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 thousands on NFTs of their work and of cryptocurrency enthusiasts making bank buying and selling them have abounded over the past year. A wave of legalization of online sports betting has swept the country, and with it, lucrative promotions for first-time gamblers that offer what is essentially free money. Not only did the pandemic create a mass of people who were bored and restless, it also created some people with enough financial privilege to try something a little risky with their $1,400 stimulus check.
The gamification of money, and the blurring boundaries between what constitutes investing and what constitutes entertainment, have raised plenty of concerns, and many argue that the government is too far behind the times to adequately address it. “Gambling went from being something that was super taboo to being easier than ordering food on Uber Eats,” says Josh Clayton, a 29-year-old copywriter in Brooklyn. “You watch a sports game and every commercial is an ad for sports betting.”
Josh started sports betting thanks to the massive deal that Caesar’s, one of the largest online sportsbooks, was offering new users: a free $300 to bet just for signing up, plus a match of up to $3,000. He put in $50 of his own money but cashed out with around $800. “A lot of sports fans love to talk about their teams and pretend that they’d be a better head coach than the guy who is eminently qualified and gets paid $40 million a year,” he says. “Sports betting gives you a little taste of making those decisions, and when you win, it feels like a validation of you being smart.”
It’s similar to what people who invest in stocks or crypto feel when something “moons,” or rises in value extremely quickly. “It just totally took over my life in the span of, like, a week,” said Jeff Andrews, a 40-year-old data reporter and a former coworker of mine. Less than a month ago, two of his friends who work in private equity told him about the tens of thousands of dollars they made in NFT trading, and then gave him advice on w
