We live in a time of great change and there's been a lot of people out there doing a lot of soul-searching lately. It's not just for NFTs - but crypto as a whole - the tech industry as a whole - and the country as a whole. If you're feeling "lost" right now, you are definitely not alone. It's a symptom of broken systems finally arriving at its logical conclusions - the desperate attempts at delaying the inevitable, as they may.
A few people may have gotten concerned at my post here (https://teia.art/objkt/881205/) where I announced that over the next few months I will stop activities on teia.cafe and find a "real" job. Truth be told, I'm actually kind of looking for it - I live minimally enough to where I don't need to find a very high-paying one, and I can't really imagine work more stressful than trying to run your own startup that has the combined volatility of a small business, tech, and art all at once. It was always an insane endeavor, if you really thought about it for any period of time. 🤪
A job would allow me to follow own advice of dollar cost averaging into crypto in anticipation of the next cycle to come - something that I've always recommended to people, especially if they were new to investing. That's how I initially made my money from the Ethereum ICO, in fact - had I been day trading or trying to time the markets during the 2013-2020 years, I probably wouldn't gotten wiped before it even started. Perhaps there's the perception among artists that giving up on your passions is somehow "losing", but I never really thought of it that way - I never minded working, and some of my happiest times in my life were when I was gainfully employed while I pitched into my nest-egg of high-risk assets like crypto where I had something to look forward to, long-term. Best of both worlds, really.
Even as a musician, the "purpose" I see in creativity diverges pretty far from how art is typically conceived in the West - I don't see self-expression as all that important, and my goal for creating something has more to do with the execution of an idea, or the creation of new forms that are "useful". To me, art has a magical ability to solve cultural and psychological problems, as it did for me when I was younger, where it taught me the importance of practice, discipline, and the ability to work with others in group settings - something that is very difficult to teach from books or classrooms alone. Though less popular, in previous years I was able to carve a niche around that philosophy by combining the creativity of artists with the problem-solving mentality of engineers in tech, but the industry has steadily progressed towards irrationality over time, which I see as self-destructing now, led by its own short-sightedness and greed.
As with the original post, I will once again say that this is not a goodbye - the whole reason why I'm looking elsewhere is so that I can protect my investments and not have to dip into it just to pay for day to day expenses. If I really had lost faith, I would have sold it off and leave quietly, as most people tend to do. I think that my initial predictions and hunches are still correct - just that I underestimated how long it would take before people took notice to what was actually going on. So the next strategy is to simply survive and sustain - then wait. The markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, as they say - and that's basically what happened in a nutshell.
But with a small group of people taking the right actions and paying attention to the right things, things could potentially turn around - maybe even very quickly. Here I'm going to lay them out very clearly - at least from my perspective of how I think things are going to turn out. All of these things are logical conclusions that I see as more or less inevitable - but the greatest uncertainty is the time it takes for people to catch up to the present. "The future" is an abstract idea that doesn't actually exist - there is only the present (reality) and our primitive brains trying to catch up to whatever that is, after all.
AI Psychosis: The Socio-Economic Delusion of Artificial Intelligence
Why does AI products - despite decades of development and billions poured into it - still get even simple things wrong? As technologies, language models and machine learning have gotten quite sophisticated in recent years, but the problem isn't actually with the models themselves - the problem lies in where it's pulling its data from.
Consider a common scenario: something on your computer isn’t working, and you turn to the internet for a fix. As you dig through forums and support pages, you quickly discover that most of the information out there is either contradictory—with users arguing over what the “real” solution actually is—or hopelessly outdated, left to gather dust because customer service teams have long since stopped keeping their documentation current. The AI absorbs this information, tells the user the wrong thing and wastes their time, the user gets angry and tells them they're wrong, and the AI responds to them "You Are Absolutely Correct!", then gives them another "solution", which also may or may not be correct - a dice roll guised as "intelligence", that is not that much different from gambling, in many ways.
If this interaction feels familiar, it's because that's how the system is designed right now, and that is the best it can do. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. Not all of the hype behind AI is completely unfounded, but unless there is a significant push to clean up the data layers on the internet itself, it will always be sub-par. There was a push towards "clean data" back in the "Big Data" eras of Silicon Valley to do exactly this, but unfortunately the movement didn't get anywhere. (Probably because in order to do that, the industry would have to acknowledge the importance of IP/copyright, which they did not want to do.)
So that's one reason why the current AI industry will not get anywhere, and why it has been set up to fail from the very start. (It's a marginal improvement to search, but not worth the trillions of valuations it has right now - not even close.) The other part of why it's unsustainable is because unlike previous tech cycles where investment was sourced by equity, AI investments have been largely been fueled by low-interest debt - the hype cycle in 21' is where it came into fruition, where the crypto industry got distracted from its original aspirations and turned itself into a casino. When people got bored, they moved onto the next shiny thing - AI - but in a lot of ways what's happening now is pretty much the same as a few years ago in crypto.
