Ballyhoo and sorcery
Femcels, funeral apps, metaverse bouncers, YouTube brain, "aspirational grief" and the second act of the hipster grifter
Hi friends. Today is May 13, 2022.
And this is the unluckiest of Friday the 13ths for a boatload of crypto investors. First, the shaky foundation of ballyhoo and sorcery underlying TerraUSD collapsed. Then, its ever-widening fallout radius cratered the value of most other cryptocurrencies by around 50 percent.
My initial (unkind) reaction approached glee, I will confess. Crypto bros — and they are still overwhelmingly bros — are not an especially sympathetic clique. One recent Korean study, which ran personality tests on crypto investors, concluded that they were “sensation-seeking, impulsive, opportunistic and revengeful,” which sounds like a description of my all-time least-favorite boss. It’s also a common psychological profile for problem gamblers, whom we tend to see more as victims than as Patagonia-vested, novelty-tattooed blowhards betting their McMansions and Model Xs on the chance to get yet richer than the rest of us.
But there are a lot of legitimate victims in this. While investors still skew young, male, educated and wealthy, crypto fever has proved almost as infectious as Covid-19. In November, the Pew Research Center found that 16% of all Americans now invest in crypto, and that low- and middle-income people buy in at *roughly the same rate* as the wealthy.
Low- and middle-income traders are, incidentally, less likely to make money on these investments. And in online communities for coins like Luna, whose value plunged to nothing this week, the people that “look[ed] at this as a get-out-of-poverty card” are now (tw: suicide) trading horror stories and helpline numbers.
To be clear, none of this diminishes the crypto elite as a source of unbridled schadenfreude. (Nobody can ever take that from us!) But these crashes do increasingly affect people besides the dudes extolling “the dip” on Twitter.
If you read anything this weekend
“Trends Are Dead,” by Terry Nguyen in Vox. From coastal grandmother to feral girl to cluttercore (tf?), people are obsessed with trends. I know this from experience because links on the subject are always the most clicked when I include them. Here, a unified theory for why every little internet hiccup, no matter how niche, has to have a name and a moment now: It makes everything “buyable, understandable, or moral (and therefore worthy of consumption).”
“Disrupting the Funeral,” by Kim Velsey in Curbed. The array of new apps and start-ups dedicated to death is so wild and morbid and … extremely cool, in my funeral-hating opinion? Please bury me in a rose gold, direct-to-consumer casket.
“I Was a Bouncer in the Metaverse,” by Aaron Mak in Slate. A more accurate headline: “I was a moderator for a series of educational lectures in virtual reality.” Still! People are predictably inventing new and more visceral ways to troll in VR, and moderators are hustling to keep up with them.
“Straight Women Are On Grindr Now. Some People Don’t Want Them There,” by Hallie Leiberman in Buzzfeed News. Did not expect to care that much, but the interloping ladies contain multitudes! They’re often joining Grindr looking for bi men, or to act on flexible/nonbinary preferences, in keeping with broader sexual trends.
“Chore Apps Were Meant to Make Mothers’ Lives Easier. They Often Don’t,” by Tanya Basu in MIT Technology Review. Turns out you can’t hack social inequities better solved by a working safety net and a change to literal millennia of social practices!
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was this trend piece on “namecore” (told you so!!!).
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Postscripts
YouTube brain. Femcels. “An extremely 2022 move.” The first TikTok from SPACE, a eulogy for the iPod and the varied joys/horrors of @RegionalUSfood. Why audiobook narration is often so bad. How Google is addressing colorism in search. The human toll of anti-vax conspiracists and the $20-billion problem with “buy now, pay later.”
It’s been 10 years but … Hipster Grifter’s back! Her level of grift now seems very quaint. The parents who won’t give their children smartphones and the Twitter users whose lives depend on anonymity. The Instagrams peddling “aspirational grief.” In defense of copypasta. Just “how” unethical is next-day delivery? (If you have to ask … you know the answer?) Gen Z blows its Britney Spears moment. Even AI can’t predict love. Last but not least: “We don’t believe the history books anymore. We have social media.”
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin