Beyond the 'JPEG' | A Human-Centric Guide to True Digital Ownership

The Great Failure of Language

The decentralization movement’s greatest weakness is not technical, financial, or philosophical; it is linguistic.

The phrase non-fungible token may be the single worst branding decision of the 21st century. ¹ It is sterile, academic, multi-hyphenate laboratory jargon. It is fundamentally negative, defining itself by what it is not (non-fungible) rather than what it is. This is language only an engineer or an economist could love. It lacks poetry, humanity, and soul.

The result was a catastrophic vacuum of meaning. Into that vacuum rushed the only visible artifact the public could grasp: the JPEG.

One of the most profound socio-technical innovations of the time—a system for restoring provenance, scarcity, and verifiable ownership to the digital world—was immediately and perhaps irrevocably reduced to a global punchline about overpriced cartoons of apes and pixelated punks. The "digital deed" became a "digital Beanie Baby." ²

This is not a semantic quibble. It is a strategic crisis.

The centralized platforms—the “mall developers” and “digital landlords” of Web 2.0—win not because their technology is superior, but because their language is simpler. They offer "friends," "followers," "profiles," and "pages." These are human-centric metaphors. The decentralized world offered NFTs, ERC-721s, DAOs, and gas fees.

The mandate of the Digital Archaeologist is to clear away this dust of jargon. It explains, in grounded, resonant terms, what this technology actually is, where it originates, and why it is the most important—and perhaps the only—antidote to the digital world created.

What It Is Not: The 'JPEG' Illusion

When Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days sold at Christie’s for $69.3 million in March 2021, the headlines focused exclusively on the image file. ³ This singular event cemented the false consciousness, the collective illusion, that the file was the asset.

This misunderstanding is the root of the skepticism. The skeptic who right-click-saves the image for free is, in their own way, correct. The individual does have the image. The pixels are identical. The file is infinitely reproducible.

What the individual does not have is the asset.

The individual has a poster from the museum gift shop; the individual does not have the original painting. The individual has a photocopy of a car title; the individual does not have the title itself. The individual has the music; the individual does not have the "first pressing" of the vinyl record.

The technological breakthrough never centered on the file. The file is, was, and always will be endlessly copyable. The breakthrough created, for the first time in the history of the internet, a mechanism to prove—irrefutably, publicly, and permanently—who holds the title to the original.

The art world has understood this distinction for centuries. An artist’s painting can be reproduced in countless books and posters, but there is only one original. Its value is a function of its provenance—a documented history of ownership. This is often tracked in a catalogue raisonné, a definitive, scholarly ledger of an artist's work. ⁴

The blockchain, in this context, is nothing more than the first truly global, public, and unforgeable catalogue raisonné. The token is not the art; it is the entry in the ledger that points to the art and names its owner.

The problem is, non-fungible token does not sound like "a permanent entry in a public ledger." It sounds like a microchip. And when a human-centric story is absent, the market will invent one. In this case, the story became "JPEGs for millionaires."

The Cognitive Burden of "Fungibility"

Understanding the failure requires excavating the word itself.

Fungible is not a human word. It is a 17th-century legal and economic term, derived from the Latin fungī, meaning "to perform, to execute, to discharge." ⁵ Its legal sense, mutua vice fungi, meant "to take the place of each other." It describes an object that can be replaced by another identical unit. A-dollar-is-a-dollar. A-bushel-of-wheat-is-a-bushel-of-wheat.

Non-fungible, therefore, is a double-negative. It means "not-interchangeable."

From the perspective of human-computer interaction (HCI), this term is a cognitive disaster. It forces the individual to perform a complex, multi-step mental calculation just to grasp its basic meaning. The individual must first:

Encounter the unknown word fungible.
Attempt to define it (likely failing).
Learn its definition ("interchangeable").
Encounter the prefix *non-*.
Mentally negate the definition ("not-interchangeable").
Finally, apply this abstract concept ("not-interchangeable token") to a real-world object (like a piece of art).

This six-step process of intellectual translation creates immense cognitive friction. It is confusing, alienating, and cold. It is "language as gatekeeping."

Now, consider the alternatives.

The Language of Exchange: What is a "Digital Receipt"?