Both the crypto and AI industries have the problem of having no companies or platforms that are profitable - many of them are not even trying - yet, somehow, they seem to be everywhere. Where is that money coming from? Debt - which is also simultaneously adding to the US deficit and devaluing the dollar itself. When you look at it from that lens, it starts to look very scary, considering how entangled all of it has become in other areas of society, even beyond tech. And what have we gotten in return from all of that, really? While they pour billions into it, it still fails to solve basic IT problems - which you would think would be the technology's forte at this point.
Though you won't find too many executives who will openly admit to this - but a big reason why a lot of places are pushing the AI thing very hard is because during the pandemic years (where loans were cheap and the government was printing lots of money as an "emergency response") they overhired and needed an excuse to lay off the "overhires". They are also tired of paying developers massive salaries ($3-500k+) and have been looking to "reset" the labor markets in their favor. Building things that "actually work" is a secondary concern for many, in other words. That’s what makes the marketing around it so bizarre—it often comes off as openly hostile toward everyday people, with messages like “you will be automated away.” Unsurprisingly, the public reaction has been equally adversarial. I’ve been through my fair share of tech hype cycles, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this. The negativity and cynicism baked into the messaging feel unprecedented—and not in a good way.
So that's the "AI Psychosis" phenomenon in a nutshell. The current trajectory is straight on-course towards a financial disaster - not a matter of if, but when. The question is how bad will it be, and how can it recover?
How To Turn All of This Around
This is where blockchain technology comes in. It has the potential to clean up the internet's data layers—offering a system that is public, transparent, immutable, and verifiable in ways that traditional (and often litigious) databases and servers simply cannot match. During the Big Data era, countless companies scraped and hoarded information at breakneck speed. But without proper quality controls in place, most of that data is now worth very little—arguably less than nothing, especially when you consider the massive amounts of false information and errors embedded within it.
So right now, a wholesale migration to a blockchain-based system—which, by definition, could be considered a form of NFTs—is long overdue. Such a shift would serve a dual purpose: cleaning up messy, unreliable data while also protecting usage rights, which in turn would reward quality contributions and penalize the spread of misinformation.
Of course, pulling this off at scale—especially within large, change-resistant institutions—has always been an ambitious undertaking. It's even more challenging in an era where transparency isn't just unpopular, but often met with outright hostility. Still, the solution itself has always been clear. And I'm certainly not the first to propose it.
For Tezos in particular, this puts them in an interesting position, one rife with opportunity if they're able to see and capitalize on it, eventually. Though the NFT markets themselves have shrunk considerably in recent years, the fact that it is now known as the defacto "art chain" in the Web3 world is nothing to scoff at because it means that despite all of the scams, ponzis, rugpulls and hacks that have plagued the industry in recent years, it has managed to retain the trust and usage of the arts communities, at least in regards to its infrastructure.
Artists are skeptics by nature because they are always the ones receiving the short ends of most deals out there - they have (myself included) found some comfort in the systems on Tezos where there is an emphasis on security and reliability, almost to an extreme degree. That does say something - and that is what is really needed, if the "Web3" world wants to be taken seriously and used in applications of actual consequence. The question remains if the community is willing to double-down on it or let it fall into obscurity after giving up - but that's yet to be seen. (Layoffs are hard but given how tiny arts budgets are compared to everything else, it should be seen as a bargain, really.) I would like to think that there will still be a few people left keeping the torch alive until the next cycle, though.
We already have a good example of the AI/crypto integration thanks to NoRulesJustFeels' AI-generated updates on our blogging system here (https://teia.art/objkt/881281). The technologies used here aren't all that different from what is commercially available right now, but what makes this "work" is the fact that its pulling its data from TEIA's ledger records directly - which makes the quality of its information high, and very resistant to tampering as a whole.
So there you have it. With on-chain copyright registrations already built into the platform, the world's biggest technology problems have already been solved here on TEIA, which was always the best hope NFTs had at mainstream adoption, regardless of its obscurity. We won't claim that we were the first to come up with these features but it's pretty safe to say that we're the only place where all of these things have been integrated into one place, with an active community that is serious about their work beyond mere speculation - something that we hope will be recognized in the long run. The question right now is if the world is ready for it yet - I have a feeling that after the AI bubble pops, we'll start to see a similar "soul searching" amongst that crowd as well. Maybe then, people will start to take another look. But it's still a hard sell amongst the hype crowd that's still looking for easy answers and quick gains - and it'll probably take some time for reality to sink in.
In the meantime, life goes on. Even when the money was good, I never tried to time the market and I'm not about to start now. Sometimes all you can do is do what you can, and wait. 🙏