Owning Ghosts

There was this cryptocurrency called CryptoCelebrities where you could buy digital contracts tied to famous people. You didn’t own their likeness or their time or anything concrete—you just owned a token that said you owned a token of Selena Gomez or Justin Bieber or Eminem. The celebrities themselves had no idea this was happening and weren’t getting paid. They just existed, and people were turning them into tradeable assets.

The whole thing was deranged in a way that only early cryptocurrency schemes could be. It wasn’t even a scam in the traditional sense—more like a kind of mass hallucination where thousands of people agreed to spend real money on ghosts. I watched people in forums fighting to acquire tokens tied to Jennifer Lawrence or Wiz Khalifa, like Pokémon cards but with actual human beings who would never consent to this and would probably find it deeply unsettling if they knew.

Part of the appeal was exactly that transgression—buying something you weren’t supposed to be able to buy. You were taking something sacred and turning it into a tradeable commodity. That’s speculation in its purest form, with nothing else to hide behind.

Selena Gomez was listed as belonging to someone with the initials W. Hilton. The weirdest part wasn’t that someone thought they could own her, but that there was a record of it on the blockchain that anyone could check. The fantasy and the transaction were the same thing.