The abandonment of the engineer's language for the archaeologist's perspective leads to two simple, grounded terms:

Digital Receipt (formerly FT or Fungible Token)
Digital Deed (formerly NFT or Non-Fungible Token)

A Digital Receipt is an interchangeable, verifiable proof of value or membership. It is fungible.

The term fungible token is just as cold as its non-fungible cousin. But what is it really? It is a token in the most classic sense of the word: a substitute for value, an "IOU."

A U.S. Dollar is a "fungible token" (a receipt for $1 of value backed by the government).
A Casino Chip is a "fungible token" (a receipt for $1 of value redeemable only at that casino).
An Airline Mile is a "fungible token" (a receipt for a unit of travel, locked to one airline).
A Ticket Stub from a concert is a "fungible token" (a receipt for entry).

The most human-centric metaphor that covers all these use cases is a "Digital Receipt." It is a proof of value paid or value held. It is an entry ticket. It is proof of membership. It is a unit of account. A "receipt" is something every single person understands as a token of value exchange.

What Digital Receipts Were Meant to Fix

The problem with all the analog examples above is their siloed nature. A casino chip from the Bellagio is worthless at the MGM Grand. Delta SkyMiles cannot be used on American Airlines. In-game currency from World of Warcraft cannot be moved to Final Fantasy.

This is the Web 2.0 model of value: value-as-control. Platforms lock users in by holding value hostage.

Digital Receipts (like the ERC-20 standard on Ethereum) were designed as a universal, open, and interoperable standard for value. ⁶ The "best-case scenario" was to create a world where value could flow as freely as information.

Practical Examples of Digital Receipts

Instead of abstract fungible tokens, consider these grounded applications:

As Community Currency: A local bookstore issues its own Digital Receipts. When a book is purchased, "Bookstore Receipts" are earned, which can be traded with neighbors for a cup of coffee at the cafe next door, which also accepts them. The value stays within the community, governed by the community, rather than being extracted by a distant credit card company.
As Portable In-Game Value: This is the holy grail for gaming. A player spends 100 hours in a game earning a rare "Phoenix Sword" and then decides to quit. In Web 2.0, that value is lost forever. In a Web 3.0 model, the sword could be "melted down" into its component Digital Receipts (e.g., 1,000 "Iron Receipts" and 10 "Magic Receipts") and those used to craft an item in a completely different game from a different developer. This gives real, persistent value to the time and effort players invest.
As Creator Patronage: A musician or writer issues their own Digital Receipts (often called "social tokens"). Their 1,000 true fans can buy these receipts, giving the creator upfront capital. In return, those receipts might grant access to a private community, early access to new work, or even a fractional share of future royalties. It is a direct, transparent patronage model, free from platform intermediaries.

One Digital Receipt for one dollar is the same as another. One Digital Receipt for one "community vote" is the same as another. They are interchangeable, but now they are portable.

The Language of Ownership: What is a "Digital Deed"?

This leads to the second, and more profound, innovation.

A Digital Deed is a unique, verifiable, and public proof of ownership over a specific, unique asset. It is non-fungible.

This metaphor is powerful because its analog ancestor is universally understood.

A House Deed: Ownership of a house is not determined by simply sitting inside it. Ownership results from holding a deed—a legal document, filed with a public records office, that proves title. The house is the JPEG. The deed is the asset.
A Car Title: Ownership of a car is confirmed by holding the title. The physical car can be stolen, but ownership can only be transferred with that title.
An Artist's Signature: For centuries, provenance has hinged on signatures, estate stamps, and inclusion in that catalogue raisonné. A Digital Deed is the unforgeable, permanent, 21st-century signature of the artist, embedded in the work's very existence.

The word "deed" itself is perfect. Etymologically, it comes from the Old English dæd, meaning "a thing done, an act." ⁷ This is precisely what the technology records: the act of creation (the "mint"), the act of sale, the act of transfer. It is a permanent record of acts related to an asset.

What Digital Deeds Were Meant to Fix: The Original Sin of Web 2.0

This linguistic clarity matters because this is not a collector's toy. It is the antidote to the fundamental flaw in the architecture of Web 2.0. It is the answer to the "enshittification" of the web. ⁸

The great promise of the early, "hand-built" web—the web of the 1990s—was digital homesteading. Users were invited to "build a homepage" on platforms like GeoCities, AngelFire, and Tripod. Digital pioneers built their own plots of land, their own neighborhoods.

