Russell Wilson has a beverage, I guess. I mean presumably he has lots of beverages, like when he is thirsty or when he needs to wash down a bite of food or when he is just in the mood for a beverage. But also he is attaching his name and possibly some amount of his money to the launch of a beverage product: "a NFT-powered, nootropic-boosted hydration drink brand aimed at Gen Z consumers," according to BevNet, a publication I'd never heard of before its post about Russell Wilson's beverage brand abruptly made me rue the very advent of language a couple of hours ago.
"NFT-powered, nootropic-boosted hydration drink brand" is a breathtakingly accursed, bone-chilling sequence of words, close to the most appalling linguistic grey goo that the idea "a beverage for people to drink" could be processed into. When I try to imagine a person who would find anything appealing in the idea of a drink brand "powered" by non-fungible tokens, I want to scream. Somehow, however, the above is not even the most revolting crime against human expression just in this one BevNet blog about Russell Wilson's beverage brand launch. That honor goes to ... this (emphasis added):
The new venture hopes to capture a piece of the nearly $9 billion sports drink market, a space that has largely been consolidated around leading players PepsiCo (Gatorade) and Coca-Cola (BodyArmor/PowerAde), each of which have sought to develop next-gen products under those banners that can play across various hydration occasions and functional need states.
Even the most dismal of Shamsisms is like Dorothy Thompson compared to this. "Next-gen products that can play across various hydration occasions and functional need states" is the describing-beverages-with-words equivalent of the guy's head tearing itself free from his neck and growing spindly spider legs and scurrying off into the dark in The Thing. A provisional mimicry of humanity is breaking down; an incomprehensible alien abomination is showing through. Quickly, burn it, before it escapes and propagates itself.
I do not want to pick on BevNet, a business-to-business publication covering the beverage industry, in particular. If "next-gen products ... that can play across various hydration occasions and functional need states" fails on semantic terms and even more gravely as mimicry of human communication, I fear it likely succeeds as a snapshot of how beverage industry types talk and think about beverages; it is probably how basically all industries are discussed by the equity vampires and MBA mutants who control them. Odds are, somewhere out there in the world someone is describing what you'll be working on next month to a roomful of endlessly rich nightmare freaks as, like, bleeding-edge 5G content that can effectuate critical penetration share in platinum-value market modalities, and that is a horror that no orbital strike of poor BevNet could erase, no matter how desperately I might wish it could.
I am here today blogging this atrocity for one simple reason: to defy you, the reader, to assemble any seven English words into any sequence more horrible than "various hydration occasions and functional need states" in description of anything as banal as a beverage for people to drink. I don't think it can be done! You may try in the comments, or you may scrawl your attempt on the wall in your own crap, or you may email it to patrick@defector.com. Thank you.
