He Marketed Beanie Babies. He Doesn’t Get NFTs.
Before we begin, I want to be very clear that this newsletter is decidedly low stakes. This post and these interviews were all conducted before the events of last week and that’s why I held this newsletter for a few days. Like everyone, I’ve been watching the news from Ukraine with a feeling of powerless outrage. Geopolitics is largely outside my professional wheelhouse and I figured the best thing to do in times like this is to step aside and not attempt to compete for attention with those bringing vital news and analysis from the region. I’ve been trying to read and understand more about the conflict and its long history, too. When things are intense, sometimes widening the aperture helps ease a bit of the anxiety for me. At the bare minimum, it is better than tweeting.
That said, I would love to hear from readers about questions you all have that you might want explored in this newsletter (people you’d like to see interviewed, rabbit holes to climb down, etc.). I’ve been trying to pay attention to the digital side of this conflict but, to be honest, I feel overwhelmed by the scale and stakes of the moment and the fog of war hasn’t left me with a lot of “takes.” Which is all to say: Suggestions and ideas are welcome right now. Just reply to this email or reach out to galaxybrain@theatlantic.com.
Today’s subscriber-only post is not about the news of the day, but maybe it is a welcome diversion. It features two short Q&As I did that are sort-of-but-not-really about NFTs. They’re more about hype and the way that it makes human beings do strange things. I am, of course, talking about the late-’90s Beanie Babies craze and golfer Phil Mickelson’s NFT-adjacent viral comments about the PGA Tour and his subsequent career meltdown. Rather than explain, I’ll just jump right in.
In January, this tweet kept popping up on my timeline:
It was obviously meant as a comment on the current hype around NFTs, as seen through the history of other wildly popular collectibles. NFT–Beanie Babies comparisons are legion these days, with evangelists arguing that NFTs are another asset bubble despite looking quite a bit like previous asset
