Everything was going so well. Paris Hilton joined The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon talk about his marriage. She says she’s had seven outfit changes. Kim Petras sang “Stars Are Blind” as she walked down the aisle. His mother, Kathy, had a great time. All the fun late night chatter. And then the crypto-Herbalife pitch began. “You taught me what’s going on, then I bought a monkey,” Fallon told Hilton. That would prevail if it was mid-century Hollywood and Hilton convinced him to buy a real chimpanzee. It would be ethically wrong, but it would still be lavish and exciting. But we know what millionaires mean when they refer to “monkeys” in 2022. Fallon meant a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, an avatar with all the aesthetic complexity of a peeing Calvin bumper sticker.
“I bought one too,” Hilton says, “because I saw you on the show with Beeple.” (An ugly phrase if we’ve ever heard one.) Fallon pulls out a physical printout of a jpeg Hilton owns (a link to), and there’s a genuine break of applause for this image which is inexplicably worth more than a starter home in many US cities and produces far more carbon emissions than just one. Then he pulls out his own BAYC (a print of a jpeg he has a link to) and says it reminds him of himself. Sad! Hilton then debuts her new NFT collection, a GIF of “a collage of all my memories with Carter” – her husband – “called ‘My Forever Fairy Tale'”, and gives one to everyone in the audience as a kind of Oprah metaverse. They go wild even though the vast majority of NFTs are about as valuable as a QR code on a Coke bottle cap that sends you to a dead link to an mp3 download. This is all Ethereum LuLaRoe. We just wish celebrities would get involved with less tacky, more glamorous ways to squander their wealth. At least the Beanie Babies bubble was cute.
