In November, I went to the most unpleasant event I’ve ever attended, located in a warehouse-like bar in downtown Manhattan and devoted entirely to the subject of NFTs. It was hosted by Gary Vaynerchuk, better known as Gary Vee, the motivational speaker-slash-entrepreneur-slash-influencer whom my boyfriend was profiling for another publication. The crowd primarily consisted of hordes of men, who were not wholly unpleasant themselves but who spoke a language so impenetrable to outsiders that being around them made me feel as though I’d missed something major.
They seemed to work in tech or finance, mostly, and had come to connect with others over the thing they loved most in the world, the wild force driving the feeding frenzy of people storming the bouncer to get inside: money, and making it as quickly as possible. The event’s attendees were at the extreme end, of course, but their language has started trickling into the mainstream as well. If Instagram made everyone a photographer and Twitter made everyone a writer, perhaps whatever the internet has done to the traditional banking system is in the process of turning us all into finance bros.
There has never been a more opportune time to have “money” as a hobby. Options trading, once the provenance of professional financiers, has soared with the rise of stock trading platforms like Robinhood, which makes it extraordinarily easy to buy and sell individual stocks. Stories of artists making hundreds of
