UK economy to suffer £700bn output loss due to Covid and Brexit, thinktank warns

NIESR says UK facing worse permanent damage than other rich nations due to ‘poor Covid response’

Containers at the Port of Felixstowe, Suffolk. The thinktank said the UK would suffer from a lingering impact on world trade caused by the pandemic and Brexit. Photograph: James Veysey/REX/Shutterstock


Richard Partington Economics correspondent
@RJPartington
Mon 10 May 2021 

Britain’s economy is on track to suffer more than £700bn of lost output caused by Covid-19, made worse by the government’s mishandling of the health emergency and Brexit, one of the UK’s leading economics thinktanks has warned.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) said the UK was facing worse permanent damage than other rich nations due to a “poor Covid-19 response” from Boris Johnson’s government.

Despite an improving growth outlook thanks to rapid progress with the Covid-19 vaccination programme, it said the scale of the UK’s economic collapse last year – the worst annual performance for 300 years – meant Britain was further behind other major economies such as the US and Germany.

The UK’s oldest independent economic research institute said the level of GDP was on track to be almost 4% lower in 2025 than it would have been without the pandemic. Equivalent to £1,350 per person a year, it said the cumulative loss of economic output would be worth £727bn over the five-year period.

“While all countries have seen downgrades in their economic outlooks, those which have handled Covid-19 well are likely to find their long-term growth prospects downgraded by less,” it said.

In a critical report for the government, NIESR said a decade of austerity-driven cuts overseen by the Conservatives had left the UK’s health and social care capacity in a “weak state” as the pandemic struck.

Highlighting research showing the UK had among the lowest numbers of hospital beds and doctors per person among advanced nations, it said: “Too little spending previously is likely to have contributed to 2020’s high Covid-19 mortality rates.”

The UK economy shrank by 9.8% last year, the worst performance in the G7, as the government delayed the launch of lockdown and took longer to relax measures, as well as due to higher rates of social spending in the UK than other nations.

However, NIESR said improvements in public health prospects from rapid progress administering the coronavirus vaccine and the lifting of lockdown measures would support a recovery in consumer confidence and a strong rebound in economic activity this summer.

The thinktank said it expected the economy to grow by 5.7% this year and to recover its pre-pandemic level at the end of 2022, in a sharp upgrade from its previous estimates for growth of 3.4%. It is however significantly below forecasts from the Bank of England for a recovery to pre-crisis levels by the end of this year, with growth of 7.25% in 2021 – the fastest expansion since the second world war.

It said the UK’s open economy would suffer from a lingering impact on world trade caused by the pandemic, while “remaining negative consequences of Brexit” would also have an impact.

Dr Hande Küçük, deputy director at NIESR, said: “Beyond short-term optimism, the outlook for the UK economy is less certain given the economic and social challenges that existed before the pandemic. Our analysis at sectoral, regional, and household level shows that despite the rhetoric about ‘building back better’ existing inequalities could be exacerbated by the pandemic and an uneven recovery.”

Biden urges employers to boost wages but warns workers they’ll lose unemployment pay if they reject jobs

PUBLISHED MON, MAY 10 2021
Jacob Pramuk@JACOBPRAMUK

CNBC

KEY POINTS

President Joe Biden said his administration will distribute more coronavirus relief funds as it aims to help companies hire more workers.

While he urged companies to boost wages and make workplaces safe to entice workers, Biden also said people who do not take an offer for a “suitable job” would lose unemployment benefits unless they have a specific coronavirus-related concern.

Job growth slowed in April, and Biden disputed the notion that a $300 per week enhanced unemployment benefit deterred Americans from taking jobs.


US President Joe Biden speak about the Covid-19 response 

and the vaccination program in the State Dining Room 

of the White House on May 4, 2021.
Nicholas Kamm | AFP | Getty Images

President Joe Biden on Monday urged U.S. companies to boost pay for workers as he outlined the steps his administration is taking to spur hiring after disappointing job creation in April.

The president said his administration will distribute more of the coronavirus relief funds included in Democrats’ $1.9 trillion aid plan as reopening businesses search for employees.


The federal government will start allowing state and local governments to apply for part of a $350 billion relief pool, push to streamline distribution of aid to child care centers and begin sending grants to 16,000 struggling restaurants and bars, among other efforts.




Biden said the White House does not “see much evidence” that the $300 per week federal unemployment benefit in place until September has deterred people from taking jobs, adding that “Americans want to work.”

VIDEO 09:53

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Colonial Pipeline cyberattack and economic recovery

Even so, he said, anyone “offered a suitable job must take the job or lose their unemployment benefits” unless they have specific concerns related to Covid-19.

The president put the onus on employers who have accepted federal relief to offer good pay, protect workers from the virus and encourage vaccination so Americans feel comfortable taking jobs.

“My expectation is that as our economy comes back, these companies will provide fair wages and safe work environments,” Biden said in remarks at the White House. “And if they do, they’ll find plenty of workers.”

Read more of CNBC’s politics coverage:
Infrastructure plan should cost up to $800 billion, McConnell says ahead of BIden meeting
Largest U.S. fuel pipeline remains mostly closed days after cyberattack with no timeline for reopening

U.S. nonfarm payrolls grew by 266,000 in April, well below expectations of about 1 million jobs created, as the unemployment rate ticked up to 6.1%. The report Friday raised questions about how companies can entice workers in a reopening economy and what role the government should play in encouraging hiring.

Biden downplayed the slow growth, saying the economy is “moving in the right direction.”

Yet the president has said the disappointing data showed the need to increase vaccinations against Covid-19 and pass his infrastructure and economic recovery plans. Democrats have said parts of his proposals, including provisions to expand affordable child care and paid leave, will make it easier for parents to accept jobs.

Increasing child care capacity, reopening schools and boosting the rate of vaccinations should help to mitigate hiring issues, Biden said Monday.

Republicans and business organizations have questioned the need for the $300 per week enhanced federal unemployment benefit as much of the country prepares to lift economic restrictions. The payments were extended as part of Democrats’ $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package.

Critics of the enhanced benefits contend they discourage Americans from taking jobs that may not pay them as much as unemployment insurance does. A lack of child-care options for job seekers and safety concerns as the virus lingers have likely played a major role, as well.

A White House fact sheet released Monday said “workers may not turn down a job due to a general, non-specific concern about COVID-19 and continue to receive benefits.” People could reject an offer and keep receiving unemployment if they have a child at home who cannot go to school due to the virus, or if an employer does not comply with federal or state health standards, among other reasons, the administration said.

