Attempted to invoke the "cat exception." Immediately closed my eyes and the browser upon discovering this. Apparently, you can "breed" your CryptoKitty *shudders* with other users' CryptoKitties in the "Marketplace"? And there are *checks notes* “cooldown” periods where a CryptoKitty cannot breed while it’s expecting offspring or recovering from "Siring."
Why must blockchain bros ruin everything?
One thing this Tamagotchi flavored innovation brings to the fore is the importance of immortality or agelessness to the kinds of imaginaries that seem to animate crypto and nfts. Obviously there are others and other people are better able to speak to them than me. Honestly, the core scam seems old. But even with the short pitch here for CryptoKitties ("...it cannot be replicated, taken away, or destroyed...") it's clear that the product is intended to speak to specific anxieties. It's been observed by communists that in a class society, capitalists tend to value their own lives differently than people who are exploited for their labor. That is, immortality in particular gets fetishized more and more as your life becomes a theme park. I think consumerism has, in the US, diffused this phenomenon pretty widely, so that you have completely secular people devoted rhetorically to the "rational" and "scientific" (and again, the political is increasingly foreclosed) who want to live forever. One reaction is the strain of eugenics surfacing in the Silicon Valley at present (talk about birthrates and IQs, etc.), another is the transhuman, singularity fixation, another is the fascinating 21st century interest in magical (again, through a rhetoric of science because of course) de-aging solutions, as with Ambrosia– the company selling the literal blood of the young to the rich and old– and perhaps another is embedded in the pitch that crypto is good because it is *immutable.* That is a really striking sales pitch for a line of code and a poorly drawn cartoon. No one ever bought a comic book because it will never die. But this can "never be taken away or destroyed." Who would want to destroy your JPEG?
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