The NFT Market for Emancipation

*The revolution has been tokenised. Unfortunately, the oppressed still cannot afford the gas fees.*

## I. Congratulations, Your Liberation Has Been Minted

There was a moment in the history of digital capitalism when somebody discovered that the ownership of an image could be made artificially scarce even when the image itself remained infinitely reproducible.

This was the elementary conceptual triumph of the non-fungible token.

The NFT did not need to abolish copying. It needed to make a particular claim to ownership unique, traceable and exchangeable.

An image could circulate everywhere while the token associated with it remained the property of somebody.

What an extraordinary philosophical achievement: the successful privatisation of a distinction.

The image belongs to everybody's visual field. The certificate belongs to its purchaser.

We should take this achievement seriously, not because the NFT market fulfilled all its revolutionary promises, but because it disclosed something fundamental about contemporary capitalism.

Capital does not necessarily require the scarcity of things.

It can manufacture scarcity in the right to claim them.

And this provides an unexpectedly precise model of contemporary emancipatory politics.

Consider the political influencer who publicly demonstrates solidarity with an oppressed population.

The injustice is real. The suffering is real. The historical conditions that produced it are real.

But the publicly recognised relationship to that suffering can become a scarce social asset.

The influencer does not own the suffering.

She owns a recognisable position in relation to it.

Her political identity functions as a certificate of moral proximity.

The more successfully that certificate circulates, the greater its potential exchange value.

One might call this the NFT market for emancipation.

It is a marketplace in which liberation is represented by tokens of moral participation, and in which those tokens acquire prestige independently of the material achievement of liberation itself.

The problem is not that these tokens are necessarily fraudulent.

The problem is that they are tradable.

Solidarity becomes distinction.

Distinction becomes visibility.

Visibility becomes authority.

Authority becomes economic opportunity.

The historical struggle remains unresolved.

But somebody has become its verified collector.

## II. From Use Value to Virtue Value

Marx's distinction between use value and exchange value provides a useful starting point.

A commodity has particular qualities through which it satisfies a need. But in capitalist exchange, these different qualities become subordinate to a general system of equivalence.

The commodity enters the marketplace as a bearer of exchange value.

Something analogous occurs when the social meaning of political action becomes subordinate to its recognised value within a moral economy.

An action can possess emancipatory use value: it can organise workers, provide legal assistance, redistribute resources, protect a vulnerable person or obstruct an unjust institution.

But the public representation of that action can also acquire what we might call **virtue value**.

Virtue value is the socially recognised prestige generated by an identifiable association with moral action.

It does not necessarily correspond to that action's effectiveness.

A small, unglamorous organisation may produce enormous material benefits while acquiring almost no public recognition.

A spectacular declaration of solidarity may acquire enormous recognition while changing very little.

Slopulism is the political culture that systematically confuses these two forms of value.

The NFT supplies its ideal economic metaphor because an NFT's market price need not correspond to the aesthetic, social or practical usefulness of the underlying work.

Value emerges through scarcity, speculation, authentication and demand.

Likewise, the moral token derives much of its value from the public recognition of an authorised relationship to an issue.

A person becomes known as the person who speaks for a cause.

The cause becomes recognisable through the person.

The person's prestige rises.

The circumstances of the people supposedly represented need not improve.

This is not simply hypocrisy.

It is a structure of accumulation.

The NFT market itself demonstrated the instability of speculative ownership. After its extraordinary boom, trading contracted dramatically; the decline did not eliminate the broader technological possibility of tokenisation, but it exposed how much value had depended on speculative expectations rather than lasting demand.

The market for emancipatory prestige, however, has no comparable requirement that its participants formally record their losses.

One can be wrong about everything, accomplish nothing, and retain an impressive portfolio of convictions.

## III. Pauline Christianity and the Privatisation of Grace

The history of Christian political theology introduces a deeper contradiction.

Paul's account of grace interrupts the idea that salvation can be secured through the accumulation of personal merit.

In Romans, justification cannot simply be earned through successful observance of the law.

There is a profound affront to the proprietary imagination in this claim.

One cannot purchase divine favour by accumulating enough moral credit.

Grace, in its theological meaning, is not a commodity.

But religious institutions have often been confronted with the problem of administering access to goods that, according to their own doctrine, exceed the conditions of exchange.

The institutionalisation of religious authority can produce recognisable distinctions between the justified and the unjustified, the orthodox and the heretical, the worthy and the unworthy.

This is not reducible to Paul's own theology. It is a contradiction encountered in subsequent Christian history.