As Democrats draft economic recovery legislation and Biden prepares for negotiations with Republicans, the president’s plans may not get through Congress for weeks or months. The White House may also have to scale back the proposals to win approval in the Capitol, even under special budget rules that would require only Democratic votes.

Another Biden priority that could make employers boost wages — a $15-per-hour federal minimum wage — did not make it into the coronavirus aid package earlier this year. A standalone bill to boost the pay floor faces long odds of Senate approval.

Mark Drakeford promises to be 'radical' after Labour re-election in Wales

16 & 17 YEARS OLDS GOT TO VOTE

By Heather Graham

Wales First Minister Mark Drakeford elbow bumps newly elected MS Labour candidates Elizabeth Buffy Williams, left, and Sarah Murphy

MARK Drakeford has vowed to be “radical” and “ambitious” in government as his party remains in power in Wales.

Labour has equalled its best ever Senedd election result by winning 30 seats – just one short of a majority – though it did not take any of the four regional seats declared yesterday.


With the final results in, the Welsh Conservatives have 16 seats, while Plaid Cymru have 13 and the LibDems have one.

Drakeford can now choose whether to form a minority government or invite members of other parties into a Labour-led administration, giving the party greater control of the Senedd.


Welsh Labour put the “extraordinary set of results” down to Drakeford’s leadership during the pandemic, which has seen the First Minister’s cautious and careful approach go down well with voters.

Asked if he planned to continue his cautious brand of politics during a new administration, Drakeford said: “Well, absolutely as far as coronavirus is concerned. The pandemic has not gone away. A government I lead will continue to follow the science ... that does mean doing things in a way that continues to keep Wales safe.


“But on other matters, our manifesto is a radical manifesto with a host of ideas that are ambitious for Wales.

“I’ll be very keen to ensure that we give that the most powerful sense of momentum behind it to get those things happening here in Wales.”

Drakeford returned to Labour’s offices in Cardiff for reserved celebrations after Friday night’s constituency results gave the party 27 seats.

He visited Porthcawl, Bridgend, yesterday afternoon to make a speech to party members.

Welsh LibDem leader Jane Dodds, who won a regional seat in Mid and West Wales, said she has yet to be approached by Drakeford to help form the next government.

She told BBC Radio Cymru: “I need to speak to other people within the party and we shall have to see.”

The Welsh Conservatives said they had secured the party’s “best ever result” in a Senedd election, winning 16 seats.

This included taking the Vale of Clwyd from Labour, and Brecon and Radnorshire from the LibDems.

Andrew RT Davies, Senedd leader for the Welsh Conservatives, said he was “delighted” to have secured those constituency seats as well as an increased number of seats on the regional list.

“It’s been an unconventional campaign and it’s clear incumbency and continuity has played a significant part,” Davies said.

He congratulated Drakeford and Welsh Labour on a successful campaign and said the election had been fought “in good spirit” by political parties across Wales.

Plaid Cymru now have 13 seats in the Welsh Parliament, though high-profile former leader Leanne Wood lost her Rhondda seat to Labour.

On her Facebook page, Wood said the result was “disappointing” but that her team could “hold our heads high in the knowledge that we ran a clean and honest campaign, we did not denigrate our opponents and we worked hard”.

Polling at the start of the campaign suggested Labour was facing its worst ever result and was at risk of winning as few as 22 of the Senedd’s 60 seats, a loss of seven from 2016, though later polls suggested a stronger showing.

Welsh Labour win stunning sixth victory in Welsh Parliament elections

THIS should have been the headline in all the newspapers in their reporting of the outcome of the Welsh elections. Instead, most of our rather lazy and London-centric media chose to report how Welsh Labour “hung on,” “failed to obtain a majority” or managed to “hold back a Tory onslaught.”

So let me put the record straight. It was a resounding and spectacular victory for Welsh Labour: our best result since the beginning of devolution.

At the start of the election campaign it was predicted we would suffer our worst ever results, possibly going as low as 22 seats. Nationalists and Tories gloated and predicted a Labour armageddon.

However, the outcome was totally different. We increased our number of seats from 29 to 30 — exactly half the total. Plaid Cymru former leader Leanne Wood lost Rhondda to Labour by two to one, and the Tories failed to make any significant dent in the so-called north-east Wales red wall.

Thirty seats might not seem a lot, but under our electoral system of 40 constituency and 20 party top-up seats, it is almost impossible for Labour to gain a majority. Labour has never obtained more than 30 seats, and even that only once.

Despite the electoral system, or perhaps because of it, we have nevertheless formed every government in Wales since the beginning of devolution 22 years ago.

To win exactly half the seats in the current political climate, post-Brexit, is a truly remarkable achievement, with increased majorities across Wales and former Brexit voters coming back in large numbers.

This has been a watershed moment for Welsh Labour, which has emancipated into a successful political movement and “brand” in its own right. Mark Drakeford will again be elected by the Parliament as First Minister and become the most senior Labour parliamentary figure in the UK.

So how is it that this proudly socialist, left-leaning politician, who was the only Welsh government minister to endorse Jeremy Corbyn, has risen to these political heights and become the most popular, best-recognised and respected Welsh politician in generations? How has Welsh Labour succeeded where others in the UK have failed?

The successful handling of the Covid pandemic in Wales has clearly played a part. Achieving the fastest vaccination rate in the whole of the UK, and in most of Europe, is one factor.

Mark’s ability to communicate the challenges and conflicts and to always steer a cautious but constructive course is another. On the streets during the election so many people came out of their homes to be photographed with him and to genuinely thank him for keeping them safe and for what he was doing for Wales. When has that happened to a politician before?

But it is more than that. Mark has built on the “clear red water” legacy of his Welsh Labour predecessors and enhanced the Welsh Labour “brand.” He has tapped into the underlying culture of Welsh radicalism and cultural identity with a message of confidence and hope, which contrasted starkly with the messages from opposition parties.

He has maintained and led a united party where Welsh Labour is a truly broad church, and the social partnership with the trade unions has built a solid foundation for what he openly describes as 21st-century socialism.

Covid of course has highlighted the benefits of devolution in a way that many previously did not understand. Standing up for Wales against some of the more reckless decisions of the Tories in Westminster when it was in Wales’s interest to do so has won over many voters.

He was able to build on a progressive Labour record in government. This included the investment of billions of pounds in new schools all over Wales through the imaginative 21st-century schools programme, developing programmes for investment in public transport and taking the railways into public ownership along with Wales’ only international airport, social partnership with the trade unions and businesses, historic levels of employment, creating over 100,000 apprenticeships, increased protection for tenants, animal welfare, organ-transplant legislation and much, much more.

