I can’t explain this to you, so: Haliey Welch, colloquially known as “Hawk Tuah Girl,” launched a custom cryptocurrency token called HAWK last Wednesday, the same day she told it Assets It was “not just a money grab,” and its manager interrupted a question about legality (because he said, “We don’t want to break securities laws”) in the same interview, hours before the vast majority of HAWK tokens were sold in what appeared to be a deal textbook pump-and-dump system. At first glance, this reads like a story about essentially ephemeral viral bullshit; That’s not it not about viral bullshit, although I think it’s worth taking seriously as an extreme but representative example of the new paradigm of online fame, social media, and a certain irradiated, newly relevant segment of culture.

Consider how Welch ended up in this position. Last summer, she answered a question from a man on the street (“What’s a move in bed that drives a man crazy every time?”) with an inspired onomatopoeic rendition of “(spit on that thing).” The speed with which the interview permeated the social internet was matched only by the thoroughness with which Welch capitalized on it. Within a month, she started selling T-shirts, signed an agent and a manager, appeared as a public figure in an interview with a Barstool Sports host named Brianna Chickenfry, and sang on stage with country star Zach Bryan. The following month, she threw out the first pitch at a Mets game.

People become overnight celebrities all the time, and for sillier reasons than Welch, although she’s something of an outlier: She wasn’t one of the thousands of interviewers with tiny microphones plaguing the streets to ask hard-hitting questions like What album makes you say “vibes”? but rather one of their themes. This meant she had no platform to capitalize on her sudden fame. Generally speaking, you have no chance of turning a viral moment into lasting fame or even a ton of money; If you’re lucky enough to get one, your chances are better if you play the meta.

That said, yes, Welch posts constantly on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, where she has done her best to become a reflection of the social media world she has created. She started a podcast with the natural name Say Tuah— and, of course, sponsored by a sports gambling company — that primarily serves as a source for clips that, if she’s lucky, will go viral on other platforms. It is a self-sustaining content factory, an efficient mechanism to capture and monetize attention. The structure of the Haliey Welch Media Ouroboros is typical of the large-scale economy of cutting-edge social media, and I would argue that she could only have successfully moved into a position where she has lots of money and a chance at lasting career fame in 2024 due to A) the rapid decline of traditional media (and even new media thanks to Elon Musk’s purchase and hollowing out of Twitter) and B) the relatively modern phenomenon of widespread acceptance and praise of the pocket-chasing nihilism.

To understand this last point, consider the post-election revelation that young male voters had moved 12 percentage points to the right, and the accompanying comments that they did so because they were listening to the wrong kind of podcasts. Many of these podcasts and their associated hucksters are explicitly focused on Donald Trump, although Trump-polarized figures like Adin Ross or the Nelk Boys seem more like extreme elements of a broad coalition whose loyalty lies primarily with The Bag. When it comes to streaming, posting and podcasting, it is now widely accepted that the purpose of streaming, posting or podcasting is to attract attention and then convert that attention into money.

I’m not so naive as to believe that the earlier, slower wave of social media I encountered was entirely different or purer. The operational difference is that the founding myth of social media as a place of connection could still be represented in 2012 in a way that obviously cannot be done today. Back then, social media was the same vertically integrated surveillance and marketing machine, only with more opaque layers between creator, audience, and pocket. The idea of ​​a major company advertising on Instagram is laughably unprovocative in 2024, but just five years ago it was the secret that defined Emily Emily in ParisShe used to get and keep her job in Paris.

The idea of ​​“selling out” as a sign of corroded inauthenticity seems even more antiquated because it relies on an alternative, pure way to make money. It also misunderstands the incentives and mechanics of social media in a way that I don’t think anyone who grew up online as a zygote would misinterpret. The clearest example I have here is the way fans of streamers and influencers respond to the objects of their fandom by offering new sponsorships or receiving publicity: by praising them for getting the bag. In the absence of media prestige or previously outdated status markers, one way to distinguish yourself and demonstrate prestige is to be an ambassador for a more prestigious brand. And as the modality of fandom shifts toward something like worship, it’s easy to see yourself as part of the process and potentially next in line for a big payday. Related to this is also the phenomenon of MrBeast, whose fans are made fully aware that the time they spend watching him makes him obscenely rich, because he explicitly states that he will use this money to pay for more videos, for example be called: $50,000 if you can go around in circles really, really fast; You get the feeling of being a part of it.

