Tokenization is the act of turning something specific into something exchangeable. An asset becomes a value, a value becomes a currency, a currency becomes a standardized token. Each step trades nuance for liquidity: the more interchangeable a thing is, the easier it is to trade, and the less it remembers what it originally was.
This is the same move as branding, and the same move as adtech impressions. A varied reality (a specific reader, a specific song, a specific building) is flattened into a countable unit so a market can form around it. Useful, until the unit fully detaches from the reality it abstracted.
“Monetizing an abstraction is fine right up until the abstraction forgets it was ever standing in for something real.”
Enshittification is what that detachment looks like over time. The platform, the ad unit, the tokenized asset: each optimizes the standardized proxy while the underlying value quietly leaves the building. Watch for the moment a market starts trading the token more enthusiastically than the thing.
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