A radical Welsh Labour manifesto for the election was one the party across Wales was able to unite behind. Progressive economic policy, investment, fair work and environmental protection created a political agenda that opposition parties found difficult to challenge. When people went out to vote, they liked what they heard and they knew what they were voting for, and that what was promised would be delivered.

There is much UK Labour can learn from Wales if they care to listen.

As the new Welsh Labour government is formed, the challenges ahead are immense: UK government austerity, NHS backlogs and economic recovery post-Covid. There are likely to be turbulent times ahead in Wales and the rest of the UK.

Although the issue of independence did not feature as a significant doorstep issue in the election, there is a growing undercurrent for change. Tory policies which are aimed at rolling back devolution and recentralising power in Downing Street will become an increasing source of conflict, not just in Wales but, as we have seen in recent months, in the regions of England.

Existing constitutional arrangements, such as they are, no longer work. Radical change is needed. The Welsh party now has a mandate for a radical federalist reform of the UK constitution: in effect, home rule.

The starting point is likely to be the creation of a Welsh constitutional convention to identify and build a consensus for change. Events in Scotland will almost certainly catalyse this process, but one thing is sure: Welsh Labour is no longer a junior partner to UK Labour. It has come of age. We have a radical agenda to implement and battles to fight — so get ready for a rollercoaster couple of years.

Mick Antoniw is the Senedd Member for Pontypridd.

THE MORNING STAR

Sheikh Jarrah: Facebook and Twitter silencing protests, deleting evidence

POSTED ON MAY 10, 2021 DIGITAL 

Facebook and Twitter are systematically silencing users protesting and documenting the evictions of Palestinian families from their homes in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem. We, the organisations listed below, demand Facebook and Twitter immediately stop these takedowns, reinstate affected content and accounts, and provide a clear and public explanation for why the content was removed.

Facebook and Twitter are systematically silencing users protesting and documenting the evictions of Palestinian families from their homes in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem. We, the organisations listed below, demand Facebook and Twitter immediately stop these takedowns, reinstate affected content and accounts, and provide a clear and public explanation for why the content was removed.

In the past days, people have taken to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to document and denounce Israeli police brutality and violent attacks by Jewish settlers against Palestinian activists and residents who are peacefully protesting against the imminent threat of being evicted from their homes.

In a rapid escalation, hundreds of posts and accounts documenting these violations were deleted on Instagram and Twitter. The scale of these content takedowns and account suspensions reported by users and documented by digital rights organisations is egregious and pronounced.

Facebook and Twitter have not provided any explanation to their users for these actions. Instagram, for instance, has removed hundreds of stories related to Sheikh Jarrah, including archived posts. The platforms’ arbitrary and non-transparent decisions constitute a serious violation of Palestinians’ fundamental rights including their right to freedom of expression, and their right to freedom of association and assembly online, which both Facebook and Twitter have pledged to honour in accordance with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Though work is being done to escalate these cases with Facebook and Twitter, timing is critical — users from Sheikh Jarrah have made it clear that without the world’s attention they would be in even more danger. We demand Facebook and Twitter immediately stop censoring and to reinstate the accounts and content of Palestinian voices. These companies must open an investigation into the takedowns, and transparently and publicly share the investigations.

The removed content and suspended accounts on both Instagram and Twitter are related to the documentation and reporting of what is happening in Sheikh Jarrah, as well as denouncing Israel’s policies of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and persecution. These violations are not limited to Palestinian users, but also affect activists around the world who are using social media to raise awareness about the grave situation in Sheikh Jarrah.

This latest spate of content takedowns is part of a wider pattern of consistent censorship of Palestinian and allied voices and systematic efforts to silence them, which civil society organisations have documented for years. Similar past cases related to takedown of Palestinian speech on these platforms have been attributed to requests by Israel’s Cyber Unit, an internet referral unit whose mission is to submit “voluntary” requests to social media companies for content removal.

The content coming from Sheikh Jarrah illustrates the sheer number and severity of human rights violations requiring digital documentation and media awareness. Social media platforms provide a crucial space for communities with no other recourse to make their demands for freedom, justice and dignity heard. Online spaces should be available for organisations, activists and human rights defenders to expose and document human rights violations on the ground. This can only work when platforms build transparent and coherent content moderation policies based on international human rights standards, and apply them in a consistent, transparent and equitable way.

We, the undersigned organisations, urgently call on Facebook and Twitter to:
Immediately open an investigation into those cases, as well as transparently and publicly share reasons behind takedown of accounts and posts related to Sheikh Jarrah;
Immediately reinstate all accounts and content currently taken offline in breach of international standards on freedom of expression;
Provide transparency on the decision-making processes involved in content takedowns related to Palestine;
Publicly commit to resist government and court orders in breach of international standards on freedom of expression;
Publish detailed data on requests submitted by the Israeli Cyber Unit including numbers of complaints received, content removal, account suspensions and other content restrictions, together with details on the category of content that was removed and/or reinstated.
Commit to the baseline principles set forth in the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation.

Signatories

7amleh

Access Now

ARTICLE 19

Mnemonic

SMEX

INSMnetwork – Iraq

Pen Iraq

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Friends of Sabeel North America

The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP)

Ranking Digital Rights

MPower Change

Action Center on Race & the Economy (ACRE)

Jewish Voice for Peace

MediaJustice

Masaar-Technology and Law Community

United Methodists’ Holy Land Task Force

Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR)

Taraaz

Center for Constitutional Rights

MILEN – Media and Information Literacy Expert Network

Free Speech on Israel

Jewish Network for Palestine

Sanders Accuses McConnell of Hypocrisy and Corruption in Scathing KY Speech

Sen. Bernie Sanders said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and the GOP are motivated more by corporate money than providing help to the American people.BILL PUGLIANO, ROD LAMKEY-POOL / GETTY IMAGES

In a rally for the progressive movement in Kentucky on Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) criticized Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) for “working overtime” for corporations and the wealthy, while working to “undermine” the lower and middle classes.

“I’m here today because Mitch McConnell is working overtime to represent the needs of the wealthy and the powerful and to undermine the needs of working families,” Sanders said, while drawing attention to McConnell’s leadership in opposing proposals like the American Rescue Plan, a $15 federal minimum wage, universal child care, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the For the People Act.

“The question, I think, that people should be asking is, ‘why is Mitch McConnell doing what he does?’” in blocking legislation that would improve the lives of working Americans while working to help the wealthy, Sanders said. “The answer is pretty simple: follow the money.”

Sanders pointed out that McConnell often receives large sums of money from Wall Street, health care companies, pharmaceutical companies, the National Rifle Association and fossil fuel companies. These groups oppose proposals like raising the minimum wage and reducing the cost of pharmaceutical drugs, among many things, he points out.

