“I will cut off your ****, you ***ing trash”
The first openly gay Lithuanian parliament member Tomas Vytautas Raskevičius is collaborating on an NFT artwork on Rarible, and creator Erikas Mališauskas will donate all proceeds to LGBT charities in their country. The artwork portrays a cloud, and it’s made using hateful private messages received by Raskevičius and others in the LGBT community in Lithuania.
The messages in the hate speech cloud are all unedited, and therefore in Lithuanian. There are some pretty harsh ones like ‘I will cut off your ****, you ****ing trash’ or ‘We will kill all the scum, you will be the first’. Mališauskas chose to make the artwork in the shape of a cloud because he believes that ‘the hate speech cloud will eventually clear away’. He also highlighted a sense of irony;
“All the money will be donated to LGBT causes in Lithuania. This means that everyone who has sent these hate speech messages to LGBT people will become contributors to LGBT welfare themselves because this art piece was created and is being sold only because of them”, the creator explained.
The Hate Speech Cloud is a unique NFT, available through Rarible.
NFTs used for good
In the first quarter of 2021, there has been $1.5 billion in trading volume for NFTs according to the DappRadar Industry Report. As NFTs hit the mainstream, this blockchain product also saw some backlash. People called out the technology for being bad for the environment. Even though they missed the fact that that particular complaint is mainly about the mining power behind the entire Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain. In addition, there are plenty of NFTs running on a Proof-of-Stake network, which requires much less power than Ethereum.
Among this negative mainstream attention, it’s also important to point out the good that technology can bring. This NFT sale supporting LGBT communities in Lithuania is just one example. A female Asian-American digital artist nicknamed pplpleasr auctioned a promotion video for Uniswap for a whopping $569,000 and donated all proceeds to charities that support the Stand With Asians movement. This happened at a time that hate crimes against the Asian community in the United States had been on the rise.
The New York Times, virtual popstar Lil Miquela, footballer Mesut Özil, Adidas and Karlie Kloss, Diplo, The Sandbox, and Paris Hilton are some of NFT creators that have donated to charity. It underlines the ability of technology to do good, bring people together and benefit other communities in need.
