Everyone Is for Sale on the Blockchain

CryptoCelebrities is exactly what it sounds like and somehow worse. An Ethereum-based platform where you can purchase contractual ownership of a celebrity—Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, Eminem, Jennifer Lawrence, Wiz Khalifa, Emma Watson—none of whom have any idea this is happening or consented to any of it. You’re not buying access to them, or their content, or anything tangible at all. You’re buying a token. A digital certificate that says: this person is mine now. They just don’t know it yet.

People are already bidding, with real Ethereum, for the right to collect a grinning press photo attached to a blockchain entry. The celebrities are listed with current prices and trading histories as if they were commodities, which is more or less the point. Selena Gomez, at time of writing, belongs to someone calling themselves W. Hilton. Make of that what you will.

There’s something almost archaeologically interesting about this as a document of peak crypto madness—the precise moment when speculative wealth had generated enough surplus that people started asking "but what if we also did celebrity trading cards, except worse and weirder and without anyone’s consent?" The answer, apparently, is this. You can’t actually own Jennifer Lawrence. But you can own a token that says you do, which is the kind of distinction that 2018 has apparently decided doesn’t matter.