The economy of contemporary political virtue reproduces the administrative problem while abandoning the theological prohibition against boasting.

Its participants accumulate evidence of righteousness.

Declarations, affiliations, denunciations and acts of public recognition form a portfolio of moral assets.

One is justified not by grace but by visibility.

And visibility must be continuously renewed.

This is why the NFT offers such an appropriate analogy.

The certificate establishes a socially legible claim to a unique position.

The moral token establishes a publicly legible claim to political virtue.

Neither necessarily confers ownership of the reality to which it refers.

Yet both can be exchanged for prestige.

In this economy, the activist becomes the proprietor of a relationship to emancipation.

The revolution is a public good.

Its certificates of authenticity are privately held.

## IV. Nicaea II and the Infinite Reproduction of the Image

The Second Council of Nicaea, convened in 787, attempted to defend the legitimate veneration of religious images while distinguishing it from worship.

Its theological reasoning depended upon a distinction between the image and its prototype.

The honour directed toward an icon was understood as passing beyond the material representation to the person represented.

The image was not supposed to become an autonomous object of ultimate devotion.

It was a mediation.

The NFT market reverses this relationship in a curious way.

The underlying image may be widely available. What becomes valuable is the authenticated claim associated with a particular token.

The authority of the representation increasingly resides in its certificate.

The certificate becomes economically more important than the image.

Contemporary political culture performs a related inversion.

The represented struggle becomes secondary to the prestige of its authorised representation.

A photograph of an oppressed community becomes evidence of the photographer's political conscience.

A statement of solidarity becomes evidence of its author's moral identity.

A collective movement becomes the foundation of somebody's personal brand.

The image no longer reliably directs the spectator toward its prototype.

It directs the spectator toward its proprietor.

This is what we might call the **NFT-isation of the icon**.

The old theological question concerned whether the image could legitimately mediate devotion.

The contemporary political-economic question concerns who acquires the profits, recognition and authority generated by that mediation.

The problem is not that political movements use images.

Images are indispensable to political memory, witness and organisation.

The problem arises when the representation of emancipation becomes a privately accumulable substitute for emancipation itself.

The image survives.

The struggle becomes its provenance.

## V. Tawḥīd Against the Marketplace of Sovereignties

Islamic esotericism provides a conceptual challenge to this arrangement, especially through traditions concerned with *tawḥīd*, the unity of God.

The crucial distinction is between recognising the unity of ultimate reality and treating one's own finite position as absolute.

In Ibn Arabi's metaphysical vocabulary, created beings do not possess independent, self-sufficient existence.

Their existence is contingent.

This is not a simple denial of worldly property, nor is it a technical ruling on the permissibility of digital assets.

It is a critique of ontological self-sufficiency.

The human being is not the ultimate proprietor of being.

Consequently, the claim to absolute possession is metaphysically unstable.

This produces a sharp contrast with the ideological imagination of speculative capitalism.

The NFT market constructs exclusive claims over identifiable digital objects or associated rights.

The speculative subject attempts to accumulate assets whose value depends upon recognised ownership.

The esoteric subject, by contrast, confronts the limits of the very self that claims to own.

The difference is not primarily technological.

It is ontological.

Capitalism asks how the subject can enlarge its portfolio.

Esoteric discipline asks what precisely this subject imagines itself to be.

Capitalism encourages the accumulation of external signs of distinction.

A radical reading of tawḥīd challenges the absolutisation of every distinction that claims ultimate authority.

The market says: *This is mine.*

The metaphysical question is: *What is this “I” that makes the claim?*

The incompatibility emerges when an entire politics of liberation is constructed around the accumulation of proprietary identities.

An esoteric account of divine unity cannot coherently treat the ego's acquisition of prestige as the ultimate meaning of emancipation.

If liberation becomes the enlargement of the moral proprietor, then the economy has reproduced precisely the self-sufficiency that spiritual discipline calls into question.

The self has not been transformed.

It has been given a more flattering asset class.

## VI. Fanāʾ: The Impossible Investment

The Sufi concept of *fanāʾ* is commonly discussed in relation to the effacement of the ego in the awareness of divine reality.

Its historical meanings vary across traditions, and it cannot be reduced to the modern language of self-improvement.

Indeed, self-improvement may be exactly the wrong analogy.

Self-improvement frequently leaves the possessive structure of the self intact.

One acquires better habits, greater discipline, a more attractive identity.

The self becomes an appreciating asset.

Fanāʾ presents a more demanding possibility: that the ego's claim to autonomous sovereignty must itself be unsettled.

