During the 2021 NFT boom, NFT-Aficionados said, “Even if it’s zero, I would like it,” as a countercultural declaration of the tongue that meaning and membership are more important than profit.
It’s become something of the punk rock spirit for Web3. Burning money (figic or literally) was a flex to show individuals belonging to individuals within a group who positioned themselves as moral antitheses to time-defined speculative frenzy.
Like the early Cypherpunks, which fought for freedom and autonomy, and Bitcoin Maxis, which had multiple crashes, next-generation NFT degrees threw magical internet money that can be saved by right-clicking and being saved JPEG.
But even the most enthusiastic followers of blockchain promises are not affected by doubt when a long, cold winter of code ejects both capital and belief. And the NFT bear was a grizzly.
The wings of the activity over the past few weeks – despite some receiving nearly $8 million for $45 crypto punk, someone else grabbed the ether rock for over $300,000, doubled the floor for Pudgy Penguins and tripled the Moonbird. At $156 million in July 2025, there’s nothing close to the crazy highs of August 2021 when Opensea reported to be over $3 billion in NFT trading volume. In particular, with NFT ART, trading has declined 93% since its peak in 2021.
So, assuming your beloved NFT is approaching the bottom of that rock, 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: Ah, I love artOtherwise, a screenshot JPEG is sufficient.
Because in order to still love these things at the bottom of their rock, first you need to be satisfied with the value you still paid in relation to the value you will gain from it.
Secondly, there must be a reason it becomes NFT. If it’s a pretty photo that can be saved, copied or shared without results, then it’s no point in being an NFT and there’s no sacrifice to see it go to zero.
As everyone’s favorite media theorist Marshall McClurhan argues, the medium is a message. For that content, you don’t love images more. Because as an NFT, the images are different. NFT reprograms your role from mere viewers of images to participants in a medium that tracks ownership, identity, value and status.
McLuhan believed that all mediums were an extension of our own. The book stretches your eyes. The phone stretches out. Similarly, like NFT, we are related to objects in ways we couldn’t do if it was just a JPEG.
Bert is evil
With this in mind, let me present a case study of my beloved NFT: Bert Is Evil. November 2022, I bought an NFT that is probably worth zero today. Called Bert Is Evil, this was one of the first ever viral internet memes (c. 1997), and was created 25 years later as NFT by the original creator.
Despite its rich history as an early online joke, it failed horribly as an NFT collection. This is a huge part of why I love it. For me, NFT is a valuable artifact that you can marvel at a museum.
It is a historic residue. Unchanging memory that failed from the intersection between two eras of the web. It revealed the limitations of translation between networks, eras and cultural grammar, and how the meaning and value of Web3 is not guaranteed by the act of casting.
and meme
Before Pepe the Frog and Troll Face, Warjack, LOL Guy, Gigachado, Bert is evil. Perhaps Mr. T just ate my balls and dancing baby, early internet memes exposed the nasty secret lives of half of Sesame Street duo Bert and Ernie.
Photoshopped at a series of mock photos, the Muppets are portrayed by the most infamous stories of history, from Jeffrey Dahmer and Lee Harvey Oswald to Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan. There was “proof” that Bart smoked marijuana, loved the younger Michael Jackson’s crotch and forced Ernie to get a lap dance.
Another “picture” referenced the suspected scene removed from the leaked sex tape of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee.
Born in 1997 while an art student at the University of the Philippines, this website was done by Dino Ignacio, in his 20s, to make his friends laugh. Armed with a magazine collection spanning 14.4 Bomodem and Omni Heavy Metal and Mad Magazine, Ignacio was a pupil of mashup culture at the dawn of the Internet.
Burt quickly went viral and traveled through early internet forums, email chains and blogs. At the time, the web was participatory and disorderly. The remix was ramped, and the author was blurred, privileged circulation over source. Anyone can edit Bert. No one owned him. He mutated endlessly at the hands of Photoshop Pirates long before conditions like “fake news” entered the Lexicon.
His popularity exploded when Burt won Webby. The website has become so popular that Ignacio can no longer afford to do it on his own. Rather than shutting it down, he zipped it up and offered it to others to turn the mirror into a mirror in exchange for hosting the original site. After being decentralized, hundreds of mirrors appeared all over the world, raising the scope and infamy of the evil Bert.
Then, in 2001, altered images of Bad and Osama bin Laden appeared on protester signs at the Protaliban rally. Ignacio felt it had gone too far. He closed the website out of concern.
But the meme had its own life. It was alive.
NFT
A quarter century later, Ignacio had the idea that Bert would immortalize evil as the subject of historic and possessable records. Casting memes as NFTs consciously revived the icon from previous technology ruptures. The gestures were intended to be cultural rather than commercial. It’s an act of media continuity.
Initially, my love for NFT was based on otakumakuhianism. However, my relationship with NFT grew as Bert failed to attract fans.
