During the NFT boom in 2021, NFT-Ficionados said “I would love it, even if it went to zero” as a tongue-in-kind-counter-cultural statement that importance and membership were more than profits.
It got a bit like a punk Rockethos in web3. Burning money (figuratively or literally) was a flex to signal the individual who belonged to a group that placed themselves as the moral antithesis against the speculative madness that defined the time.
Like the early cypherpunks that fought for freedom and autonomy, or Bitcoin Maxis, which held through several crashes, the next Gen Nft Degens fueled the amount of magical Internet money on otherwise right-click-and-cow-in JPEGs to prove that they understood the deeper layers of internet culture and crypto ideology.
But even the most eager believers in Blockchain’s promise are not immune to doubt when a long, cold crypto winter drains both capital and conviction. And the NFT -Bear has been grizzly.
Despite a flutter of activity in recent weeks – someone picked up 45 cryptopunks for nearly $ 8 million, another one ether for over $ 300K, Pudgy Penguins’ floor doubled, moonbirds tripled – mostly the NFT market is down bad. For $ 156 million for July 2025, we are nowhere near the crazy heights in August 2021, when OpenSea reported over $ 3 billion in the NFT trading volume. For NFT art, trade has specifically declined by 93% since its 2021 top.
So if you assume your beloved NFT is approaching his rocky bottom, it’s time to check in and see: Do you actually love it?
If so, why Do you still love it?
And you can’t just say: Oh i love the artOtherwise, a screen protected JPEG would be sufficient.
To still love these things in their rock bottom, firstly, you have to be happy with the value you paid in relation to the value you still get out of it.
Secondly, there must be a reason why it is an NFT. If it was just a beautiful image that can be stored, copied or shared without consequence, there is no sense that it is an NFT and no victim in seeing it go to zero.
Like everyone’s favorite media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, would argue: The media is the message. You don’t love the image anymore because of its content. You love it more, because like an NFT, the picture is something else. NFT reprograms your role from pure viewer of the image to participant in a medium that tracks ownership, identity, value and status.
McLuhan thought each medium is an extension of ourselves. A book is expanding the eye. A phone expands the voice. Likewise with an NFT, we are compared to an object in a way we couldn’t have been if it was just a JPEG.
Bert is evil
With this in mind, let me present to you a case study for my beloved NFT: Bert is evil. In November 2022 I bought an NFT that is very likely to be worth zero today. Called Bert is evil, this was one of the first viral Internet memes (c. 1997), embossed as a nft of its original creator 25 years later.
Despite its rich story as an early online joke, it failed terribly as an NFT collection. Which is a very big part of why I love it. For me, NFT is an invaluable artifact that you could wonder about in a museum.
It is a historical remnant; An unchangeable memory from a failed crossing between two eras on the web. It revealed the boundaries of translation between networks, eras and cultural grammar, and how meaning and value in web3 is not guaranteed by mint action.
And -meme
Before Pepe the Frog and Trollface, Wojak, Lol Guy and Gigachad, there were: Bert is evil. Precaced maybe only by Mr. T ate my balls and dancing baby, the early internet meals exposed the eerie secret life in half of Sesame Street Duo, Bert and Ernie.
Photoshopped into a series of spot photographs was made of the meat together with the most notorious of history, from Jeffrey Dahmer and Lee Harvey Oswald to Hitler and Ku Klux Klan. There was “proof” for Bert Smoking Marijuana, Fondling a Young Michael Jackson’s steps and forced Ernie to get a lap.
Another “photo” referred to an alleged deleted scene from Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s leaked sex bands, where the newlyweds had engaged in “A Torrid Orgy” with Bert.
Spawned in 1997, while still a student at art at the University of the Philippines, the site was just one thing that twenty-something Dino Ignacio did to make his friends laugh. Armed with a hand-me-down 14.4 Baud modem and a magazine collection spanning Omni Heavy Metal for Mad Magazine, Ignacio was a disciple of mashup culture on the Internet Dawn.
Bert quickly went viral and traveled through new internet forums, E -mail chains and blogs. Back then, the Internet was participating and anarchic. Remixing was violent and authorship blurred, privilege circulation over the origin. Anyone could edit Bert; No one owned him. He mutated infinitely in the hands of Photoshop Pirates long before terms such as “fake news” came into our lexicon.
When Bert won a web city, his popularity exploded. The website became so popular that Ignacio could no longer afford to run it on its own. Instead of closing it down, he lightned it up and offered it to others to mirror in exchange for hosting the original place. After decentralization, hundreds of mirrors emerged all over the world and increased the reach and notority of the evil Berte.
Then, in 2001, a changed picture of Bert and Osama bin Laden appeared on the protester signs at a Pro-Taliban rally. Ignacio felt it had gone too far. He closed the website of concern.
But the meme had his own life. It lived on.
NFT
A quarter of a century later, Ignacio had the idea of immortalizing Bert is evil as a historic, own subject of record. Minting of meme as an NFT deliberately resumed an icon from a previous technological break. The movement was not intended to be commercial, but cultural: an action with media continuity.