Here the opposition to the NFT market for emancipation becomes especially clear.

The moral entrepreneur wants a more valuable self.

The speculative activist wants her convictions to appreciate.

The digital revolutionary wants a recognisable political identity that cannot be mistaken for anybody else's.

All three require the continuity of the proprietor.

But fanāʾ cannot be adequately understood as the acquisition of a particularly prestigious spiritual identity.

One cannot straightforwardly accumulate the dissolution of one's own proprietorial ego.

The person who announces that she has successfully transcended herself and would now appreciate public recognition for the achievement has recreated the problem in the act of declaring its solution.

Capitalism is capable of marketing almost any form of renunciation.

It can sell simplicity, detachment, mindfulness and spiritual authenticity.

But the commodification of fanāʾ exposes a conceptual contradiction.

The market requires a bearer of accumulated distinction.

Ego-effacement questions the ultimate sovereignty of that bearer.

The market requires an asset that can be authenticated as belonging to someone.

The spiritual discipline challenges the desire to make even one's proximity to truth into a possession.

A certificate of self-annihilation would be a magnificent commercial product.

It would also be a rather conclusive demonstration that the certificate had missed the point.

## VII. Barzakh Cannot Be Tokenised

The contradiction becomes subtler through the concept of *barzakh*.

In Ibn Arabi's thought, barzakh can signify an intermediary reality that simultaneously connects and distinguishes.

It cannot be understood simply as an object occupying a stable position between two already completed realities.

It concerns the complex relationship between manifestation, imagination and being.

This matters because the NFT operates through determinate identification.

A token is distinguishable from another token.

Its identity can be recorded, verified and transferred according to the relevant technical system.

Its commercial intelligibility depends on making certain claims sufficiently definite to be owned and exchanged.

Barzakh belongs to a different conceptual order.

It names a form of mediation whose philosophical significance cannot be exhausted by the assignment of a unique identifier.

The image is not simply reducible to the object.

The intermediary is not simply reducible to either of the realities it connects.

The relationship exceeds the certificate.

A digital token could certainly represent an artistic interpretation of barzakh. Nothing about Ibn Arabi's metaphysics makes a blockchain incapable of recording such an object.

But the token cannot own the metaphysical reality it represents.

The distinction is the entire point.

The NFT can authenticate a claim concerning a representation.

It cannot authenticate possession of transcendence.

The problem of slopulism begins when a comparable distinction is lost.

The activist treats a recognisable representation of political commitment as equivalent to the historical substance of emancipation.

The token becomes its own prototype.

And the political subject mistakes the acquisition of the sign for the transformation of the world.

## VIII. The NFT Market for the Oppressed

The most troubling consequence of this arrangement concerns the position of the people whose liberation is being represented.

The oppressed are not necessarily those who own the means through which their struggles acquire public value.

Their images circulate.

Their experiences are interpreted.

Their injuries become occasions for commentary.

Their historical circumstances create opportunities for the accumulation of moral capital.

But ownership of the instruments of representation frequently remains elsewhere.

This resembles a problem long familiar to political economists: the separation of producers from the conditions under which the products of their activity acquire value.

In the economy of emancipatory prestige, the people who produce the historical substance of political struggle may not control the institutions that transform that struggle into public recognition.

The result is a secondary economy of appropriation.

The material injury becomes a symbolic resource.

The symbolic resource becomes professional authority.

Professional authority becomes an institution.

And the institution develops an interest in preserving its own position as the authorised mediator of injury.

The political question is therefore not merely who has the right to speak.

It is who controls the conditions under which speech becomes valuable.

This question is particularly pressing in societies such as India, where caste, class, religion and language strongly condition access to media, educational institutions and cultural prestige.

The ability to articulate an injustice in the idiom recognised by metropolitan institutions is not evenly distributed.

The most publicly celebrated interpretation of oppression need not originate among those who possess the greatest knowledge of its material consequences.

The NFT market for emancipation can therefore reproduce older social hierarchies under the appearance of democratic recognition.

A privileged intermediary accumulates the political value of an injury.

The injured community acquires another representative.

Everybody is invited to celebrate the diversity of the transaction.

## IX. Why Islamic Esotericism Cannot Be Reduced to an Anti-Capitalist Brand

There is an obvious danger in this argument.

Islamic esotericism can itself be converted into a commodity.

The Sufi aesthetic can be sold.

The vocabulary of divine unity can become an instrument of communal distinction.

The language of fanāʾ can become a luxurious form of self-advertisement.

A mystic can become an influencer, and an influencer can discover that humility performs exceptionally well.

