My father died 23 years ago, his voice is now an NFT
Twelve days before my 13th birthday my father lost his battle with cancer, that was twenty-three years ago. This was hands down the most difficult event that I’ve ever experienced in my life. Losing my father at such a young age is something I didn’t handle well, and it had negative impacts on my life starting with me largely dismissing school and not applying myself to anything for roughly the next decade.
My father welcomes me into the world
Sadly, my father died before there was the ease of recording moments in high definition video via these nifty little things we call smartphones. A couple of dozen photos of my father exist and, until very recently, it was all I thought I had to remember him by. While I did find the audio of his funeral recently and digitize it to publish to YouTube, I didn’t have any audio or video of him.
Then I found a microcassette tape with my name written in my father’s handwriting on the label. I went to eBay and bought the cheapest microcassette record I could find. My father worked for the Indiana State Police and, at the time of his passing, was a detective so he frequently used microcassette tapes for notes and interviews, would this be a personal message to me that I’d somehow not discovered until now? Sadly, no. It was one of the tapes from our answering machine in 1998.
Did my father leave me a message?
Jackpot.
My father’s voice. MY FATHER’S VOICE! Dad, through almost 23 years of time you’ve reached out and spoken to me. I cried. At first, I listened in shock, rewind, play, rewind, play, rewind, play. Then I cried. I’d heard my father’s voice for the first time in decades. But it’s so brief, ever so brief, just him saying our phone number at the time and to leave a message. I listened to both sides of the tape and sadly, this was the only capture of his voice. The rest of the tape was filled with me rambling to the machine that so and so would be bringing me home after basketball practice, people calling to leave messages to mom that they were so sorry to hear of his passing, but alas only these few words of my father’s voice. Even now I have tears freely flowing as I write this.
Wow, dad, you sounded a lot more country than I remember. What have I forgotten about you?
My father has been dead for almost two thirds of my life now, aside from a few memories that grow fuzzier each year, I don’t have much to remember him by. I write a yearly letter to tell him of what has happened in my life, you can find the most recent one here, I find it a therapeutic process and it lets me feel for a brief few moments that I still have my father here and that he’s part of my life still. This letter gives me some way of keeping him alive, digitally, by treating him like he’s still there.
Enter NFTs. NFT stands for non-fungible token, they are these blockchain creations that allow you to carry out transactions involving the ownership of a specific digital thing. Recently NFTs have made headlines as people have begun selling digital art. Then I joked to someone about the only known recording of my father’s voice as an NFT to someone.
Well… why not? If I make my father an NFT, I could give him some extension to his digital mortality by getting another person involved in the stewardship of this digital artifact that captures a brief moment of his time on earth. Maybe he’ll go on to be sampled in a song or used by some electronic music artist to be the next “the system is down, the system is down, doo doo doo”, used in a film, catch a news cycle, or maybe someone will become his champion like me and work to keep some fragment of his existence preserved for as long as practically possible.
Mark Mercer, born on January 24th, 1953. Died March 11th, 1998. Rebirthed (sorta) as an NFT on March 17th, 2021.
Dad, you are now a unique digital asset. Your voice now exists as a non-fungible digital property. You could barely operate an electric typewriter and now you 'live' on the internet in the latest in blockchain developments.
https://rarible.com/token/0x60f80121c31a0d46b5279700f9df786054aa5ee5:492427?tab=overview