“Ownership is one of the last frontiers (of) the digital space.” These are the words of Dee Goens, the co-creator of NFT Marketplace Zora, speaking to Spike editor and arts writer Dean Kissick in the first episode of our new podcast series for A Future World. 

You can’t talk about the future right now without talking about non-fungible tokens, the crypto-technology that is shaking up the art world for better or worse in 2021. But are they a utopian democratiser, or creativity-flattener? Does the rise of the NFT spell the end of the internet being “free” as we know it? What does democratisation, and decentralisation, of the art world actually look like? And why are some people so mad about it?

In the episode, hosted by former Dazed Digital Arts Editor Ashleigh Kane, now an art writer and creative consultant,, Kissick and Goens tackle these questions and lift the veil on how NFTs work, as well as what they actually spell for the art world and all the adjacent audio-visual culture we experience through the lens of the internet.

For Goens, “it is 100 per cent revolutionising the understanding of how we own information on the internet. You can now have a provable, canonical first instance of that iconic meme, or that GIF, and the value that that creates over its lifespan can actually accrue back to the provable creator of that meme, or that GIF.”

For Kissick, there’s more of an open question about how much things will change within the more storied corners of the art world. “I don’t think it’s going to lead to total democratisation of the arts, but if you haven’t found yourself where you want to be, or you have no interest in going through a well-trodden path, you’re just free to do your own thing. And that’s good, right?”

For this and more “vibey stuff” (Goens words), listen to the pair and Dean Kissick go head to head on NFTs here: