Who doesn't love a good crazywall?I find the world of NFT-flogging celebrities fascinating, both because of the visceral, skin-crawling embarrassment I feel when I see people like Fallon and Hilton half-heartedly try to express enthusiasm for their expensive new Twitter avatars, and also because it gives me the sense that there is something going on behind the scenes here that I am not quite privy to. Where does a person like Paris Hilton or Eminem even hear about "bored apes"? Who is recommending that they buy one? Is this really the best thing any of them can think to do with their money and fame? [...]
If you pay attention to both the Hollywood trades and the crypto press, and smoke enough weed, you can begin to pick out the contours of an expanding, interconnected, celebrity-based web3 financial-cultural complex: [...] If you have access to a free trial of some chart-making software, you can even begin to make a corkboard map of this emerging web of ownership, business relationships, and incredibly bad art.
I don't quite know what to make of this. Is it a ... scam? A dodge? A conspiracy? One of the funny things that the world of web3 seems intent on revealing is the extent to which the boundaries between concepts like "Ponzi scam," "pyramid scheme," "multi-level marketing," "conspiracy," and "just regular old financial capitalism working as intended" are not really as clear as we might like or hope. [...]
One reason the clip is so weird and funny is that it's not all that different from Hilton going on The Tonight Show and talking about her favorite penny stocks, while Fallon enthusiastically confirms that he's invested, too.
What you'll be seeing for the next period of time is very desperate promotion of NFTs and Crypto to wider and wider audiences, because now it's a race: Finding marks before the marks hear that NFTs and Crypto are scammed up garbage selling bridges and swamp land as get-rich.
It's going to be weirder and weirder to see how easily those nice-looking people on the tv and the movies and in the cables and the streams are made to stumble haltingly over the dumb, dumb language of NFT/Crypto, but don't worry
It'll be over soon
And we'll have right-clicked
I'm amazed at the way this has me feeling both less and more insane. Love a good chart, though!
…God, CAA’s in on it too? It’s gonna leach into Hollywood’s drinking water if that’s the case 🤮
Ooo suddenly wondering if there's a Unix graph-drawing tool with a red yarn mode.
Wow. That lead down a rabbit hole. These links got me started down a hole in the internet reading about an understanding NFTs and how people are selling them. I always had a feeling that NFTs were almost certainly an even bigger scam than crypto, but I had never really taken the time to really understand it. I ended up wandering through NFT Twitter for a bit.
It's so much dumber and more of a scam than even my wildest imagination could have come up with. I don't understand how it isn't blindly obvious that these dumb cartoon avatars are not actually being sold. Not that it matters though, because even if NFTs worked exactly as advertised, and having an NFT literally gave you exclusive control over an image all across the internet that no one could copy, what moron thinks that those dumb semi-randomly made images are worth anything? It's mind blowing. NFT twitter is just amazing.
It is ownership in its purest, most abstract form, uncontaminated by tangible or intangible matter.
You own nothing, but you possess a surprisingly robust cryptographic proof that you own a specific portion of the nothing.
A dive into the celebrity-industrial complex that allows grifters to purchase celebrity endorsements:
Warning: also an annoying pseudo-influencer, but at least he (or his team) has done some actual detective work.
Not long before Ooma shipped their first product, our boy-wonder founder announced a marketing partnership and spokesperson deal with a major celebrity. On The Day, he went around the building telling us to play it cool when Ashton Kutcher arrived.
Blank stares all around. "Who?" "Um, I think he was Demi Moore's boy-toy or something?"
There were two things that came out of this deal: a baffling concept video, and a launch-day disaster that led thousands of potential customers to publicly speculate that they were being Punk'd.
The punchline was an invoice that landed in the wrong inbox a while later, from a celebrity-introduction service. Boy Wonder was paying to hook up with the rich and famous, without even getting a happy ending.
-j
i'm anxiously waiting for NFTs to be sold on QVC.
Looks disturbingly like a circuit diagram. I wonder what the equivalent to Kirchoff's laws is.