Part 1: Illuminati Fables

The machinery of the world is hiding in plain sight.

In small towns you can hear the hum. A low beep in the distance. The buzzing of a generator. In my mind, it’s indelibly paired with sodium vapor lights. The kind that give the winter night sky its unreal orange glow. Here but for God. The literal reality of human survival isn’t hidden by image-swarmed bustling cities. In those places you can forget reality. Effervescent wealth shields from difficult truth. But here we cannot forget. We are here but for God. There are no luxury beliefs.

In crypto you feel something similar. You can hear the hum of something not quite human. We’re social creatures on a fundamental level and as a result finely attuned to power shifts. Wolves sniffing asses, looking for shifts in gait, posture, expression, uncomfortable with too much eye contact. Like them, we have a preternatural concern for hierarchy. Whenever there’s a disturbance in the force, we snap to attention. Like a dog hearing a whistle. Like a cat seeing a ghost. 

Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

It took me a long time to write this piece. I agreed from a tiny hotel room in the Sixth last October. Uncomfortable and congested from as my friend Jordan Richman called it the Miu Miu flu—one of those mass contagion moments that happened during every event when the world reopened—I was operating on Adderall. And in that way, I broke all three of my rules. Never do business sick. Never do business high. And never ever do business on vacation. 

Since the winter of 2021, it had been all cryptomania all the time. No one wanted to talk about politics anymore. No one wanted to talk about COVID. And no one wanted to talk about each other. We crawled out of quarantine sallow, shaggy, anxious, with new beer bellies. We needed the soft pitter patter of water cooler talk. Movies and albums for the industry types. Exhibitions and events for the art world set. But the last year and a half had been a cultural embarrassment. Crypto filled that void.

No one knew anything really. Just that so and so had done an NFT. Or hey, didn’t you do an NFT? (It’s true I did do an NFT with some former collaborators.) And hey what do you think? The conversations were sometimes friendly. (So and so really deserves to finally get paid.) They were sometimes nasty. (So and so is selling NFTs because they’re canceled!) Mostly they were about money. (So and so is so rich!) 

If there was a sentiment, it was resigned disgust. Over oysters and rosé at an emerging pop star’s studio, a gallerino told me Beeple’s auction was bid up by his employer, a hedge fund where he still worked by day. Someone chimed in: “That’s just what Gagosian does!” Deflated, the gallerino mumbled something about ‘rainbow vomit’ and ambled away.

Class war. 

An old friend, worried that selling an NFT was a “cash grab” and a “bad look” for anyone involved. To which I replied, “It is a cash grab and so what?” He was from a helicopter-parent suburban background, upper middle class in that tedious status conscious way. He had long ago left the culture industry for a white collar bullshit job, which he endlessly complained about, but wouldn’t deign to quit. You know the type.

If I was a little smarter, it wouldn’t take hindsight to see the angle here. Crypto was a “bad look”—to those who escaped 2020 with their institutional faith intact. Just like not having a job at a Fortune 500 company is a “bad look” to my friend’s status-anxious suburban parents. 

“Bad look” as a phrase is a dead tell. I never hear the poor or working class say it. Nor do I hear actual wealthy people use the term. The rich and poor are alike in that they are doomed by fate. No matter how high you rise or how far you fall, you are marked. The middle class alone is gifted with the double-edged sword of self-actualization and status anxiety. Hence the fixation on career and credentials—hence the paranoia about anything that disrupts that. 

But as the internet dissolves our cultural myths like a Brancusi dropped in battery acid, those just so stories about there being a right way and a wrong way to do things feel like transmissions from a bygone era—like car commercials on network television…

Most people want to make crypto a story about technology or a story about culture. But reminiscing, I think crypto is a story about power. They say politics is downstream of culture. But you know what is upstream of culture? Power.

So I struggled for a year to write a culture story—unable to shake the overwhelming sense that there was no there there. I think back to late night Uber rides in Paris, passing the Louvre, pondering how the old stone buildings unlit fold into the night sky, shadows in shadows… No one was talking about NFTs. It should’ve been a sign. But unfortunately, like everyone at the height of cryptomania, I was high.