The Luther Blissett Legacy
Proof of Workerism (PoW) vs. Proof of Prank (Pop) culture!
Minted on the Polygon blockchain, the metadata frozen NFT collection consists of 428 Video Artworks in memory of the super folk hero Luther Blissett and evolves the ongoing conflict between Communism and Capitalism, metaphorical symbolised by the concepts of Proof of Workerism vs. Proof of Prank, or NFT workers vs. RoBots.
The work itself reflects on the cultural history of the Luther Blissett Project and adapts, or better hijacks their working principles to transform them into the cultural and political revolution of the blockchain and the NFT itself.
By inventing fake quotes as they would be written by international scholars like Toni Negri, Franco Bifo Berardi & Co. - other beautiful post-workerists or better, as Negri prefers, “operaisti without post” - the artwork itself becomes a prank within a prank and therefore breaks free from mainstream thinking.
The conception behind it is to concoct a new prank in the name of Luther Blissett: the most important names of a certain peculiar strain of radical economics theories and political anti-capitalist class struggle and criticism, the very Italian movement called “operaismo”, literally in English: workerism, near to the perhaps in England more common labourism, yet a completely independent experiment, meet and feat in a purely invented way the ideal of NFT, transforming themselves in the heralds of this technology, which they surrealistically consider like liberating, a way out of the oppression of finance, accelerated neoliberalism and semioeconomics. The terms are coined “Proof of Workerism” and “Proof of Prank” and in the White Paper which works like a manifesto, the hypothesis is that Luther Blissett reincarnated in Satoshi Nakamoto. Every name under the quotes on the “sensationalistic” online presence, the whole bunch of “signatories” of the project is related to the system of thought of workerism or the corpus of writings of Luther Blissett. The prank in the prank is that thanks to the algorithms of research those names, which have been mangled and distorted, are anyway all online traceable so that when you google them the related real person appears under the first results which refer to their institutional pages if they are professors or to the publishing houses if they are mostly radical writers or also to their accounts on Wikipedia as it happens for most of those figures. Without using their real names!
The official website may be also seen as a standalone piece of Net Art and contains many interesting background information, also in regard to the origins of QAnon but also hints and clues to the stories of Luther Blissett, Wu Ming and Satoshi Nakamoto itself.
The OpenSea collection instead fulfils all “classical” attributes of an NFT collection and invites the spectator to explore the transformation and distortion of the different selves of the Luther Blissett pseudonym.
Even if the project is Non-Commerical Blissett brings it perfectly to the point: “Lots of Money because I am many.”
The NFTs are not for sale in the primary market and can only be gifted to selected people.