I learned about it. I learned about the Maiden Edition of Philippine Vogue (September 2022). Ignacio was featured by gloss, recognising its impact on the technology industry. Vogue is not the obvious place to get your NFT alpha, but I was intrigued and thought that this unsold unknown NFT might have been overlooked and underrated.
In the story, the journalist investigates Ignacio and why he thought his NFT project was a flop. “Maybe I don’t understand NFT,” he said.
If I were a better investor, I would recognize this as a red flag and continue to turn my magazine over. Instead, I jumped to the Foundation and bought the first of the four in the collection. Within a few hours, mutual friends saw the transaction on-chain and connected Ignacio with me via Facebook DM.
Ignacio was shocked that one of his NFTs finally sold almost a year after Mint. His friend told him I was someone On Crypto he agreed to the phone and then I heard the backstory. Ignacio said he felt like a Web3 con man. He was confident in the area of existing Web2 spheres that circumnavigate game design, software development, VR, avatars, and more, but he accused him of not feeling the same reliability on Web3 and not doing enough to publish Mint.
Several of his friends offered advice on how to create hype, such as diving into discrepancies, shit on Twitter, and making some space. However, Ignacio only spent a few weeks before giving up.
Admission requirements
Crypto is not technically permitted, but culture is not. The Web3 community loves to bang for adopting the next billion and insist on claiming to brand your own branding to be inclusive and empowering. Most often it is a sect with its own encounter location, ritual, language, and admission requirements.
In Ignacio’s case, his Web2 pedigree, who played senior roles in Electronic Arts, Oculus, Facebook and Roblox, earned little reputation points on Web3. rattles off these roles to slip into the discrepancy, Steve Buscemi says, “How are you, fellow kids?” meme.
Bert NFT failed because Ignacio brought Web1 artifacts to Web1 context using Web2’s assumptions about reputation, attention and status. Ignacio was correctly respected in his early internet circles. However, he did not proceed to make an effort to establish a presence in the Web3 space.
Web3 is a tribal and tight knitting, with a tweaked bullshit detector for outsiders who are not spending their time. Web3 doesn’t care who was on other versions of the internet. Web3 gives zero Fu*ks what you list on LinkedIn. You cannot just show up and expect your heritage to be making itself. Web3 wants to know what NFTs you collect, what Shitcoins have destroyed you, the DAOS you contributed.
The wallet tells the story. And without a realistic and verifiable involvement with Crypto, the network considers you read-only, not write-owned. In other words, Ignacio admitted that he can’t even join Crypto Twitter. My guess is that he was quickly labelled as an extractor rather than a value added. This is probably the fastest way to kill the fastest NFT project before it’s released.
So I wonder if Ignacio actually dodged the bullet. He didn’t have to have that conversation with his patron about why those Bert NFTs went to hell instead of the moon.
In the final tragic, highly crypto twist of the story, Ignacio was scamned when he clicked on a malicious link sent via email. Fake enquiries about to buy one of the other Bad NFTs.
Ignacio asked me for help and after watching it temporarily, all I could say to him was that one eth I paid for Bert #1 was gone forever. This was particularly painful as Ignacio had pledged to donate 50% of the proceeds from his collection to an affiliate of Seattle’s public broadcasting services. The only reason he hadn’t made a donation is because I told him (in 2022) it’s better to wait for the entire collection that was sold. Meanwhile, his ETH Treasury value will certainly increase. In hindsight, it was the worst advice ever.
He’s not dead yet
And I thought that was the end of the story. Bart was meaningful, but his bids were poor and he was not sold now. He never sold. I wrapped a loyal respect for the NFT that endures this market, sent the article to the editor, and shot DMs at Ignacio to let him know that something was coming out.
“Are you the person who bought the second one?” Ignacio replied with a link to TX hash a few days ago.
Hmm, what? no! I didn’t buy Bert #2. So who did it?
Searching the wallet address, I discovered it belongs to the Internet Culture Bureau (BIC) –Crypto’s Historical Unchanging Memes Ministry of Financeas explained in X Profile. Browse their collections and browse over 900 ETH, I kept the iconic internet memes as NFTs created by creators like Gusta, Baton Lu, Atmosphere Cat, Impressed Nightclub Girl, Kevin and more, paying 11.11 ETH and 36 ETH for keyboard cats.
I couldn’t believe it. These guys got it. This was a museum I always knew that Bert belonged to.
Maybe Ignacio knew there was an on-chain group that actually won Bert, and did he recognize Ignacio himself as a visionary worthy of the online legacy’s location in the blockchain-based hall of fame?
And I wondered: what if I was right in my original idea that Bert is underrated in 1 ETH? All we needed to do was agree that this external body was worth buying NFTs. You need to test your beliefs about values. And when that happens, things are actually worth it.
But hey, maybe I loved it more when it was zero.
