Julia Fox
When Kim Kardashian and Ye — then still known as Kanye West — announced their divorce, I did not bat an eye. Rumors had been flying for a while and — after a couple of suspicious Halloween costumes and Ye’s increasing Kim-targeted rants — divorce seemed inevitable.
I pretty much forgot about the announcement then, and I thought the divorce would be just as insignificant to me as your garden-variety celebrity split. Boy, was I wrong.
I don’t know what I expected given that Ye — the man notorious for interrupting Taylor Swift’s VMA speech because he believed she didn’t deserve to win — is not the most graceful loser. But his divorce is one confusing, messy spectacle we’re all forced to bear witness to, despite our attempts to ignore it. We have much more important things to focus on like Rihanna’s pregnancy or the latest Zoe Kravitz movie — now I spend my days saying "uncuh gyams" on repeat (IYKYK).
Frankly, their past few months have been a brazen press tour rather than a divorce. Each news story features a complex web of egoism, sexism, and even racism — from Kim’s problematic SNL monologue and that Blackfishing Vogue cover to Kanye’s manipulative Instagram posts. We refuse to mention the Super Bowl Instagram posts.
As the former power couple have battled it out in the public eye, their replacement relationships — or on Ye’s part, his faulty parachute relationship — have caught the public’s attention. Kim’s with the people’s favorite stand-up comic and serial monogamist, Pete Davidson; and Ye’s now-defunct tryst with actress Julia Fox has busted up completely.
Both new partners have been plagued by intense media scrutiny, but public perception of them is quite different. Why? Sexism.
Pete Davidson is well known for dating some of the most desirable women in Hollywood. While many wonder what exactly draws them to him — sometimes cruelly judging his appearance — he’s mainly applauded for dating Kim. While the innate sexism of treating Kim like a prize to be won is its own issue, this is wildly divergent from how Julia Fox has been treated.
In a recent episode of Forbidden Fruits — Fox’s podcast with co-host Niki Takesh — Fox discussed her relationship with Ye and the press’s narratives surrounding it. Fox is unphased by the omnipresent negativity, saying: "People are like 'Oh, you're only in it for the fame, you're in it for the clout, you're in it for the money.' Honey, I've dated billionaires my entire adult life, let's keep it real."
Fox doesn’t find these media accusations surprising, and neither should we. The notion that she’s self-interested, ill-intentioned, and clout-chasing comes from the ingrained idea that women who want more are bad.
Too often, women are systematically discouraged from seeking success and penalized when they do — especially if they’re brazenly shameless about it. According to money expert, Stefanie O’Connell-Rodriguez, women are punished for seeking advancements or — heaven forbid — positions of power.
O’Connell-Rodriguez refers to this as the ambition penalty, saying: “The problem with this messaging is it implies that a woman’s primary obstacle to economic power is herself, and that inequities in pay and wealth result from our own behavior. There’s no acknowledgment of how women are often penalized for pursuing their ambitions.”
To combat the ambition penalty, it’s important for society to see prominent examples of women acting ambitiously, and getting rewarded for it. Changing the culture isn’t merely about telling women to take “just” out of their emails and apologize less. It’s about demanding equitable representation and tearing down prevailing structures of oppression.
When it comes to personal finances, women are increasingly challenging notions that they’re hopeless with money and they shouldn’t have control over it anyway. The Confessions of a Shopaholic spiraling? The Carrie Bradshaw cluelessness? These tropes are long out of fashion.
Instead, it’s increasingly common to see women in pop culture claiming their financial independence. Instead of “can you pay my bills” — sorry Destiny’s Child — female artists are declaring their ability to pay their own bills and demanding respect for their financial achievements.
Despite the slowly shifting ties, cultural phenomena such as this drawn-out divorce remind us of how far there is left to go.
While Julia is branded an opportunist, Pete is considered a hero. And it’s not just Julia under the microscope. Kim has been equally accused of being with Pete for PR reasons and engineering the relationship for her own gain.
In both cases, the women are viewed as greedy and shamed about how their relationships might be in their self-interest.
Fox won’t let those accusations merely bounce off her — she’s embracing them. If she can have fun dating Ye while advancing her career, why not? “Why not see me for what I am which is a #1 hustler,” she told The Cut. After announcing their split on Valentine's Day, Fox is only just beginning to demonstrate her own vision, rather than being subject to the press — or Ye.
