I can't ease you into this one, so: Haliey Welch, colloquially known as the "Hawk Tuah girl," launched a bespoke cryptocurrency token called HAWK last Wednesday, the same day she told Fortune it was "not just a cash grab" and her manager cut off a question in the same interview about its legality (because, he said, "We don’t want to break securities laws"), and hours before the vast majority of HAWK tokens were sold off in what appears to be a textbook example of a pump-and-dump scheme. This reads, on first glance, as a story about some fundamentally ephemeral viral bullshit; it isn't not about viral bullshit, though I'd argue it's worth taking seriously as an extreme yet representative example of the new paradigm of online fame, social media, and a certain irradiated, newly relevant segment of culture.
Consider how Welch got into this position. This past summer, she answered a man-on-the-street question ("What's one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?") with an inspired onomatopoeic rendition of "[spitting] on that thing." The speed at which the interview saturated the social internet was only matched by the thoroughness with which Welch capitalized on it. Within a month, she'd begun selling T-shirts, signed an agent and a manager, launched herself as a public figure in an interview with a Barstool Sports host named Brianna Chickenfry, and sang on stage with country star Zach Bryan. The following month, she threw out the first pitch at a Mets game.
People become overnight celebrities all the time, and for stupider reasons than Welch, though she is something of an outlier: She was not one of the thousandfold tiny-mic interviewers plaguing the streets to ask hard-hitting questions like What's an album that makes you say "Vibes"? but rather one of their subjects. This meant she did not have an existing platform from which to capitalize on her sudden fame. You generally do not get two shots at parlaying a viral moment into permanent fame or even a lot of money; if you are lucky enough to get one, your odds are better if you play the meta.
Which means, yes, Welch posts all the time, on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, where she has done her best to become a mirror of the social media world that made her. She launched a podcast, naturally called Talk Tuah—and naturally sponsored by a sports gambling company—which exists mostly as a source of clips, which, if she is lucky, will go viral on other platforms. It's a self-sustaining content factory, an efficient mechanism for arresting and monetizing attention. The structure of the Haliey Welch Media Ouroboros is typical of the large-scale economics of bleeding-edge social media, and I'd argue that she could only have successfully pivoted into a position where she has a lot of money and a chance at permanent fame in 2024 because of A) the rapid decay of traditional media (and even new media, thanks to Elon Musk buying and hollowing out Twitter), and B) the relatively modern phenomenon of the wide acceptance and praise of bag-chasing nihilism.
To understand that last point, consider the post-election revelation that young male voters swung right by 12 percentage points, and the attendant handwringing about them doing so because they listened to the wrong kind of podcasts. Many of these podcasts and associated hucksters are explicitly aligned with Donald Trump, though Trump-polarized figures like Adin Ross or the Nelk Boys seem more like extreme elements of a broad coalition whose allegiance is foremost to The Bag. Across streaming, posting, and podcasting, it is now widely understood that the purpose of streaming, posting, or podcasting is to attract attention and then convert that attention into money.
I am not so naive as to think that the earlier, slower wave of social media I came up on was much different or any more pure. The operative difference is that you could still make a case for the founding myth of social media as a locus of connection in 2012 in a way that you obviously cannot now. Social media was the same vertically integrated surveillance and marketing machine back then too, only there were more obscurant layers between creator, audience, and bag. The idea that a big company would advertise on Instagram is laughably unprovocative in 2024, but just five years ago it was the secret sauce that Emily, of Emily in Paris, used to get and keep her job in Paris.
The notion of "selling out" as a signifier of corroded inauthenticity seems even more antiquated, as it relies on some alternate, pure path to making money. It also misreads the incentives and mechanics of social media in a way that I don't think anyone raised online since they were a zygote would misread them. The cleanest example I have here is the way that fans of streamers and influencers respond to the objects of their fandom rolling out new sponsorships or getting ads: by praising them for getting the bag. Absent legacy-media prestige or any earlier outdated marker of status, a way to distinguish yourself, to exhibit prestige, is to be an ambassador for a more prestigious brand. And as the modality of fandom shifts to something like worship, it is simple to see oneself as part of the process and potentially next in line for a big payday. Related here too is the phenomenon of MrBeast, whose fans are made fully aware that their time spent watching him makes him obscenely rich because he's explicit about using that money to pay for more videos called, like, $50,000 If You Can Spin Around In A Circle Really Really Fast; they get to feel like a part of it.
