Were we ever so different? Perhaps what has changed is not our nature, but the affordances present in our environment. For all our billions of years of evolutionary history until just about last Tuesday, there has never existed a global market with virtually zero cost of creating “goods” to sell. Now, with digital “assets”, there is.

The ratio of perceived benefit (make money from selling shitty NFTs or shitty beats) to cost (essentially zero cost to mint a shitty NFT or create a shitty beat) is infinite, NaN, divide-by-zero. Of course this results in near-infinite supply and thus most people don’t make any money. But the zero-ish cost means the flow of supply doesn’t stop.