Despite Ye’s public parade of Kim look-alikes and his manipulative attempts to coerce her back into his life, no one questions his motives. And despite serious doubts about the legitimacy of Pete’s alliance with Kim, accusatory fingers are never pointed in his direction.
The ambition gap paints women with one brush, blinding us to the nuance in their actions. While both relationships increase the couples’ fame, the women are the ones called out for it. So what if there is a PR element to these curious couplings? Celebrity relationships have never been the exemplars of purity and virtue. This, we expect. But we shouldn’t have to expect sexism too.
In a perfect world, I’d simply discount the goings-on of KimYe, JulYe, and whatever we’re calling Kim and Pete. But the blatant sexism and problematic narratives surrounding these pairings is a glaring reminder of society’s larger issues.
The payment app started their #VenmoItForward promotion last year, dropping $20 in the accounts of 30,000 Venmo users who had recently given money to charitable causes, with the express intention that these generous people would use the added funds for more good. As far as corporate marketing ploys go, it was a solid way to encourage good behavior at a time when people were using the app more for supporting worthy causes than for splitting brunch bills.
That's not to say that it was an altruistic move — nothing a massive corporation does ever is. It was another example of a company using a veneer of generosity for self-promotion, like the Super Bowl ad that cost Budweiser millions so they could brag about giving away a fraction of that amount to charity.
#VenmoItForward was even a finalist for a Shorty digital marketing Award for social good. But now that the trashfire of 2020 is finally dying down and we're all getting used to living in the smoldering ruins, it's time for Venmo to abandon that veneer and the original meaning of #VenmoItForward, and just start tempting people with cash giveaways to use their app.
Hey! @Venmo, please fix your terrible privacy settings. In the meantime, here’s how to fix them yourself. https://t.co/U4LBHB1zmy— Mozilla (@Mozilla) 1623856681.0
Does the idea of making your financial activity available for public consumption as a form of "social media" creep you out? Well... what if we offered you and your "VFF" — that's Venmo Friend Forever, for the uninitiated — $500 dollars each!
That's the promotion Venmo decided to run on Wednesday. In exchange for downloading their app, following them on Twitter, retweeting the post, and tagging "the friend you Venmo the most" — nevermind giving them free advertising, plus a bunch of your data, which that they promise to use responsibly (wink) — they're giving away $10,000 in $100, $250, and $500 increments to pairs of financial buds!
No shame to anyone who jumps on the offer, but maybe Venmo's parent company, Paypal, could do more good by just paying a reasonable rate of taxes on the $900 million in revenue Venmo is projected to make as a financial middleman in 2021. Still, whichever marketing executive came up with this incredibly cheap ploy for social media engagement definitely earned their $500,000 bonus...
Last July the "Dogecoin Challenge" was trending on TikTok.
The intricate rules of the "challenge" involved TikTok users buying Dogecoin, then posting about it...that's it. And the stated goal of this challenge was to push the joke cryptocurrency — based on a meme from 2013 — to a value of one dollar.
Given the fact that there are currently around 113 billion DOGE in circulation — compared to less than 20 million Bitcoin — and that the value, even after doubling, remained a fraction of a penny, this goal was actually quite lofty. So lofty, in fact, that I didn't take it seriously.
In an article I wrote at the time, I argued that the whole weird story was best understood as a joke. That the $1 price target was "an unlikely — and probably not that serious — goal."
I even joked that it was part of an effort to make Baby Boomers so confused and alienated that their brains would melt. It was a silly meme built on a silly meme, and the idea that anyone was actually trying to get buy-a-boat rich off of Dogecoin seemed like a stretch.
Anonymous investor is Dogecoin's first billionairewww.youtube.com
That was before Gamestop and WallStreetBets proved the strength of the meme economy in January, helping to drive the value of Dogecoin past 1 cent, then five cents, then 10 cents... And now Dogecoin is proving that strength once again.
This morning the value of a single Doge in the coin marketplace exceeded 60 cents per DOGE — more than 200 times its value a year ago — putting the total value of circulating Doge at nearly $70 billion.
