Celebrities and NFTs Are a Match Made in Hell
In football, when a quarterback “breaks contain,” he evades the oncoming pass rush, escaping into the open field. To break contain is to generate chaos; it can extend the life of an otherwise dead play, forcing the defense to scramble. It’s a concept I also find useful in thinking about trends: Almost all big trends are conceived in a subculture—gamers, rap fans, teen TikTokers, whoever—but most of the things that get popular within those groups never make it through the barrier to the outside world. But when a trend does manage to break contain, it becomes everyone’s problem.
As I watched the of Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon uninterestedly cooing about their newly acquired Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, it occurred to me that I had probably just watched NFTs break contain. “It reminded me of me a little bit, because I wear striped shirts,” Fallon said, meekly justifying the computer-generated doodle of an, I thought to myself. NFTs have been an obsession in some of the more tiresome corners of the internet for the past year, and an extended conversation between two massively famous people on national television is exactly how that kind of thing leaps into the larger culture. It’s the reason a retired relative texts you to ask if they need to know about NFTs.
