Hong Kong, May 4 (Reuters)-Shanghai residents turn to and share blockchains to preserve their memory of the city’s month-long blockade of COVID-19. Creating videos, photos and artwork that capture the trials as non-alternative tokens Avoid deletion.
Unable to leave home for weeks at a time, many of the city’s 25 million inhabitants have unleashed frustration online, talked about tight blockades and the difficulty of sourcing food, and patients. Share stories of difficulties such as not being able to receive treatment.
It intensified the game of cats and mice with Chinese censors. They vowed to strengthen the policing of the internet and group chat to prevent what they describe as rumors.
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Some people are resolutely reposting such content, while others are looking to NFT marketplaces like the world’s largest OpenSea. There, users can create content and use cryptocurrencies to buy and sell content. This is partly due to the fact that the data recorded on the blockchain cannot be erased. ..
The height of the moment of the blockade in Shanghai is 6 on April 22, titled “April Voice”, a montage of voices recorded during the outbreak in Shanghai, where netizens fought censors overnight. It’s rooted in sharing a minute of video.read more
As of Monday, alongside hundreds of other NFTs related to the blockade in Shanghai, 786 different items related to video will be found on OpenSea.
On April 23, a Chinese Twitter user with a handle of imFong made a video of “April Voice” on an NFT and frozen the metadata in a widely retweeted post. This video will be forever in IPFS. ” For interplanetary file systems, a type of distributed network.
Like most major foreign social media and news platforms, Twitter is blocked in China, but residents can access it using a VPN.
A Shanghai-based programmer told Reuters that he was one of the people in the city who saw their efforts to keep the video alive as part of the “people’s rebellion.”
POPaganda, a non-fungible token (NFT) collection created by Malaysian artist Simon Fong, depicting life under the blockade of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Shanghai, China, is on the web of the NFT Marketplace OpenSea. You can see it on the site. , 2022. REUTERS / Florence Lo / Illustration.
He created an NFT based on screenshots of Shanghai’s COVID lockdown map, showing how most of the city is blocked from the outside world.
“Stuck at home because of an outbreak leaves me a lot of time,” he said on anonymous terms.
Other Shanghai content sold as NFTs at OpenSea includes Weibo posts with curb complaints, images inside the Quarantine Center, and works of art inspired by the blocked life.
Simon Fong, a 49-year-old freelance designer from Malaysia who has lived in Shanghai for nine years, began to create satirical illustrations of a closed life in the style of propaganda posters from the Mao era.
He hit the market late last year and started making them on NFTs, and now he can sell nine pieces for an average price of 0.1 ether ($ 290).
His work includes scenes dramatizing PCR tests and residents’ demands for government rations.
“Some people say that the blockade is retreating Shanghai, so I chose the Mao-era propaganda style for these pieces,” Fong said.
Although China has banned cryptocurrency transactions, it sees blockchain as a promising technology, and NFTs are gaining domestic attention as they are accepted by state media and even tech companies such as AntGroup and Tencent Holdings.
The protracted blockade in China’s financial hub, Shanghai, is a party to the controversial Zero-Corona strategy, a policy that poses an increasing risk to Beijing’s economy.
The COVID outbreak in Shanghai, which began in March, was the worst in China since the early days of the 2020 pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of people are infected in the city.
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Report by Josh Ye; edited by Brenda Goh and Michael Perry
Our Criteria: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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