I was just about to go to bed when I remembered I hadn’t posted anything today. So here we go. Today we’re going to talk about a shower thought I had.

Last year the YouTuber/influencer Logan Paul released an NFT project called 99 Originals¹. In it, Logan set out to create 99 unique Polaroids, resulting from his creative experiments all around the globe. Each original consists of the Polaroid picture itself, and an accompanying NFT, the latter being the main focus of his project.

At first, I found the concept of the 99 Originals really interesting. Not because of the NFT part of the ordeal, but because it got me thinking about how the Polaroid seems to be the best translation of the NFT into the real world.

From my understanding, the concept of an NFT centers on giving traceable ownership of a non-tangible asset to a person. A good example of this is the infamous NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, whose owner would somehow “own” that piece of internet history. I guess?? This is really hard to understand.

Anyway, it’s under this gray area that my shower thought happened. Let’s forget the internet for now, how can we own a moment? Well, we can’t, because a moment stops existing the very moment it happens. So what is the closest thing to owning the moment? How about owning something that is “proof” of the moment?

If I were to say I “own” a dinosaur, you would probably guess that I own a fossil of a dinosaur. Well, that fossil is not the dinosaur, it is a manifestation of the dinosaur’s existence on some sedimentary rock. Still, we think of it as remains of the dinosaur itself².

So my parallel, is that one can own a moment by owning a Polaroid picture of said moment. The main point I want to stress is that it has to be a Polaroid picture. Why is that so? Why isn’t a smartphone or digital camera picture enough?

When you take a photo on your phone, a sensor reacts to the light coming in the lens, and the electrical signal is transformed into bits, which are saved in the camera’s flash memory. When you see the photo, on a screen, you’re seeing the result of copying those bits and moving them into a screen buffer of sorts.

Notice, that the actual physical manifestation of the real moment is lost. However, with a Polaroid picture, what is seen is actually the result of the light that composes the specific moment hitting the chemicals in the paper. In my opinion, this is the closest we can get to the actual fossil/footprint metaphor.

I’ve also come to the conclusion, that an analog camera produces the same effect. However, Polaroids are much more palpable, since, in analog cameras, the actual “fossil” of the moment is imprinted in the film, which is not very “eye-digestable”.

Just to end with an example, someone owning a Polaroid picture of say, the Saturn V’s first launch, would have a piece of paper that came to be via a direct reaction to that moment.

I know this falls in a very philosophical area, but that’s the nature of shower thoughts. I very much enjoyed writing about it.

See you all tomorrow!