“Mitch McConnell’s top campaign contributors want to do exactly the opposite of what the American people want and need. And so does Mitch McConnell,” said Sanders.

Sanders went on to criticize McConnell’s hypocrisy in whingeing over government spending for the working class while working to provide tax breaks for the rich.

“This I will never forget: On New Year’s Eve, Mitch McConnell blocked legislation I was offering to provide working class Americans with a $2,000 direct payment because, get this, he claimed it was ‘socialism for the rich,’” said Sanders.

“In Mitch McConnell’s world, if you are a multi-millionaire campaign contributor, it’s okay to receive a $1.4 billion tax break,” as the Koch family received as a result of Republican tax cuts in 2017. “But if you are a working-class person, apparently, it’s not acceptable to get the help you so desperately need,” Sanders said. “If you are a teacher or a construction worker who makes $75,000 a year, a $2,000 direct payment is, according to McConnell, ‘socialism for the rich.’”

Sanders pointed out that the ideology of the GOP as a whole is not actually about limiting government, as they claim — rather, it’s about who can help them raise more money on the campaign trail.

“The difference in ideology between Senator McConnell and myself, between the Republican Party and the progressive movement, is not a question of big government versus small government,” the senator went on. “It’s a question of whose interests the government represents. It’s a question of whether you fight for the needs of the wealthy and large corporations who fund your campaigns, or the working families of our country.”

By contrast, Sanders said, the progressive movement is fighting for the interests of the working classes, who have suffered during the pandemic.

“What I want to do now — which, I think, as a nation, we don’t do enough — is to simply compare Senator McConnell’s ideology, his Republican ideology, his votes, his actions, and his vision for America with the progressive vision for America,” said Sanders. “And our vision is that the government should represent all of the people, not just the 1 percent. Our vision believes that the foundations of government should rest on the pillars of justice — economic justice, racial justice, social justice, environmental justice.”

“While tens of millions of Americans have been living in economic desperation, the wealthiest people in this country have become obscenely richer,” Sanders noted. “We have a worse level of income and wealth inequality today than we’ve had since the 1920s. In America today, two people now own more than the bottom 40 percent of our nation, while the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 92 percent.”

Indeed, economists have shown that the top 1 percent of households own a hugely disproportionate share of wealth in the U.S., and that share has continually been growing over many decades. A recent study showed that the billionaires’ profits from just the pandemic alone amount to over $1.6 trillion combined, or a growth of 55 percent in a little over a year.

“This is a pivotal moment in American history,” Sanders said. “In the coming months, we have a fundamental decision to make. Will we build a government, an economy and a society that works for all of us and not just the 1 percent? Or will we continue the drift towards oligarchy and authoritarianism in which a small number of incredibly wealthy and powerful billionaires own and control a significant part of the economy and exert enormous influence over the political life of our country?”

Paris court tries anti-racism activist for statue attack

ASSOCIATED PRESS | Monday, May 10, 2021 

AP
A worker from Paris’ City Hall cleans the statue of Jean-Baptiste Colbert in Paris on June 23, 2020.

PARIS — A French activist for Black rights went on trial in Paris on Monday for defacing a statue of a historical figure from France’s colonial, slave-trading past, calling the protest a political act to denounce deep-seated racism.

Franco Lollia said that rather than vandalize the statue, he improved it by spraying “state Negrophobia” in red paint on its pedestal.

The statue outside parliament honors Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a 17th-century royal minister who helped author rules governing slaves in France’s overseas colonies. Among other cruelties, Colbert’s notorious “Black Code” allowed for slaves to be branded, have their ears cut off and be executed for escape attempts.

Lollia told the court that, in his view, Colbert committed crimes against humanity. He said celebrating Colbert with a statue outside the National Assembly shows that the French state “is viscerally Negrophobic even today” and that the statue’s presence is “spitting in the face of all people who look like me.”

Lollia, who is Black, called the trial “an insult.”

“I am sad to see that history seems to be repeating itself and our voices are still not heard,” he said. “I am really disappointed that the justice system is still so blind.”

The trial coincided with France’s annual commemoration of the abolition of slavery. Lollia noted that the day isn’t marked with a national holiday, dismissing it as “a bone for a dog” that fails to adequately commemorate the horrors inflicted on millions of slaves. French President Emmanuel Macron marked the day of remembrance with a wreath-laying and a minute of silence at a Paris monument symbolizing broken chains.

Inside the courtroom, Lollia’s defense team put France on trial, detailing and denouncing centuries of colonial atrocities. They argued that in the wake of the worldwide wave of fury galvanized by the killing a month earlier of George Floyd, Lollia shone a necessary light on slavery and Colbert’s role.

AP
Franco Lollia, an activist from a group called the Anti-Negrophobia Brigade, arrives at the Paris courthouse on Monday.

Calling slavery “the greatest injustice in the history of humanity,” defense lawyer Guy Florentin said the paint on the statue represented “the blood of victims demanding reparations.”

“There was no degradation, it was just a bit of paint,” he said. “I would have left it as it was.”

The sweat-top and face mask that Lollia wore to the trial both had the words “Anti-Negrophobia Brigade” printed on them. The back of his T-shirt described “Negrophobia” as a “weapon of mass destruction that doesn’t admit its name” and said: “Let’s arm ourselves to the hilt to fight it.”

The judge said video footage of the graffiti attack showed him hurling paint at the statue and spray-painting its base.

“It was a political act,” Lollia said. “It wasn’t a degradation. It was a contribution. It was even an improvement.”

The charge of defacing property is punishable by a fine or community service. The prosecutor asked for a fine of $970. The judge said she would deliver her verdict on June 28.

Lollia’s lawyers argued that he acted in self-defense. His attorney Georges-Emmanuel Germany said the judge should consider France’s past behavior as “a criminal state” in weighing Lollia’s act.

“You are not only the judge of the accused,” the attorney said. “You are also the judge of the behavior of the victim” — meaning the French state.

Speaking outside the courtroom, Lollia said France’s colonial past is still feeding racial discrimination.

“Colbert is a major figure of this colonial past, this past where Black people were not recognized as human beings,” he said.

“The system itself is Negrophobic from the moment it doesn’t put into question the history,” he said. “France is capable of healing from its Negrophobia and from its state racism in general, but the French state must learn to face its history, and not only part of the history it likes.”