This was an illusion. The users were, in essence, "digital tenants in digital malls."

In 2009, Yahoo, the landlord of GeoCities, shut it down. In an instant, millions of digital homes, creative projects, and personal histories vanished. An entire era of internet culture was erased, an event akin to a digital Alexandria. ⁹

This was the original sin of Web 2.0. Users never owned anything. Users never had deeds to their digital homes.

Users became tenants on massive, centralized platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. Users built vast, intricate social structures, businesses, and identities on land they did not own. Creations, social graphs, and identities could be—and are—deleted, demonetized, or de-platformed at the whim of a landlord optimizing for ad revenue.

As Cory Doctorow outlines in the "enshittification" lifecycle, this is the inevitable path for all tenant-based platforms. Platforms first lure in users with a good service (low rent). Then, platforms lure in businesses to access those users (building stores in the mall). Finally, when both groups are locked in, the platform extracts all value from both, debasing the service until it is a "fading-fast shit-heap." ⁸

The tenant status resulted from a lack of a technical mechanism for ownership. There was no way to prove ownership of a profile, data, or list of "friends." The platform owned it all.

Digital Deeds (like the ERC-721 standard) flip that script. ¹⁰

They are the technical and legal backbone of a human-centric web. They are the tools that allow building on owned ground for the first time.

Practical Examples of Digital Deeds

This is the "best-case scenario," a vision of what the web should be.

For Digital Art & Collectibles (The Obvious Use): This is the Beeple example, but correctly understood. An artist mints a Digital Deed for their work. When the deed is purchased, the buyer is not buying the JPEG; the buyer is buying the provenance. The deed proves ownership of the original. More importantly, the underlying code (a smart contract) can ensure the artist automatically receives 10% of every future resale—a royalty system never possible for physical artists.
For Music & "First Pressings": A band releases their new album as 1,000 Digital Deeds. These are the verifiable "first pressings," akin to a limited-edition vinyl run. Owning one might grant access to concert pre-sales, private Q&As, or a fractional share of future royalties. The deed becomes a direct, provable link between the artist and their most passionate fans.
For Real-World Assets & Provenance: This is where the JPEG illusion fully collapses. A Digital Deed can be attached to a real-world object. When a luxury watch is purchased, a Digital Deed is also received. When the watch is sold, the deed is transferred. This creates an unforgeable, public history of ownership, eliminating the market for fakes and verifying provenance forever. This is already used for everything from real estate to rare whiskey. ¹¹
For Digital Identity & Reputation (The "Soulbound" Idea): This is perhaps the most powerful idea. A university degree, professional certifications, or a driver's license become Digital Deeds. These would be "soulbound" deeds—possession is provable, but sale is impossible. ¹² They are part of the individual. In this model, the individual owns their identity. Reliance on Facebook or LinkedIn to "verify" identity is unnecessary. The individual holds the deeds to their own life, and can present them to any platform desired.
For Digital Landmarks & Homesteads: This returns to GeoCities. A Digital Deed can represent a plot of virtual land, a unique in-game item, or—most critically—a landmark domain name. Owning a domain like authenticate.im means more than "renting" it from a registrar. In a decentralized system, the Digital Deed to that name could be held. It becomes a permanent piece of digital real estate, an "owned ground" safe from confiscation by a landlord.

When the skeptic says, "I just right-clicked and saved your JPEG," the answer is simple:

"That's fine. The individual has a picture of the house. The owner has the deed to it."

This single metaphor resolves the entire conflict. It separates the copyable file from the uncopyable title. It re-frames the conversation from "valuable pixels" to "verifiable ownership."

The Sobering Reality: What Deeds and Receipts Don't Fix

A "best-case scenario" fails if the "worst-case reality" is ignored. Credible analysis demands honesty about the technology's profound failings. It is not a magical panacea.

