Still Loving My ‘If It Went to Zero’ NFT

During the NFT boom of 2021, NFT-aficionados said “I’d love it even if it went to zero” as a tongue-in-cheek countercultural declaration that meaning and membership mattered more than profit.

It became kind of like a punk rock ethos in Web3. Burning money (figuratively or literally) was a flex to signal individual belonging to an in-group that positioned itself as the moral antithesis to the speculative frenzy that defined the time.

Like the early cypherpunks who fought for freedom and autonomy, or the Bitcoin maxis who held through multiple crashes, the next-gen NFT degens threw eyewatering amounts of magical internet monies at otherwise right-click-and-savable JPEGs to prove they understood the deeper layers of internet culture and crypto ideology.

But even the most ardent believers in blockchain’s promise are not immune to doubt when a long, cold Crypto Winter drains both capital and conviction. And the NFT bear has been grizzly.

Despite a flutter of activity in recent weeks—someone picked up 45 CryptoPunks for nearly $8 million, someone else grabbed an Ether Rock for over $300K, the Pudgy Penguins’ floor doubled, Moonbirds tripled—for the most part, the NFT market is down bad. At $156 million for July 2025, we’re nowhere near the crazy highs of August 2021 when OpenSea reported over $3 billion in NFT trading volume. For NFT art specifically, trading is down 93% since its 2021 peak.

So, assuming your beloved NFT is nearing its rock bottom, it’s time to check in and see: do you actually still love it?

If so, why do you still love it?

And you can’t just say: Oh, I love the art, otherwise a screenshotted JPEG would suffice.

Because to still love these things at their rock bottom, firstly, you have to be content with the value you paid in relation to the value you still get out of it.

Second, there has to be a reason for it to be an NFT. If it were just a pretty picture that can be saved, copied or shared without consequence, there's no point in it being an NFT and no sacrifice in watching it go to zero.

As everybody’s favorite media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, would argue: the medium is the message. You don’t love the image more because of its content. You love it more because as an NFT, the image is something else. The NFT reprograms your role from mere viewer of the image to participant in a medium that tracks ownership, identity, value and status.

McLuhan believed every medium is an extension of ourselves. A book extends the eye. A phone extends the voice. Likewise with an NFT, we are in relation to an object in a way we could not have been if it were just a JPEG.

Story Continues## Bert Is Evil

With this in mind, let me present to you a case study for my beloved NFT: Bert is Evil.In November 2022, I bought an NFT that is very probably worth zero today. Called Bert is Evil, this was one of the first-ever viral internet memes (circa 1997), minted as an NFT by its original creator 25 years later.

Despite its rich history as an early online joke, it failed horribly as an NFT collection. Which is a very big part of why I love it. For me, the NFT is a priceless artifact that you could be marveling at in a museum.

It is an historical residue; an immutable memory from a failed crossing between two eras of the Web. It revealed the limits of translation between networks, eras and cultural grammars and how meaning and value in Web3 is not guaranteed by the act of minting.

The OG Meme

Before Pepe the Frog and Trollface, Wojak, LOL guy and GigaChad, there was: Bert is Evil. Prefaced perhaps only by Mr. T Ate My Balls and Dancing Baby, the early internet meme exposed the sordid secret life of one-half of the Sesame Street duo, Bert and Ernie.

Photoshopped into a series of mock photographs, the Muppet was pictured alongside history’s most infamous, from Jeffrey Dahmer and Lee Harvey Oswald to Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan. There was “evidence” of Bert smoking marijuana, fondling a young Michael Jackson’s crotch, and forcing Ernie to get a lap dance.

Another “photo” referenced an alleged deleted scene from Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s leaked sex tape where the newlyweds had engaged in “a torrid orgy” with Bert.

Spawned in 1997 while he was still a student of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines, the website was just a thing that twenty-something Dino Ignacio did to make his friends laugh. Armed with a hand-me-down 14.4 baud modem and a magazine collection spanning Omni Heavy Metal to Mad Magazine, Ignacio was a disciple of mashup culture at the internet’s dawn.

Bert quickly went viral, traveling through nascent internet forums, email chains and blogs. Back then, the web was participatory and anarchic. Remixing was rampant and authorship blurred, privileging circulation over provenance. Anyone could edit Bert; no one owned him. He mutated endlessly at the hands of Photoshop pirates long before terms like “fake news” entered our lexicon.

When Bert won a Webby, his popularity exploded. The website became so popular that Ignacio could no longer afford to run it on his own. Rather than shut it down, he zipped it up and offered it to others to mirror in exchange for hosting the original site. After decentralizing, hundreds of mirrors popped up across the world, increasing Evil Bert’s reach and notoriety.

Then, in 2001, an altered image of Bert and Osama Bin Laden appeared on protestor signs at a pro-Taliban rally. Ignacio felt it had gone too far. He shut down the website out of concern.

But the meme had a life of its own. It lived on.

The NFT

A quarter-century later, Ignacio had the idea to immortalize Bert is Evil as an historical, ownable object of record. Minting the meme as an NFT consciously resurrected an icon from a previous technological rupture. The gesture was not meant to be commercial but cultural: an act of media continuity.