Indonesia says powerful underwater wave likely sunk submarine

Navy dismisses speculation of human error, involvement of foreign vessel

People throw flowers and petals with the names of the sunken KRI Nanggala-402 submarine crew members from a boat in sea near Labuhan Lalang, Bali, Indonesia, on Monday. © Reuters

ERWIDA MAULIA, Nikkei staff writer

April 27, 2021 

JAKARTA -- Indonesia's navy on Tuesday said that last week's fatal submarine sinking was likely caused by an underwater phenomenon known as an "internal solitary wave."

Officers said that differences in the density of waters off Bali and in the nearby Lombok Strait may have triggered a "massive movement" strong enough to pull down the submarine in seconds.

Iwan Isnurwanto, commander of the Navy Staff and Command School, said the presence of the wave around the location of the submarine at the time of the accident last Wednesday was confirmed from images produced by Japanese weather satellite Himawari 8.


"There was nothing that they could do, no time to do anything... if the sub was brought down by such a wave. It likely angled [downward], causing all the crew members to roll down [to the bottom of the vessel]," Isnurwanto told a news briefing at navy headquarters in Jakarta. "We have to do further investigation, but that is most likely what happened."

With large amplitudes that cause powerful currents, internal solitary waves are considered a major hazard to marine engineering and submarine navigation. They can impose unexpectedly large stresses on offshore oil rigs.

Naval officials said more surveys to detect potential internal solitary waves in Indonesia's waters will be needed to avoid similar incidents in future submarine operations.

Officials dismissed speculation about other possible causes. These included allegations of poor maintenance of the aging submarine, human errors, as well as a rumor circulating on social media that it had been shot by a foreign vessel.


The KRI Nanggala 402 is a German-built submarine that had been in service since 1981, and underwent a full refit in South Korea that was completed in 2012.

Muhammad Ali, assistant to the navy chief of staff, said the submarine had undergone regular checks, including its last "docking" last year, when the vessel was deemed seaworthy through September 2022.

He added all crew members on board the vessel were well trained, and it was not true that the submarine was over its crew capacity. The vessel was earlier reported to have a capacity of just 33 people, but Ali said that represented the number of beds available, and that subs operated by the navy commonly carried more than 50 personnel.

"[The rumor] that it had been shot by a passing foreign vessel is I think outrageous," Ali added. "We had many above-water ships during the time of the incident, and they have sonars, which could have detected an explosion if it happened."

The Nanggala vanished in the early hours of Wednesday while conducting a torpedo-firing exercise. The last detected signal from the vessel was from a depth of 850 meters, beyond its diving limit.

The last communication with the sub was at 4 a.m. on Wednesday. When the commander of the training task force tried to authorize the firing drill 25 minutes later, communication with the submarine could not be established. The vessel had been due to surface by 5:15 a.m. on Wednesday morning.

On Sunday, the Indonesian navy, with support from Singapore's MV Swift Rescue, a submarine support and rescue vessel, found large pieces of debris at a depth of 838 meters. The vessel was believed to have split into three major parts, including the ruptured main body, eroding all hopes that survivors would be found.

The navy said attempts to evacuate the sub and remains of the victims will continue, though it has not been decided how they were going to salvage the wreckage. The MV Swift could only lift smaller parts.

Navy deputy chief of staff Ahmadi Heri Purwono said Indonesia now has just four submarines to safeguard the vast archipelago. One, similar to the Nanggala, is also German built and has been in service for 40 years, and three newer ones were made in South Korea.

The navy said it was planning to procure a submarine rescue vessel following the incident.

But asked whether the purchase of more submarines will be accelerated, Purwono only said, "Let's pray we can have more submarines in the future."

What does digital art have to do with sustainability?

By Ben Soltoff

The artist beeple, aka Mike Winkelman, in early 2021 sold a series of digital pieces

 for $69 million, the highest price ever paid for digital art.

Beeple

Minutes before midnight March 22, two art collectors got into a heated bidding war at a charity auction for a climate organization. The auction was happening online, but it was eliciting the same staggering dollar amounts and tense drama of an in-person auction house.

The item in contention was a single picture of a futuristic scene. The bidding had already exceeded $5 million, but Justin Sun, a 30-year-old tech entrepreneur, kept getting outbid by just $50. Ultimately, Sun offered an even $6 million and the auction was over. Sold, to the cryptocurrency millionaire.

His prize was a digital drawing by the artist beeple, who just a couple weeks earlier had sold a series of pieces for $69 million, the highest price paid for digital art. The auction was benefitting digital advocacy organization Open Earth Foundation, which ended up raising a total of $6.6 million. Beyond raising funds, the foundation aimed to raise awareness about the potential for digital technologies to address climate change, as well as their potential negative impact.

“Obviously, we landed at the right place at the right time,” said Martin Wainstein, executive director of Open Earth Foundation.

Blockchain-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) recently have made a big splash in the art world and beyond. Fundamentally, they allow for the unique differentiation and ownership of digital goods. In addition to generating both headlines and confusion, NFTs have drawn attention to the high carbon footprint of certain blockchain applications. Cryptocurrency and digital art are riding high on the tech hype cycle right now, but the current conversation around NFTs raises a critical question for anyone seeking to use blockchains as a sustainability tool: Are blockchains bad for the planet? As with any tech tool, the short answer is that it depends.

Moving away from proof of work

Much of the perceived negative impact of blockchains comes from just two of them, Bitcoin and Ethereum. These platforms are home to the most widely used forms of cryptocurrency, which makes them the most widely used blockchains in the world.

"We now have a misconception that blockchains are equal to energy and climate impact. That misconception comes from the fact that the two most important blockchains do [have high impact]," Wainstein said.

Blockchains are, by nature, decentralized data records. They include information distributed across a wide network of servers. In order to maintain trust in the veracity of the data, the network needs some way to validate new information. Because every server in the network needs to accept that the new information is authentic, this feature is called a consensus mechanism. Bitcoin and Ethereum both use a consensus mechanism called proof of work, in which computers solve a bunch of complex math problems, and the first one to reach a correct answer adds the next piece of information to the chain. Solving the math problems comes down to processing power, so it uses a whopping amount of electricity.

We now have a misconception that blockchains are equal to energy and climate impact. That misconception comes from the fact that the 2 most important blockchains do [have high impact].

"Bitcoin has a huge and unsustainable energy-consuming pattern. It’s a monster, and we’ve got to stop it," Wainstein said.

There are two ways to lessen the impact of blockchains that use a proof of work consensus mechanism. The first is not to use them at all. Many blockchains use alternatives that are far less energy-intensive. For example, a proof of stake mechanism requires some sort of collateral to be put up (or staked) in order for a member of the network to add new information. Ethereum is already in the process of switching to a proof of stake model.