They Don't Fix the Interface: The single greatest barrier to adoption is usability. The current experience of "web3" is a cognitive nightmare of seed phrases, browser extensions, and cryptic wallet addresses. It is hostile to ordinary humans. The promise of an "owned web" is meaningless if only a tiny fraction of technically-literate users can access it.
They Don't Fix Human Greed (The Bubble): The 2021-2022 mania was a catastrophic distraction. It was a "gold rush" driven by the worst aspects of financial speculation. Hype completely eclipsed utility. This "digital Beanie Baby" phase ² poisoned the public's perception, perhaps for a decade, and made it infinitely harder to have sober conversations about the underlying purpose of the technology.
They Don't Magically Solve Storage (The "Oracle Problem"): This is the technology's dirty secret. A Digital Deed is just an entry in a ledger. It is not the artwork itself. The deed points to where the art is stored. In many early cases, this was just a regular URL on a private company's server. If that company goes bust, the URL dies, and the owner is left holding a deed to a digital "404 Not Found." ¹³ While solutions like IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) aim to fix this, the connection between the "deed" and the "thing" is the weakest link in the entire chain.
They Don't Fix the Environment (By Default): The initial Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism, which secured Bitcoin and early Ethereum, was—and is—an environmental disaster, consuming more energy than entire countries. ¹⁴ While the vast majority of the Digital Deed ecosystem has moved to the highly-efficient Proof-of-Stake (PoS) model (which uses ~99.9% less energy), this massive initial carbon footprint rightly damaged the technology's reputation.
They Don't Fix Bad Art or Bad Ideas: A Digital Deed does not imbue an asset with quality. 99.9% of the JPEGs minted were, in fact, worthless, low-effort cash-grabs. The technology is a tool for provenance, not a validator of quality.

This technology, in its current state, is deeply flawed. It is cumbersome, has been co-opted by speculators, and carries the baggage of its own early, destructive mistakes.

The Archaeologist's Mandate: Reclaiming the Narrative

The digital world is living through a crisis of trust. It is saturated with synthetic media ("deepfakes"), ephemeral platforms, and digital landlords who view users as a resource to be harvested.

The decentralization movement offered a solution: a permanent, public, verifiable ledger of truth. But instead of communicating this revolutionary value, its proponents offered the world non-fungible tokens. They failed to tell a human story.

The mandate of the Digital Archaeologist is to clear away this dust of jargon. To stop talking like engineers and start talking like humans. To stop saying NFT and FT and start saying "Digital Deeds" and "Digital Receipts."

These are the simple, grounded, and powerful metaphors of true ownership. They are the language of a web where creators own their work, not platforms. Where users own their identities, not landlords. Where provenance, not hype, defines value.

The "best-case scenario" is not about universal crypto-trading. It centers on a web where a concert ticket also functions as a lifetime backstage pass. It is about a web where a university degree is a "soulbound" deed an individual holds, not a piece of paper a future employer must verify. It is about a web where identity, digital home, and creative work build upon owned ground—a landmark safe from erasure by a digital landlord.

The battle for the future of the internet is, first and foremost, a battle of language. Reclaiming the web requires reclaiming the narrative.

Sources

Farokhmanesh, M. (2021). "Even the NFT acronym is terrible." The Verge. ↑
Kastrenakes, J. (2021). "NFTs are a digital Beanie Baby bubble." The Verge. ↑ ↑
Christie's. (2021). "Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days." Christie's Auction House. ↑
Roeder, M. B., & W. Weit. (2017). "Provenance and the Catalogue Raisonné." Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of N.A.. ↑
Harper, D. (2023). "Fungible (adj.)." Online Etymology Dictionary. ↑
Ethereum Foundation. (2015). "ERC-20: Token Standard." Ethereum Improvement Proposals. ↑
Harper, D. (2023). "Deed (n.)." Online Etymology Dictionary. ↑
Doctorow, C. (2023). "Why the Internet is a Fading-Fast Shit-Heap (And How to Fix It)." Wired. ↑ ↑
CNN. (2009). "Yahoo shutting down GeoCities." CNN.com. ↑
Ethereum Foundation. (2018). "ERC-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard." Ethereum Improvement Proposals. ↑
G.D. (2021). "Why luxury brands are experimenting with NFTs." The Economist. ↑
Vitalik Buterin, E. G. Weyl, & P. Ohlhaver. (2022). "Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul." Social Science Research Network (SSRN). ↑
Olshansky, M. (2021). "What happens when your NFT's URL breaks?" Vice. ↑
University of Cambridge Judge Business School. (2023). "Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index." ↑