Nothing could be a greater cultural and ethical shock to archives than NFTs. Prevailing archival ethics generally dictate that all users are treated equally, and that archival materials aren't exposed or sold only to high bidders. And once archives select materials for retention, they consider themselves in most cases ethically bound to do so permanently.
If an archive has a merch business, it's tiny: keychains and postcards. As poor a fit with archival DNA as tokenizing archive collections as NFTs may be, the possibility of leveraging digital scarcity by selling NFTs while retaining physical materials is a hefty temptation. The archival world is a world of inadequate budgets and financial constraint, filled with underpaid workers and massive, poorly resourced projects like digital preservation, and the challenging task of digitizing analog materials. Will archives be tempted by the potential upside of NFTs and tokenize digital representations of their crown jewels (or the rights to these assets)? This would worsen an already bad situation, where institutions like our Library of Congress hold physical copies of millions of films, TV programs, and recordings that can't be touched because someone else holds the copyright. Ideally, archives and museums should own and control both the physical and digital states of its collections. That won't happen if they have to sell or license NFTs in order to survive. And there’s another risk: Minting NFTs requires a lot of energy (though we may hope for a cleaner process), and the future security of archives is threatened by climate change. Researchers have discovered that almost all archives will be affected by risk factors like sea level rise, increased temperature, or heavy rainfall.
For those working with the raw materials of history, integrity and authenticity are the chief necessities. How do NFTs address these? While the blockchain is supposed to draw an unbroken link between creator/tokenizer and purchaser, it's just a record of transactions that might be tainted or even bogus. We know the original Mona Lisa resides in the Louvre, but it's very hard to identify who really created and who owns many of the millions of creative works made in the analog era. It’s nearly impossible to track who owns the even greater number of digital works made every year. So while the blockchain can help us follow sales and transfers of digital objects, how do we know the original representations made about these objects can be trusted? Already there are many NFTs on offer that are nothing more than tokenized versions of works belonging to third parties, often scraped from museum websites. This isn't a new problem—after we put digitized films from our archives online for free, many other stock footage companies downloaded them and sold them as their own. Who will be the arbiter of which copies are closest to the original? The quagmire recalls Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, where American craftspeople build near-perfect counterfeits of American cultural collectibles. Authenticity is based on aura, aura on belief. If many Alices sell tokenized, pirated copies of the Zapruder film to many Bobs, this bombs the blockchain with many transactions that obfuscate the fact that these might be pirated versions. The solution, obviously, is to know your source—to authenticate objects and their provenance by authenticating their owners. But can that scale in a marketplace where transactions might number in the billions?