Many sustainability applications that rely on blockchain technology are already avoiding proof-of-work-based blockchains in favor of more planet-friendly alternatives.

"In most cases, those blockchains are using other kinds of consensus mechanisms where the energy consumption is just not a big deal," Jesse Morris, chief commercial officer of Energy Web, an organization that helps companies manage electricity with digital technologies.

Regen Network, a market for landowners to sell ecosystem services, is based on the public Cosmos platform, which uses proof of stake. IBM’s supply chain tracking efforts are based on a private blockchain called Hyperledger, which uses a mechanism called Byzantine Fault Tolerance.

"First focus on what it is you need to solve, then find the right blockchain for meeting that need," Wainstein advised.

A Paris Agreement for blockchain

The other way to lessen the impact of blockchains is to ensure that the energy used is completely renewable. On April 7, a coalition led by Energy Web announced the Crypto Climate Accord, modeled loosely on the Paris Agreement. The top-level goal of the accord is for all of the world’s blockchains to be powered by 100 percent renewables by 2025. Like the Paris Agreement, this broad pact is pathway-agnostic. It pushes parties to sign onto ambitious goals and then meet those goals in whatever way makes the most sense for them.

"What we’re trying to do here is not about a single company, we want the whole industry to go green as early as 2025," Morris said.

To make blockchains greener, the coalition plans to encourage the same strategies that have enabled tech giants such as Google and Microsoft to make commitments of 100 percent renewable energy for their data centers, such as power matching and smart load management.

"What the tech companies are doing is exactly what crypto can do," Morris said.

Where do NFTs fit in?

NFTs may seem tangential to blockchain’s sustainability applications, because they’re mostly being used for art sales right now. However, just like blockchain overall, the potential uses extend far beyond the initial starting point.

“Art is the first mainstream adoption of it, but there have been many, many instances of people building NFTS for all sorts of different applications,” said Joshua Bijiak, chief technology officer of Creol, a startup that offers blockchain-based carbon credits.

An NFT attests digitally to the unique properties of a given asset, and art is far from the only asset with unique properties. It might eventually be possible to generate an NFT associated with a specific good that indicates the precise energy mix being used at the time it was produced, distinguishing it from a similar good produced just a few hours later.

As with many blockchain solutions, there still needs to be some process to enter physical products into a digital system, but many sustainability assets already are traded entirely in online marketplace. For instance, carbon offsets. An NFT could be used to record the unique attributes of a carbon offset project, helping to address issues of double counting.

For the recent climate NFT auction, the organizers generated unique offsets from the Verra registry that were themselves NFTs. That’s why the team at Open Earth Foundation was enthusiastic about the auction, even before its $6.6-million windfall. It highlighted the promise of using blockchain, not just the peril.

"It’s empowering things that we couldn’t do before in all sectors: currency, art, carbon, the planet; and we’ll continue seeing that, there’s no doubt about it," Wainstein said.

WTH are NFTs? Here is the token, there is the Beeple....

76.23kWh per-transaction footprint... WTF, people?

Danny Bradbury 

Tue 4 May 2021 

In the art world this spring, there's just one phrase on everyone's facemasks: the non-fungible token (NFT). When artist Mike Winkelman sold a JPG embedded into a cryptocurrency token for $69m in Ether (he pocketed $53m of it) jaws hit floors. But what is an NFT, exactly, and should you care, or just roll your eyes and go about your business?
Three letters and a lot of theory

An NFT is a form of cryptocurrency token that has a unique identity. Bitcoins, litecoins, doge, ether, and most of the other hundreds of cryptocurrency tokens out there are fungible, like digital sausage meat. It doesn't matter which piece of a bitcoin lands in your wallet. The value lies in the general price of the asset at the time. In that way, it's a little like cash. Whether someone gives you this dollar bill or that one doesn't really matter.

Now, imagine that Sylvia Plath had written a poem on the dollar bill in your wallet, and you could prove its authenticity. The dollar would be worth much more, even if the poem itself could be reproduced elsewhere. It would gain unique value.

To replicate that in cryptocurrency, you need to make tokens unique. In 2018, the Ethereum cryptocurrency community did that with a standard called ERC-721. Now, people could digitally scrawl whatever they wanted to inside an Ethereum token. Winkelman (aka Beeple) embedded his 443,902,761 pixels in one, earning him just shy of 12 cents per pixel.

Beeple's is far from the first NFT. They date back to Cryptokitties and beyond, and there are platforms like OpenSea and Nifty Gateway (which sells Beeple's work) making money from them. But $69m for a JPG has a way of capturing the media's attention.

So NFTs are just another way of signing digital prints, then, and all this is just a bubble? Well, no and yes. Winkelman himself has said that NFT-based art collectibles are a massive bubble. But it hasn't stopped people trying to do more interesting things with them.

Matt Stephenson is one such person. Last month, the Columbia PHD and behavioural economist sold his own digital asset as an NFT: a polynomial smoothing graph. It was the result of his early research into a two decades-old piece of pseudoscience: the Shangri-La Diet. Professor Seth Roberts wrote the book on this diet after arguing that ingesting flavourless calories (such as extra-light olive oil) in between meals would program the brain to lower the 'set point' at which the body maintains weight.

It was pseudoscience because Roberts experimented on himself and didn't conduct peer-reviewed research. That doesn't mean the idea wasn't plausible. It gained traction, but never got the research it needed to prove or disprove it, explains Stephenson.

The problem is that the incentives just aren't there, he says, which is why so many ideas that might have some grounds for further research are ignored by academia. "It didn't get absorbed into a research stream of basic science that would preserve it," he tells us. "It also wasn't patentable. So nobody wanted to run the study."

He ran a rudimentary scientific study with crowdsourced respondents in 2018 to see if a more detailed study was worthwhile. "It looks promising enough based on the results of the study," he says. So he auctioned off a hash of the graphed study results as an NFT via OpenSea. It sold for $24,000, which is around a quarter of the amount he needs to run the more detailed replication study.

Ideally, Stephenson would like to see NFTs become an alternative incentive to fund scientific research into plausible ideas that fall through the cracks.
NFTs that compute

Some people envisage NFTs going beyond simply containing or pointing to collectibles. ERC-721 NFTs aren't just tokens. They're smart contracts. Rather than just representing a digital asset, they can run code, making them distributed blockchain-based programs. That enables people to encode rules around how a digital asset is used.

"You can control the access rights, earn rewards, or get paid by letting other people use your NFT to train or test their ML/AI algorithms," says Dragan Boscovic, a research professor at Arizona State University who founded its blockchain research lab.