To put this in perspective, the global market for leisure boats was around $41 billion in 2020. So, not only can Dogecoin investors buy boats, they could theoretically buy all the boats, with enough left over to buy several thousand private islands to go visit on those boats.
I still cant believe I just watched this happen🤯🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 #dogecoin #doge #Robinhood #dogefather #DogecoinRise https://t.co/teWL3E29UV— Limitless (@Limitless) 1620137244.0
The price of a DOGE has fluctuated since then but remains above 50 cents at the time of writing, and it seems increasingly doubtful that it won't continue to rise. And with Tesla CEO/Dogefather Elon Musk set to host SNL for some reason, it seems doubtless that the aggressive upward trend of Dogecoin will continue, at least long enough to reach $1.
Hell, it could pass that by the time I finish writing this sentence. It could be at $10 by Saturday. If Elon Musk says, "Such Crypto. Much wow" on Saturday Night Live, Dogecoin could be the de facto global currency by June — with a loaf of bread selling for 0.001 DOGE.
To put it simply, I was wrong about Dogecoin. I was so patently wrong that I've lost all concept of reality, and I genuinely don't know what to think anymore.
Is money even real? And if it's all a weird shared delusion, why is it so important? Why are we forced to slave away for scraps of fantasy paper that will soon be replaced by a digitally-gilded image of an aging Shiba Inu?
Why is survival dependent on the arbitrary value ascribed to drawings of dead presidents and old masonic memes of pyramids with eyes? Why not update it with a meme that embraces chaos and absurdity?
I am ready for it now. Now that I have loosed my grip on the "sanity" that told me people would never invest tens of billions of real, need-'em-to-live bucks in a stale joke, I can embrace my inner boomer, allow my brain to melt in contact with a culture it no longer comprehends, and invest my life savings in Dogecoin.
Why not? There's nothing to lose but the last frayed tendrils of coherent thought tying me to a dying reality. #HODLer #ToTheMoon.
There is no truth anymore. There is only DOGE.
- Inside the Backlash Against Elon Musk Hosting SNL - Popdust ›
- Tesla's BTC Billions: Why a Car Company Invested in Crypto - Popdust ›
- TikTok Challenge Leads to Massive Spike in DogeCoin Value ... ›
With images like this ... what did we expect?
Hulu's new documentary on the rise and fall of WeWork focuses on its charismatic, egotistical founder and CEO Adam Neumann, who was ultimately the company's downfall.
In the tale of how the cult-of-personality (rumored to be played by Jared Leto in an upcoming film adaptation) created the coworking empire and subsequently caused its downfall, WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn interviews employees of the company who were there from the beginning to pinpoint what went right that led to the inescapability of WeWork a few years ago, and what went so horribly wrong.
WeWork went from being valued at $47 billion to collapsing in a matter of months, largely because of the unchecked whims of Adam Neumann, who expanded without consideration of cost, and because of the the false promises made by the company's mission and its overinflated value.
WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn • Official Trailer - A Hulu Originalwww.youtube.com
Above all, the documentary exposes the hollowness of value-driven corporations, and exposes how WeWork used its message of community to fuel the ambitions of those at the top. It also reveals how much of the company fell prey to its idealization of the rat race of hustle culture for very little reward.
So much of the documentary was surprising — the extent to which people bought into their brand's message, the internal cultish loyalty to Adam as the leader — and almost all of it seems, from the outside, insane. Startups are notoriously fickle, but WeWork's meteoric rise and fall was so catastrophic that it makes sense that there was more to its implosion than meets the eye.
The common lore of its downfall focuses on the loss of its major investor, SoftBank, alongside its reckless spending combined with its ambitious growth, but The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn shows how much was wrong at the core of WeWork and its culture from the start.
Critics of hustle culture and corporate activism (read: us) are not surprised by this capitalist Wizard of Oz story. Here are some of the wildest, most warped aspects of the WeWork documentary, which make us wonder how the employees on the inside didn't recognize their unicorn as an overinflated bubble waiting to burst.
Overall, the documentary was an elegy to an "era of easy money and no rules," according to Bloomberg Quicktake. Neumann reaped the benefits of a time when innovative tech startups were hailed as the new frontier, real estate was changing, and co-working was still just an idea.
However, his massive success came with a God complex which was eventually his downfall, all at the expense of the people he had made believe in him.