As unlikely as big-time TikTok success is for most people, the barriers to entry are nonexistent, unlike access to the upper tier of American life. Young people today live in a country with collapsing public services, a society actively receding away from them. If they are lucky enough to get into a position to rack up six figures of student debt, they face bleak job prospects and prohibitively expensive housing costs, not to mention the death of the biosphere and its associated shakeups. That aforementioned "pure path"? It doesn't meaningfully exist anymore, so why not play the viral lottery? Why not start gambling? Why not generate AI images of Jesus smoking weed with Santa Claus and harvest the last drops of juice from Facebook's corpse? Why not get involved in cryptocurrency speculation? What is keeping you from getting off your ass and drop-shipping baby products? Sure, the game is rigged, but so is everything, so why not have some fun along the way? Why not at least be on the winning side of something?
I'd argue this loose ideology cohered as material conditions worsened alongside the rise of social media, then emerged out of its protean discontents in 2020-21, when a nationwide mental health crisis coincided with Americans getting a bunch of extra money via pandemic stimulus. This is how you get the Robinhood meme stock bubble, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the second cryptocurrency gold rush, Chamath Palihapitiya, the Bored Ape Yacht Club people having to apologize for severely damaging dozens of people's eyes with off-brand UV lights at a 2023 party in Hong Kong, and the sports gambling gold rush/debt manufactory. The social media climate that flowered from this nihilistic moment was defined by a cynical Manichaeism: You were either a wolf or a sheep, a sucker or a predator of suckers. You might win if you gamble, but the real money is in being the house.
Which brings us back, finally, to Haliey Welch. If the sui generis emergence of her media career is a case study in how to most efficiently capitalize on a single, widespread, ecstatic moment of attention—I should stress that this is not a critique of Welch as a comedian or public figure; not anyone could hop on the mic and be so comfortable so quickly, and while her stuff is aggressively not for me and I find the broader Zynternet which Max Read brilliantly aligned her with earlier this summer to be rancid, she seems at least mildly talented and eminently ready for her moment—it is simultaneously the purest expression of this bag-chasing id. The crypto pump-and-dump makes total sense, as it is the most direct and ruthless mechanic through which one could monetize attention and obtain The Bag. In the Fortune interview, Welch said she used to conceive of crypto as "just a scam" and an "easy way for you to lose money," but that she changed her mind after going to a pair of conferences, which is another way of saying after her role in the online ecosystem switched from potential prey to potential predator.
The play-by-play of the story is interesting only in its predictability. HAWK launched on Dec. 4 with a detailed breakdown of how Welch and her associates would use the money; once trading started, value peaked around $490 million. But within hours, the token's value crashed as over 91 percent of tokens were sold by insider wallets and bot snipers. Welch and her team have denied any wrongdoing, obviously, claiming that the value was cratered because of bots (this is an unintentional and unintentionally revealing Elon Musk homage). Actual chain data shows that people connected to the launch sold a bunch of the tokens for around $3.3 million.
But regardless of how much money Welch did or did not pocket here, the pump-and-dump scheme is so well established by now that I find myself amazed that anyone would invest real actual dollars in what would seem to be the most obvious fake cryptocurrency scheme possible. A far likelier explanation than anybody actually believing in the durable investment value of a Hawk Tuah cryptocurrency is that those investors, like Welch herself, were hoping to cash out ahead of the suckers—were hunting The Bag, and simply didn't grab at it fast enough.
This isn't a phenomenon distinct from Welch's output and rise, but rather its logical extreme. What better way to show ritual fealty to The Bag than to make a sacrifice at its feet, and what better holy site to self-immolate at than the set of the Talk Tuah podcast?
