How NFTs ruin the beauty of procedural generation

This is going to be a short polemical post, I think, about something that's been bothering me within a lot of the NFT related discussion.

So I love procedural generation as a cross-disciplinary artform. I say artform instead of technique because I think there's traits that gather most procgen projects together philosophically regardless of the medium of the final artifact.

One of the most important ones, to me, is *contingency*. While there are procgen works that deterministically use the procedural generation as a way to compress the artifact down to a small space, notably I'm thinking of artworks in demoscene, I think a large part of what people mean when they say procgen involves the use of randomness (or rather pseudo-randomness seeded by something like the particular moment in time when the generation happens). This randomness leads to unique experiences, surprises, works that are frozen little moments of time out of a staggering number of possible universes.

One of the things I love is the combination of this contingency with interactivity: every new planet in No Man's Sky is something *you* get to see for yourself for the first time, every roguelike run is---while not guaranteed to be so, it is extremely likely to be---a unique playthrough, every time you make music in Tidal and use any kind of randomness you're going to get a unique experience of song to that moment in time, every execution of a Processing art piece for yourself is going to give you something new no one else has seen.

What I'm saying is that this contingency is best when it's experienced and lived, which brings me to what I hate about the use of procgen in NFTs: the tl;dr is that you can generate a large number of artifacts that you can guarantee are different from each other but thematically related to mint as a collection of tokens.

I find that aesthetically and philosophically horrifying because it's a direct inversion of what I think is special about procgen art.

It takes that contingency, those moments that should be a part of your memories and your experiences, and turns them into something to trade. Instead of each person getting to experience the in-the-momentness of the generator running with that seed in that time, you run it many times pre-fabricating those memories in advance for consumption.

Is that the worst part of the NFT movement? Probably not. But I think it's a part that's worth actively fighting.