Originally, my love for nft was grounded in nerdy McLuhianism. But when Bert did not attract fans, my relationship with NFT was elaborated.
I had learned about it by reading the Maiden edition of the Philippines Vogue (September 2022), where Ignacio had been profiled by the blank in recognition of his influence on the technology sector. While Vogue is not the obvious place to get your NFT alfa, I was fascinated and thought that this unsold, unknown NFT might have been overlooked and underestimated.
In the story, the journalist Ignacio examined why he thought his NFT project was a floppy. “Maybe I just don’t understand NFT’s,” he said.
If I was a better investor, I would have recognized this as the red flag it was, and continued to turn through my magazine. Instead, I jumped on foundation and bought the first of four in the collection. Within hours, a mutual friend had seen the transaction on-chain and connected Ignacio and I on Facebook DM.
Ignacio was shocked that one of his NFTs had finally sold, almost a year after the coin. His friend told him that I was naked In Crypto, he accepted a phone call, and then I heard the back story. Ignacio said he felt like a imposter in web3, uncomfortable, foreign. While he was confident among his existing web2 spheres that circled game design, software development, VR, avatars and more, he did not feel the same credibility in web3, and he accused himself of not doing enough of publishing the coin.
Some of his friends offered advice on how to build hype, like diving into discords, shit posting on Twitter and making some spaces. But Ignacio spent only a few weeks before they gave up.
Access requirements
While crypto is technically allowed, the culture is smaller. As much as the Web3 community loves to turn on board the next billion, and insist on branding itself as inclusive and authorizing, mostly it is a clique with its own meeting places, rituals, languages and access requirements.
In Ignacio’s case, his web2 tribal board – after having senior roles on Electronic Arts, Oculus, Facebook and Roblox – served him get reputation points in web3; To slip into disagreement to rattle from these roles induce, as Steve Buscemi “How are you doing, fellow children?” Meme.
Bert NFT failed because Ignacio brought a web1 artifact into a web3 context using web2 assumptions about reputation, attention and status. Ignacio was rightly respected in early internet circles. But he did not go to the effort to establish a presence in web3 room.
Web3 is stem and tightly composed with a bullshit detector that is fine -tuned to outsiders who have not made the time. Web3 doesn’t care who you were on other versions of the internet. Web3 gives zero Fu*KS what you have listed on your LinkedIn. You can’t just show up and expect your inheritance to mint yourself. Web3 will know which NFTS you collect, what Shitcoins destroyed you, what Daos you’ve contributed to.
Wallets tell stories. And without real, verifiable involvement with crypto, the network sees you as read -only, not writing. I mean Ignacio admitted he couldn’t even get into Crypto Twitter. My guess is that he was quickly marked as an extractor rather than a value added. Which is perhaps the fastest way to kill an NFT project before it is even launched.
For that reason, I wonder if Ignacio actually evoked a bullet. He never had to have that conversation with his patrons about why these Bert NFTs went to hell instead of the moon.
In one last, tragic, oh-so-crrypto-twist in history, Ignacio was scammed as he clicked on a malicious link sent via email; A false study that wants to buy one of the other Bert NFTs.
IGNACIO DM’d me for help and after briefly examining it was all I could tell him that the 1 eth I paid for Bert #1 was gone forever. This was especially painful as Ignacio had committed to donating 50% of revenue from the collection to Seattle -affiliated the public TV service. The only reason he had not given the donation already was because I had told him (back in 2022), it was better to wait for the whole collection, and during that time the value of his Eth Treasury would certainly rise. Afterwards, it was the worst advice ever.
Not yet dead
And then I thought it was the end of the story. Bert was rich in meaning, but poor in bids, had not sold now, he would never sell. I packed my faithful tribute to this market -repellent NFT, sent the article to my editor and shot a DM to Ignacio to let him know something was coming out.
“Were you the one who bought the other?” Ignacio responded with a link to a TX -HASH from a few days ago.
Umm, what?! No! I didn’t buy Bert #2. So who did it?
Searching the Wallet Books address I discovered that it belonged to the Bureau of Internet Culture (BIC) –Crypto’s historic unchangeable meme -state boxAs described on their X -profile. By browsing their collection, which was appreciated over 900 ETH, I saw that they held iconic Internet memes as the creator-embossed NFTs, including me Gusta, Baton Roue, Vibing Cat, Inimpressed Nightclub Girl and Kevin, and had paid as much as 11.11 Eth for Dancing Baby and 36 Eth for Tastonkat.
I couldn’t believe it. These guys got it; This was the museum I always knew that Bert belonged to.
I was wondering: If Ignacio had known, there was an on-chain collective who actually ‘got’ Bert, and who recognized Ignacio himself as a visionary whose online heritage deserved somewhere in a blockchain-based Hall of Fame … So maybe he wouldn’t have felt so alone in web3?
And then I was wondering: What if I was right in my original thinking that Bert was underestimated on 1 ETH? All that it took was for this external body to agree that NFT was worth buying and suddenly it was. The belief in value must be validated – through pricing, cultural narrative, influencer -support and community hype. And when that happens, the thing is actually valuable.
But hey, maybe I loved it even more when it was at zero.
