Creators Take Control

Edward Lee, a leading legal scholar, takes on a question many readers have asked: if you buy a non-fungible token, do you actually own anything? Critics say you do not, yet buyers spent roughly $27 billion on NFTs in 2021 alone. Meanwhile, major companies and venture capital firms are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into NFTs for the metaverse, a digital world that exists only in imagination.

To explain this puzzle, Lee introduces his own framework, which he calls Tokenism. Through concrete examples, he shows how NFTs work and how they reshape the idea of ownership, so that possession itself becomes virtual. He defines Tokenism as an artistic, cultural, and technological movement that creates value by assigning ownership of a new kind of property, represented by a virtual token, through technological abstraction and artificial scarcity. He compares it to Cubism, which transformed how people made and viewed art in the twentieth century, and argues that Tokenism is doing the same for how we understand owning art and other things.

Creators and businesses have already acted on this change. They have built a market for digital art, established new rights for artists, developed business models based on decentralized collaboration, and created forms of interactive ownership that connect identity, community, and patronage to NFTs. Lee argues that these developments are only the beginning of much broader social change. He also introduces decentralized intellectual property, or De-IP, which he links to the decentralized finance (DeFi) movement and presents as a way for creators to take control of their work and their livelihoods.

The book also offers practical insights and a hopeful vision for encouraging creativity and building a lasting virtual renaissance.