Assemblage in anonymity. Meanings of the action on NFT: CryptoPunks case study

Abstract

This paper looks forward in investigating NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) Communities through the case study of the CryptoPunks collection as deterritorialized assemblages with a clear ethic posture towards market (financial and art) decentralization, taking into account the interpretations of the meaning(s) of the action, having a view on philosophical theory close to the Crypto community as well as the perception of users and experts on the matter. The investigations works on the direction of finding said meaning through an analysis on the semantic and pragmatic levels, distinguishing between discourses and the practices carried out within the Blockchain, with a particular focus on the Ethereum Network to make emphasis on the mechanisms which allow said assemblage.
Additionally, I hope to draw the importance of the human-inhuman interaction in the sociological field, focusing on the possibilities of sociability which are established semantically as well as pragmatically in the technical and technological advancements, taking into account our current time of growing automation and algorithmization of interactions.
As a conclusion, we find that ethicity is distributed differentially between the semantic and pragmatic moments, as foundational discourses and the uses taken by the collectionists are far off in their meaning. Such discourses usually go in favour of decentralization of the economy in the privilege of heteronomic and heterarchical forms of constructing value and subjectivities, meanwhile, the uses taken by the collectionists usually undergo in the meaning of maximizing investments which were pushed onto the digital assets tied to NFT contracts, and as such, the community is bonded as far as the speculation of a collection maintains its upward momentum. The community, gestated as an assemblage on its motivation for speed, deterritorialization and decoding is captured by users co-opted by the discourses of capital as an Entrepreneur of himself, seeing digital art assets as maximizers of capital, locking into a loop much like stock market practices.