"The only limit is your imagination," says Boscovic.

Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and blockchain software technology company ConsenSys, says he sees almost limitless opportunity in the kinds of things you can embed in an NFT.

Rather than storing a pre-made asset in an NFT or storing a pointer to it on an external storage system, a Consensys-based project called EulerBeats encodes the instructions to generate the art as a smart contract. The contract can create art and music from its own code directly on the Ethereum blockchain.

The project sold its second batch of 25 NFTs for at least 45 Ether (around $85,000) each at the end of March, with some fetching far more. Owners can then mint limited copies of each one and earn royalties from them.
Energy consumption

The blemish on this utopian landscape is energy usage. Ethereum still uses proof of work for its consensus mechanism, leading to what data scientist Alex De Vries' Digiconomist site says is a 76.23kWh per-transaction footprint.

"Ethereum's energy issues, which are non-trivial but not terrible, will disappear in nine to 12 months," asserts Lubin. That's because Ethereum 2.0 will use the more energy-efficient proof of stake mechanism. There are also existing PoS-based blockchains such as Charles Hoskinson's Cardano, which has native tokens in its ledger rules, so some have begun to use it for minting NFTs or making transfers. It appears to be working on an NFT standard.

For his part, Lubin is working on Palm, an NFT platform that will launch with a Damien Hirst NFT sale. Co-founded with others including David Heyman, who produced the Harry Potter movies, Palm will eventually use a small number of verifiers to slash energy usage to insignificant levels.

The Palm network, which will bridge to Ethereum, will also link to the Protocol Labs' Filecoin, which Lubin says will help to provide permanent decentralized storage for digital work on the Palm system.

The flurry of attention paid to NFTs will likely subside in time, and it remains to be seen how much of this will trickle down to those of us without wallets full of Ether. Tech luminaries like Jack Dorsey can flog tweets for millions, and you can pick up a certified unique picture of an anthropomorphised hotdog for 55 bucks on OpenSea. But we're looking for something we could actually use.

Here's a neat idea. Stephenson is plotting another use of smart contract-based NFTs called the Splitstream, to programatically split funds from an academic NFT sale among the authors of any works that it cited. And it would be recursive. "An NFT sale's proceeds is partially split toward the works that the NFT depended on, like a citation. Those "citations" can then further split and cite," he explains.

With so many interesting ideas in play, NFTs have the potential to be far more than an art and collectibles fad. But as with many nascent technologies, someone has to make the use cases work in practice. ®

At Satoshi’s Tea Garden
Ben Walker

LRB
Vol. 43 No. 9 · 6 May 2021

Prin 1979 words

Buzz Lightyear​ is naked, save for his standard-issue purple balaclava and a banana taped to his hairy stomach. He stands in front of the white wall of an art gallery; a label to his left reads ‘The Impossible Dream of a Pubic Fruit’ and an audience looks up at his giant grey legs. The image is one of five thousand that make up the digital artist Beeple’s collage Everydays: The First 5000 Days, the first purely digital artwork to be auctioned at Christie’s, on 11 March this year. It sold for $69.3 million, making it the third most expensive work by a living artist, after Jeff Koons’s Rabbit and David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist. The buyer, Vignesh Sundaresan, called it a ‘significant piece of art history’. Sundaresan doesn’t own the copyright to Everydays. All he bought was a non-fungible token (NFT): a collection of data stored using blockchain technology. There is nothing stopping you from downloading the image yourself, printing it off and sticking it above the fireplace. It will look exactly the same.

Each time an NFT is created – or ‘minted’ – or is transferred from one digital account to another, the data recording the event is stored as part of a ‘block’ on a chain. Each block contains information from the previous block in the chain; sneakily try to change a line of code and the chain collapses, so the erroneous entry is easily discovered. This makes a blockchain, in theory, incorruptible. As soon as a transaction is made, it is broadcast across a vast network of computers: it is ‘decentralised’, meaning that anyone can be the detective who spots the crime. There is no single authority declaring what’s what. For almost as long as this technology has existed, people have been excited about its potential use as a means of securing the provenance of assets. If records of financial transfers can be made totally tamper-proof, then why not deeds to houses, or medical records, or entire digital artworks?

The artist Kevin McCoy and the technologist Anil Dash minted the first NFT in 2014 as a way for digital artists to keep control of their work. ‘McCoy used a blockchain called Namecoin to register a video clip that his wife had made,’ Dash explained in the Atlantic, ‘and I bought it with the four bucks in my wallet.’ Later that year a company called Counterparty set up a few NFT ‘marketplaces’ – websites where NFTs are bought and sold. The biggest was the Rare Pepe Directory, devoted to images of Pepe the Frog, the comic book character beloved of the alt-right. In 2017, Larva Labs released ten thousand pixellated cartoon characters – for free – on the Ethereum blockchain. They can now fetch millions of dollars apiece. After Beeple’s Everydays, the second most expensive NFT sold so far is CryptoPunk #3100, a bald alien with a headband, which fetched 4200 ether, or about $7.6 million (ether is a currency, just like bitcoin). One collector is planning to sell nine CryptoPunks at an upcoming auction in New York.

1. CryptoPunk 3100 - Larva Labs

   https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks/details/3100

   

   33 rows · CryptoPunks are 10,000 collectible characters on the Ethereum blockchain. These are the details for Punk #3100

‘Cryptopunk #3100’

After CryptoPunks – inevitably, because this is the internet – someone came up with the idea of CryptoKitties, a game involving a digital marketplace where people could buy, sell and breed digital cats. An alarming number of CryptoKitties – fat little felines in a rainbow of colours – seem to have some form of anisocoria, where one pupil is larger than the other. Unlike the punks, which were all visually as well as cryptographically unique, two cats can look exactly the same, but since each kitten is attached to a unique NFT they’re treated as separate artworks, like prints in a series. Millions more dollars were made.

Because NFTs are essentially just digital deeds, they can be used to turn almost anything online into a saleable asset – pictures, video clips, even words on a webpage. In March the New York Times auctioned off an article about NFTs for 350 ether – half a million dollars. NBA Top Shot, the official NFT marketplace for the National Basketball Association, is a trading site for classic moments in basketball matches, like LeBron James dunking. William Shatner sold an X-ray of his teeth. I saw one developer offering NFTs of famous dates. Do you want to own Michael Jackson’s first moonwalk, on 25 March 1983? That’ll currently set you back 0.5 ether, or $1300. Bill Clinton’s impeachment on 19 December 1998? One ether. The first witch-burning at Salem on 10 June 1692? A steal at just 0.3 ether, or $780. One of the founders of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, auctioned an NFT of the first ever tweet, five words – ‘just setting up my twttr’ – that cost the winner some $2.9 million.

