Right-Clicker-Mentality

Bezzlers coin a phrase to describe the anti-bezzle.

Having coined a few terms in my day, I revel in new coinages that capture something really gnarly and interesting.

Take “bezzle” — JK Galbraith’s term for “the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.” So much of our contemporary economy is captured by that delicious term!

https://pluralistic.net/tag/bezzles/

Recently, I happened on another coinage that is marvellously apt for our current moment: “right-clicker mentality.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgzed/what-the-hell-is-right-clicker-mentality

The term comes to us from the world of NFTs, which have blown up into a massive, fraud-ridden speculative bubble that is blazing through whole rain-forests’ worth of carbon while transfering billions from suckers to con-artists. A bezzle, in other words.

The creators of NFTs envisioned them as a kind of bragging right that described the relationship between a creator and a member of their audience. When you paid for an NFT, you recorded the fact that you had made a donation to the artist that was inspired by a specific work. That fact was indelibly recorded in a…