything.
This philosophy makes British royalty an interesting case study. They have been living an “influencer” life for their whole existence, albeit with much more credible displays of luxury. They may not have to make daily videos about spa treatments or use idiotic hashtags (#blessed), but they do use every action - and every lack of action - to send or reinforce messages.
That is a hard kind of life, and it comes with a sense of repression - of being constrained from living the life you want, and loving the person you want. It can lead to results that are awkward, profound, and damaging. (Ask this royal, this royal, or this royal for details.)
Or ask yourself, or the people around you. How did they fare in COVID-19 lockdowns? Do they feel seen and represented in modern society? How about in politics? And amidst the call to never return to a ‘normal’ 9-to-5 commuting and office life, talk to the people who want or need it back. How do they feel about what a warping in real life did to their reality?
The fact is, we’ve been papering over cracks for a long time, and our period of disruption is marked by a thousand different compromises that people are increasingly less willing to make. And it is hardly just the royals busting out; take a gander at how fashion industry mavens are trying to work out the zaniness and contradictory behaviors of Generation Z.
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The Price of Certainty
What do you do in the face of such chaos, when it is the chaotic who are your prime customers?
More or less the same thing that humans have always done in the face of uncertainty: deal with it poorly and make bad trade-offs to get rid of it however you can. And that brings us back to NFT handbags and the meaning of life.
In late 2021, Women’s Wear Daily published an interview with Quynh Mai, the founder and CEO OF Moving Image & Content. She had many profound things to say about Generation Z, including the thoughts below:
NFTs and Crypto fit neatly into the digital world that Gen Z is already comfortable with — where most of life’s interactions happen online like making friends through social, buying and selling goods through anonymous dealers online. They trust this digital world and see great value in it already, so do not hesitate to invest in NFTs as collectibles and Crypto as the currency of the internet.
Gen Z sees NFTs as extensions of the things that they already value online — their identities (Instagram and TikTok accounts), their reputation (where they sit on a Leaderboard) and their most prized possessions (a diary of their lives through photos and posts). NFTs provide them with the opportunity for true, verifiable ownership, something unattainable in every other form of the digital asset to date. This ownership also provides them with a financial opportunity to sell their NFTs on secondary markets at a profit, a new-world version of what previous generations experienced selling physical baseball cards or comic books.
There are entire PhD theses to be written about just small sections of this quote, such as the statement that “most of life’s interactions happen online,” or the fact that NFTs are “extensions” of their “identities…reputation…most prized possessions,” but also convenient in that they can be sold like baseball cards or comic books.
If you are not a collector, you may not understand how someone could compare something as flimsy and ephemeral as baseball cards or comic books to things as fundamental as identity. The mistake would be to see those things as cheap, or a watering down of the more important elements such as reputation and identity.
But that’s backwards thinking, and we find a perfect demonstration of our point in a paper from 1991.
The title is Collecting in a Consumer Culture, and while the entire thing is worth a read, we will focus specifically on these lines:
“Asked what things they would save in a fire. people we have interviewed commonly cite a number of "special" objects including photographs, keepsakes, heirlooms, and valuables. it is no coincidence that many of these objects constitute collections that have been purposively and systematically gathered and preserved. For, unlike ordinary objects of consumption, collections tend to take on an importance and character comparable in some respects to that of family members. Collected objects are often anthropomorphized, fetishized, and personified until they define and occupy the little world of an intimate family in which the collector reigns as an absolute sovereign.”
An absolute sovereign.
Apologies to the royal family, but the authors have it right. In the digital existence, curation of identity and experience can become everything, and if you don’t like who challenges that curation, you simply cut them out of your worldview.
But if anyone’s avatar can have a LV handbag, what’s to be done? After all, for many people, status over others is a key part of their identity. That’s why luxury goods makers need to fight for their rights in the digital world; because it is very possible that someday, the Metaverse is the only place where new Louis Vuitton handbags will even be released, and their future as a company depends on building that same relevance and cachet they have enjoyed in the physical world.
But it’s also funny that, for those with an NFT-backed virtual handbag, owning a real one will be all the more flashy and ironic. The cosplay community is very forgiving of homemade costumes, but for the fashion set, the ability to dress up in real life as your digital self only matters if you nail the details.
If that’s an NFT-proven LV bag on your avatar’s arm, you’d better be able to prove the one in your hands is real, too. And now LV is able to sell two NFTs instead of one. Not a bad gig.
Of course, we don’t mean to just pick on one company or retail category. NFTs will help to prove other things as well, like whether you really did or did not go to that Harry Styles concert, really had a certain brand of orange juice for breakfast, or - for that matter - have done anything else “real” in the Proof of Anything Era.
At some point, it may just be too much for some people. Making sure you’ve got the right paperwork for your digital self. Making sure you’ve got the right paperwork for your real-life self. Jumping back and forth between the affairs of the two worlds, paying twice or more sometimes for something that started as an online affect.
Better to just disappear into the Metaverse and be done with it. Real life is a luxury you cannot afford.