As unlikely as a major TikTok success is for most people, the barriers to entry, unlike access to the upper echelons of American life, are non-existent. Young people today live in a country with collapsing public services and a society that is actively distancing itself from them. If they are lucky enough to accumulate six figures of student debt, they face bleak job prospects and prohibitively high housing costs, not to mention the death of the biosphere and the upheaval that comes with it. The “pure path” mentioned above? It no longer exists in any sense, so why not play the viral lottery? Why not start gambling? Why not create AI images of Jesus smoking weed with Santa and harvest the last drops of juice from Facebook’s corpse? Why not get involved in cryptocurrency speculation? What’s stopping you from venturing out and selling baby products via drop shipping? Sure, the game is rigged, but that’s all it is, so why not have a little fun with it? Why not at least be on the winning side of something?

I would argue that this loose ideology held together as material conditions deteriorated with the rise of social media, and then emerged from its diverse discontents in 2020-21 as a nationwide mental health crisis coincided with Americans living through pandemic Stimulus measures got a lot of extra money. This is how the Robinhood meme stock bubble is born, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the second cryptocurrency gold rush, Chamath Palihapitiya, the Bored Ape Yacht Club people having to apologize for shining the eyes of dozens of people with UV light other brands have seriously damaged 2023 party in Hong Kong and the sports betting gold rush/debt factory. The social media climate that emerged from this nihilistic moment was one of cynical Manichaeism: you were either a wolf or a sheep, a fool or a predator among fools. You might win if you play, but the real money is in being the house.

This finally brings us back to Haliey Welch. If the sui generis The emergence of her media career is a case study in how to most efficiently capitalize on a single, widespread, ecstatic moment of attention – I should emphasize that this is not a criticism of Welch as a comedian or public figure; No one could get on the mic so quickly and feel so comfortable, and while her stuff is aggressively not for me and I find the wider Zynternet that Max Read brilliantly aligned her with earlier this summer rancid, she at least seems reasonably talented to be supremely ready for her moment – ​​it is also the purest expression of that bag-chasing identity. The crypto pump and dump makes perfect sense as it is the most direct and ruthless mechanism by which one can monetize attention and preserve The Bag. In the Assets In an interview, Welch said that she used to view crypto as “a simple scam” and “an easy way for you to lose money,” but that she changed her mind after attending two conferences that were a different way is, according to her, the role in the online ecosystem has changed from potential prey to potential predator.

The gameplay of the story is interesting only because of its predictability. HAWK launched on Dec. 4 with a detailed breakdown of how Welch and her staff would use the money; When trading began, the value peaked at around $490 million. But within a few hours, the token’s value plummeted as over 91 percent of the tokens were sold by insider wallets and bot snipers. Welch and her team have apparently denied any wrongdoing and claimed that value was destroyed by bots (this is an unintentional and unintentionally revealing tribute to Elon Musk). Actual chain data shows that people associated with the launch sold a number of the tokens for around $3.3 million.

But regardless of how much money Welch pocketed here or not, the pump-and-dump scheme is now so well established that I wonder anyone would actually invest real dollars in what appears to be the most obvious fake cryptocurrency scheme possible. A far more likely explanation than anyone actually believing in the lasting investment value of a Hawk Tuah cryptocurrency is that these investors, like Welch himself, were hoping to make money before the suckers – were on the hunt for “The Bag.” and just didn’t reach for it quickly enough.

This is not a phenomenon distinct from Welch’s work and rise, but rather its logical extreme. What better way to show one’s ritual allegiance to the Bag than by making an offering at its feet, and what better sacred place to burn oneself than on the Bag’s set? Say Tuah Podcast?