We Feared the Wrong Thing (Again)
The digital world spent three years convinced that JPEGs were the future of value.
Bored apes. Digital receipts on a blockchain.
We were told this was a revolution in ownership and scarcity.
That cycle collapsed. Now everyone’s skeptical. And when AI showed up, the pattern-matching kicked in. “This feels like NFTs. More hype. More noise. More people getting rich off nothing.”
That comparison isn’t just wrong. It’s a category error that will cost you years if you believe it.
The Pattern You’re Missing
NFTs required belief. You had to buy into a philosophical framework about digital scarcity before the technology had any value to you. The entire system depended on collective agreement. When that agreement broke, the floor fell out.
AI doesn’t care what you think. It debugs code. It summarizes legal documents. It generates functional prototypes. You can hate the entire concept and still use the output. That’s the difference between hype and an engine.
This matters because belief systems collapse.
Tools evolve.
The Misplaced Fear
When AI hit mainstream, people panicked about jobs, creativity, truth itself. Valid concerns. But notice what didn’t happen with NFTs. Nobody feared them. We should have.
A speculative bubble disguised as culture should terrify you more than a productivity tool you don’t fully understand yet. NFTs incentivized pure speculation over production. No engine. No function. Just up or out.
AI scares people because it actually does something. That’s the tell.
The Spam Phase Is Real
Right now, AI is flooding the internet with mediocre content. Generic blog posts. Soulless imagery. The criticism is fair.
But I’ve seen this cycle before. The printing press filled the world with pamphlets. Photography was going to kill painting. The web was going to drown us in geocities pages.
The spam phase always happens when the barrier drops to zero. What matters is what comes after. The people using AI to create more noise will get filtered out by the market. The ones using it as a scaffold for real thought will define what’s next.
This is the diagnostic: if a tool survives its spam phase, it wasn’t a fad. It was infrastructure getting installed.
What to Verify
Go test the difference yourself. Try to build something with an NFT. Not flip it. Not speculate on it. Build with it. You’ll find there’s nothing there.
Then take any real problem you’re facing and run it through an AI workflow. Doesn’t matter if you like the tool. Just see if it moves the work forward.
One was a religion. The other is a bicycle.
The future isn’t about owning digital receipts. It’s about mastering new ways to build. The people who recognize the difference now are the ones who won’t waste the next three years nursing the wrong hangover.
ABOUT THE 55/35 METHOD
Veteran intuition meets modern velocity. Pattern recognition from decades of cycles applied to today’s tools. We move fast. But we move with weight.
THE ARMORY
Free readers get the diagnostic. Paid subscribers get the engine. Upgrade and you unlock the operational layer: workflows, guides, the internal methods that run VengaDragon. Three foundational PDFs now. One new tactical guide every month. Stop watching. Start building.
V➤ If you can’t tell the difference between a tool and a belief system, you’ll spend the next decade building temples instead of bridges.