It's like they take the best part of internet (freedom to spread information) and forced a price tag on it. Like people who have more money than they can use tried to come up with a way to waste that money to make everything worse.
Bioshock was a warning, not a guidebook. If you have too much money, I'm sure there are lots of reputable charities that need money.
Or 532 million$ for https://www.cnet.com/news/why-this-cryptopunk-nft-sold-for-5...
A lot of it is greenwashing + fraud (eg. money laundering) + wales upping the price for a ( stupid) digital avatar. I would expect some people also earned a lot of money with crypto and are using it just as a way to show off.
The intrinsic value is yet to be determined. Let's see what happens when crypto drops like after 2017.
Edit: I just crawled OpenSea api and these are the results by it's collection market cap ( 50.100 collections).
The value quickly decimates and there are only 277 of 50100 collections with > 0 eth
Data: https://pastebin.com/NyLMcs7c ( not sure why cryptopunks is not in it though. All data without market cap from the api was filtered out)
Script ( linqpad) : http://share.linqpad.net/wkbrut.linq
I think it is growing as a way to establish and track ownership of digital assets, which up to now has not been possible for most people. How this all shakes out over the next few years is unknown, but I think that is the primary motivator (aside from it currently being a fad).