Initially, my affection for the NFT was grounded in nerdy McLuhianism. But, as Bert failed to attract fans, my relationship to the NFT deepened.

I had learned about it by reading the maiden edition of Philippines Vogue (September 2022), where Ignacio had been profiled by the glossy in recognition of his impact on the technology industry. While Vogue is not the obvious place to get your NFT alpha, I was intrigued, thinking this unsold, unknown NFT might have been overlooked and undervalued.

In the story, the journalist probed Ignacio as to why he thought his NFT project was a flop. “Maybe I just don’t understand NFTs,” he said.

If I were a better investor, I would have recognized this as the red flag it was and continued to flip through my magazine. Instead, I jumped onto Foundation and bought the first of four in the collection. Within hours, a mutual friend had seen the transaction on-chain and connected Ignacio and I on Facebook DM.

Ignacio was shocked that one of his NFTs had finally sold, almost a year after the mint. His friend told him that I was someone in crypto so he agreed to a phone call and then, I heard the backstory. Ignacio said he felt like an imposter in Web3, disingenuous, foreign. While he was confident amongst his existing Web2 spheres orbiting game design, software development, VR, avatars and more, he didn’t feel the same credibility in Web3 and he blamed himself for not doing enough to publicize the mint.

Some of his friends offered advice on how to build hype, like diving into Discords, shitposting on Twitter and doing some Spaces. But Ignacio spent only a couple weeks before giving up.

Admission Requirements

While crypto is technically permissionless, the culture is less so. As much as the Web3 community loves to bang on about onboarding the next billion, and insists on branding itself as inclusive and empowering, for the most part, it is a clique with its own meeting places, rituals, language and admission requirements.

In Ignacio’s case, his Web2 pedigree — having held senior roles at Electronic Arts, Oculus, Facebook and Roblox — earned him few reputational points in Web3; sliding into Discord to rattle off those roles conjures that Steve Buscemi “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme.

The Bert NFT failed because Ignacio brought a Web1 artifact into a Web3 context using Web2 assumptions about reputation, attention and status. Ignacio was rightly respected in early internet circles. But he didn’t go to the effort to establish a presence in Web3 spaces.

Web3 is tribal and tight-knit with a bullshit detector fine-tuned to outsiders who haven't done the time. Web3 doesn’t care who you were on other versions of the internet. Web3 gives zero fu*ks what you listed on your LinkedIn. You can’t just show up and expect your legacy to mint itself. Web3 wants to know what NFTs you’re collecting, what shitcoins wrecked you, what DAOs you’ve contributed to.

Wallets tell stories. And without real, verifiable involvement with crypto, the network sees you as read-only, not write-own. I mean, Ignacio admitted that he couldn’t even get into Crypto Twitter. My guess is that he was quickly labeled an extractor rather than a value-add. Which is, perhaps, the fastest way to kill an NFT project before it’s even launched.

For that reason, I wonder if Ignacio actually dodged a bullet. He never had to have that conversation with his patrons about why those Bert NFTs went to hell instead of the moon.

In a final, tragic, oh-so-crypto twist in the story, Ignacio was scammed when he clicked on a malicious link sent by email; a phony inquiry looking to buy one of the other Bert NFTs.

Ignacio DM’d me for help and after briefly looking into it, all I could tell him was that the 1 ETH I paid for Bert #1 was gone forever. This was particularly painful since Ignacio had committed to donating 50% of the proceeds of the collection to the Seattle affiliate of the Public Broadcasting Service. The only reason he hadn’t made the donation already was because I’d told him (back in 2022) it was better to wait til the whole collection sold, and in that time, the value of his ETH treasury would surely increase. In hindsight, that was the worst advice ever.

Not Yet Dead

And so, I thought, that was the end of the story. Bert was rich in meaning but poor in bids, had not sold by now, he was never going to sell. I wrapped my faithful homage to this market-resistant NFT, sent the article to my editor, and shot a DM to Ignacio to let him know something was coming out.

“Were you the one who purchased the second one?” Ignacio replied, with a link to a tx hash from a couple days ago.

Umm, what?! No! I did not buy Bert #2. So who did?

Searching the wallet address, I discovered it belonged to the Bureau of Internet Culture (BIC)—crypto’s historic immutable meme treasury, as described at their X profile. Browsing their collection valued over 900 ETH, I saw they held iconic internet memes as creator-minted NFTs including Me Gusta, Baton Roue, Vibing Cat, Unimpressed Nightclub Girl and Kevin, and had paid as much as 11.11 ETH for Dancing Baby and 36 ETH for Keyboard Cat.

I couldn’t believe it. These guys got it; this was the museum I always knew Bert belonged in.

I wondered: If Ignacio had known there was an on-chain collective that actually ‘got’ Bert, and who recognized Ignacio himself as a visionary whose online legacy deserved a place in a blockchain-based hall of fame… Then maybe, he wouldn’t have felt so alone in Web3?

And then I wondered: what if I was right in my original thinking that Bert was undervalued at 1 ETH? All it took was for this external body to agree that the NFT was worth buying and suddenly it was. Belief in value needs to be validated—through price action, cultural narrative, influencer support and community hype. And when that happens, the thing does indeed become valuable.

But hey, maybe I loved it even more when it was at zero.

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