I am washed because I absolutely hate the idea of NBA Top Shot
The digital tulips transform personal experiences into an arbitrary commodity
The easiest way to explain NBA Top Shot is to say it’s like Topps, the sports trading card company, hooked up with Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency, and they proceeded to give birth to a digital version of Rosemary’s Baby, the spawn of Satan. If the phenomenon could somehow incorporate a popular alcohol brand, it would possess a little bit of everything you wasted money on during the first four decades of your life.
The more accurate way to explain NBA Top Shot would be to say it’s a blockchain-based platform that allows fans to buy, sell and trade numbered versions of licensed basketball highlights (like digital sports cards) that are first attained by purchasing digital packages from the NBA Top Shot website (for as “little” as $9 and as much as $230). The highlights you unpack are “showcased” in an encrypted, secure wallet, or you can resell the collectibles through the NBA Top Shot Marketplace (for as “little” as $17 and as much as … $240,000).
But to my mind, the most accurate way to explain NBA Top Shot is to say it’s a blight on our existence.
To be fair, it’s not apparent whether it represents the future of the sports trading card market or yet another overvalued digital phenomenon exploiting suckers until its inevitable bust, a technological tulip capitalizing on the aimless cravings of children and the greed of credulous adults, while creating an arbitrary economy of nothing custom built for know-nothings eager to possess an area of expertise that smarter people haven’t yet bothered to enter.
Who can say?
What is clear, however, is that I cannot even begin to fathom its appeal and am therefore sworn to hate it. And this makes me feel so so so so old, because when I examine why I feel such disdain toward this product, I realize I’m advocating for the dated values of the extremely washed.
I love sports. What makes athletic competition so wonderful to me is that I can receive a visceral experience through a vicarious relationship. I get real feelings from subconsciously pretending to be involved in moments far bigger than myself (because there are hundreds, thousands, millions simultaneously making this same bargain). And yet, despite so many collecting the shared memory of a Super Bowl victory or a World Series win, my memory is my own because no on else has the experience around it that I did.
When the reel of LeBron James blocking Andre Iguodala’s easy layup attempt in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals plays in my mind, I don’t just see James unexpectedly flying into frame from what seemed like an impossible distance. I remember sitting at a table in a neighbourhood bar with my buddy Paul, cementing a friendship that has become one of my most prized. I remember negotiating with the bartender to turn up the volume on the television and being gently apprehensive about the increasingly rowdy table of softball players next to us. I remember downing beer after beer and sharing anecdotes and feeling like I was experiencing something to be savoured: a tightly contested, all-or-nothing final. I remember the shocked faces on everyone when James made the block; the unique outbursts — ahhhh, ohhhh, wow — collectively drowning out the commentators on the broadcast. It was lovely and irreplaceable. And something I’ll never forget.
Owning the official moment from an official camera angle, and officially possessing it in your own official digital wallet with an official resale value reduces that exceptional experience to a corrupted commodity. It enforces a completely arbitrary value on something that previously held intrinsic significance.
The literal ownership of a moment is crass. It renders it devoid of imagination and fancy; artistry and wonder. It strips everything around it that can possibly make it one’s own and imposes a singular perspective for all. It grosses me the fuck out.
But market value! But digital! But blockchain!
I have no illusions that my complaints against NBA Top Shot and my hopes that the disingenuous sensation doesn’t dig its claws into other sports are anything more than the ramblings of an antediluvian; the modern equivalent of a man adorned in horn-rimmed glasses shaking his fist at kids playing with a hula hoop in his front yard.
But, this is one of the many challenges of getting older: trying to decipher whether the urge to condemn the unfamiliar is borne out of wisdom or simple bias. I don’t know which is represented by my antipathy for NBA Top Shot, and I don’t really care. I’m protective of my experiences — perhaps for the very fact that they’re not stored in a digital wallet somewhere — and I’ll always rage against anything that tries to corrupt them.
Except the one when Lucas Moura scored against Ajax in injury time during the second leg of the 2019 Champions League semifinal. You can have that one, blockchain. Do with it what you must.
Photo by Nicholas Green on Unsplash