PhD candidate Spencer Kaplan publishes article on Berlin's NFT community

Tuesday, August 27, 2024
NFT enthusiasts in Berlin

PhD Candidate Spencer Kaplan has published an article titled “Facing blockchain’s double bind: Trustless technologies and ‘IRL friends’ in Berlin’s NFT community” in the peer-reviewed journal New Media and Society. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Berlin, he asks why local non-fungible token (NFT) enthusiasts preferred to create an offline community despite their shared passion for an online future. He demonstrates how the values guiding this community’s interactions differed between online and offline spaces, and that by moving offline, they could resolve the technology’s inherent contradictions.