Nor does Islamic esotericism automatically produce an egalitarian politics.

Historically, Sufi institutions have existed within commercial societies, accepted patronage, accumulated property and participated in hierarchies of political and religious authority.

There is no historical basis for claiming that Islamic mysticism has always stood outside capitalism or property relations.

The proposed incompatibility must therefore be stated with precision.

**Islamic esotericism is not necessarily incompatible with owning objects, trading digital assets or using markets. It is incompatible, in the radical interpretation developed here, with treating emancipation itself as a privately accumulable form of moral sovereignty.**

This distinction prevents the argument from collapsing into religious romanticism.

One could own an NFT and engage seriously with Ibn Arabi's writings.

One could sell digital art while practising Sufi disciplines.

One could use a tokenised fundraising mechanism to finance an emancipatory project.

None of these activities establishes a theological contradiction by itself.

The contradiction arises when the ownership of a symbol becomes confused with the possession of the truth or liberation it represents.

That is the proprietary temptation against which this reading of Islamic esotericism is directed.

The subject cannot own its own transcendence in the same sense that it owns a transferable asset.

And a movement cannot achieve emancipation merely by increasing the exchange value of its symbols.

## X. The Anti-NFT Theory of Emancipation

What follows from this argument?

First, emancipation cannot be adequately measured by the market value of its representations.

A political movement's visibility may increase while the conditions confronting its participants remain unchanged.

Second, moral authority cannot be treated as an indefinitely accumulable private asset without creating new hierarchies.

The person who becomes the recognised proprietor of a cause acquires interests that may diverge from the liberation of those represented.

Third, the image must remain answerable to its prototype.

Political representations should be evaluated according to their relationships with historical realities, rather than merely according to the prestige of their creators.

Fourth, the organisation of liberation must confront the structures of material ownership.

The transformation of political consciousness cannot substitute for the redistribution of resources, expansion of rights, democratic accountability or organisation of collective power.

Finally, the emancipatory subject must remain capable of questioning its own authority.

Here Islamic esotericism offers an especially demanding resource.

A politics informed by the critique of egoic sovereignty would not assume that correct convictions automatically confer the right to command.

It would not make righteousness a personal possession.

It would treat political leadership as contingent, answerable and subject to criticism.

It would understand solidarity less as the acquisition of an identity than as the assumption of obligations that do not necessarily produce recognition.

Such a politics would not abolish representation.

It would refuse to make representation the final object of political desire.

## XI. The Non-Fungibility of Liberation

An NFT derives its distinctive identity from its non-fungibility.

It is not interchangeable with another token in the way that one unit of conventional currency is interchangeable with another.

But the market can still give it an exchange price.

Its uniqueness becomes an occasion for valuation.

The contemporary politics of recognition performs a similar operation upon moral identity.

Every subject is encouraged to understand her historical position as singular, authenticated and publicly legible.

That position can then become the basis for acquiring authority.

Difference becomes an asset.

Identity becomes provenance.

Conviction becomes a certificate.

The irony is that liberation is not itself a collectible object.

It is a transformation of relations between people, institutions and material conditions.

It cannot be transferred from one proprietor to another.

It cannot be stored in a private wallet.

Its value cannot be established by a floor price.

Its achievement is not demonstrated by the scarcity of those authorised to represent it.

An emancipatory politics worthy of the name would seek to make the conditions of freedom more widely available, not to increase the prestige attached to possessing the correct signs of freedom.

And this is why the esoteric critique matters.

It offers a way of thinking against the fantasy that liberation culminates in the sovereign self's possession of an increasingly impressive collection of moral accomplishments.

The object of emancipation is not the glorification of the emancipator.

It is the transformation of the conditions that make emancipation necessary.

The NFT market for emancipation reverses this relationship.

It makes the struggle the raw material of the moral proprietor.

Islamic esotericism, at its most philosophically demanding, reverses the reversal.

It asks the proprietor to confront the contingency of the self that claims possession.

And in doing so, it opens a question that the market cannot answer on its own terms.

**What would freedom mean if nobody could own the certificate?**

Perhaps the revolution will not arrive as a collectible.

Perhaps solidarity will not produce royalties.

Perhaps the most significant political act will be one whose author cannot convert it into a recognisable personal asset.

The speculator objects that such an arrangement offers no return on investment.

The mystic might reply that this is precisely the difficulty.

And Marx, arriving rather late to the conversation, would presumably want to know who owns the marketplace.

*The emancipated have left the auction.*

*The auctioneers are still selling their seats.*