A CryptoKitty

A CryptoKitty itself isn’t a currency token, however. Instead, it’s a “digital asset” that’s stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Technically, each CryptoKitty is a unique ERC-721 token that’s stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Each CryptoKitty has a combination of “cattributes” that make it unique.

What the &#%$ is a CryptoKitty? - How-To Geek

www.howtogeek.com/354535/what-the-is-a-cryptokitty/

A CryptoKitty

The owners of these digital artefacts have no rights to the intellectual property. Sina Estavi, who bought Dorsey’s tweet, can’t stop people retweeting it. Whoever bought the New York Times article can’t reprint it without permission. And of course no one can own a date: what people are actually buying are just JPEGs of a calendar with the purchased event marked in bold. So what’s the point? For richer investors, it’s an exercise in clout, a tech-bro muscle flex. Only a certain type of person wants to be able to lean over your shoulder as you watch the latest viral video or meme and shout: ‘That’s mine! I own it!’ For less wealthy traders, NFT ownership operates more like a collectible card game. The programmers who developed CryptoPunks were amazed by the number of people willing to take a ‘conceptual leap’ about what ownership can now mean. Estavi said that buying Dorsey’s first tweet was like owning the Mona Lisa.

One problem with NFTs – which Dash and McCoy first developed in a ‘one-night hackathon’ – is that the data storage capacity of a blockchain is limited. It’s really just a string of code, which is capable of representing anything, but it can’t be too long or it will be too expensive for the network to process. (It is possible to store images on the blockchain, but it costs way too much.) What Dash and McCoy came up with was a system that records a link to an image that exists somewhere on the web. ‘We took that shortcut because we were running out of time,’ Dash wrote. ‘Seven years later, all of today’s popular NFT platforms still use the same shortcut.’ Worse still, the link that is bought and sold leads to ‘the website of a new start-up that’s likely to fail within a few years’. Suddenly, NFTs seem no more indestructible than certificates of authenticity on plain old paper.

NFT artists and buyers are thrilled that they allow them to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of the industry and interact directly with their audience. The banana taped to the nude Buzz in Beeple’s Everydays has become something of a motif for digital artists – a big fuck you to gallerists and art-biz moguls. (Beeple’s picture is a reference to the satirical artist Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, an actual banana taped to a wall at Art Basel in 2019, which was the occasion for Twitter to explode with images of people sticking grapes, leeks and frozen peas to their kitchen cabinets.) The hope is that once venture capitalists and tech pioneers get bored of the novelty of NFTs, there will be some innovations worth holding on to. As one developer put it: ‘We will see some scammy projects, but there may be some gems with actual utility.’ A feature of NFTs that may make the gatekeepers superfluous is the option for artists to attach royalty clauses to their work. In this scenario, every time something is resold, the creator automatically takes a cut. If you buy an NFT of a song from a small band you like, the band gets an immediate investment as well as a royalty payment every time the token is sold on a secondary marketplace. If in a few years’ time they become global superstars, the NFT owner can make a lot of money – or, if they want to hold on to it, prove that they were there at the beginning.

‘CryptoBanana #4’

‘CryptoBanana #4’

Champions of NFTs should be alarmed by Christie’s smooth consumption of the concept, however. Maybe the buyers are different – so far, tech entrepreneurs and bitcoin fundamentalists rather than conventional collectors – but the business is the same: the perception of value can be exploited and translated into big bucks for the big beasts. The technology has already, and inevitably, been co-opted by corporations on the lookout for fresh markets. Nike has reportedly patented a ‘system and method for ... mining, intermingling and exchanging blockchain-enabled digital shoes’. Taco Bell sold digital pictures of its products with a $500 gift card attached (only the first buyers were entitled to the free food). There will be a multitude of beneficial uses for blockchain technology, and the promise of true decentralisation is a boon, but the bleak fact is that NFTs are quickly becoming another tool for companies to sell us things we already own.

There’s another problem with NFTs: they have an exorbitant environmental impact. The computing power that underpins decentralisation consumes a huge amount of energy. Earlier this year, Cambridge researchers reported that bitcoin was using more energy than the whole of Argentina. In December 2020, the artist Memo Akten estimated that the average carbon footprint of a single NFT artwork was equivalent to driving a car more than six hundred miles. The sculptor Joanie Lemercier discovered that six NFTs he minted had used 8.7 megawatt-hours of energy, as much as he had expended in his studio in two years. Artists and marketplaces are trying to compensate for their environmental impact with somewhat glib gestures to carbon offsetting. When the musician Grimes sold a series of video art pieces on the Nifty Gateway marketplace, she donated an unspecified percentage of the $6 million proceeds to the climate-change NGO Carbon-180. (Access to Nifty Gateway, one of the biggest marketplaces for NFT artworks, is by invitation only. No gatekeepers, though, right?)

A screenshot from Decentraland

A screenshot from Decentraland

One of the most curious uses for NFTs so far has been in managing the exchange of digital building blocks in virtual gaming worlds. Decentraland is the latest in a long line of world-building videogames (Sim City, Civilisation, Theme Park World, Minecraft), and is underpinned by NFTs and cryptocurrency. Since its launch in 2017, tens of thousands of players have travelled, often using virtual reality headsets, through its digital world, using Decentraland’s own cryptocurrency (MANA) to buy and sell individual land parcels (LAND) on which citizens can build computer-generated real estate. Each piece of land is represented by an NFT. It’s still an embryonic universe, with many plots containing only a few benches and bushes, but the possibilities are bountiful – and lucrative. Decentraland has virtual book launches and virtual art galleries displaying digital artworks: one gallery houses miniature versions of paintings by Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Decentraland has bars, casinos, chapels, mosques. There’s even an electoral system in which users vote in referendums. It’s more like a plutocracy than a democracy: those with the most LAND and MANA get more votes. A couple of years ago a Decentraland user purchased 64 empty plots of land and combined them into a single estate. He called his new property ‘The Secret of Satoshi’s Tea Garden’ – a reference to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous founder of bitcoin. But it also put me in mind of Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, in which the narrator, on learning of his great-grandfather’s theory of multiple dimensions, describes his surroundings in a way that could apply to the Decentraland universe: ‘I sensed the pullulation ... that the dew-damp garden surrounding the house was infinitely saturated with invisible people ... secretive, busy and multiform in other dimensions of time.’ Satoshi’s Tea Garden sold for $80,000, its price inflated because of its appealing location, completely surrounded by digital roads.

Ben Walker is an editor at the LRB.