Enlarge / Actress Reese Witherspoon during an interview on Thursday, December 17, 2021. (credit: NBC)
At 12:24 pm on January 11, the actor and entrepreneur Reese Witherspoon made a startling announcement to her 2.9 million Twitter followers. “In the (near) future, every person will have a parallel digital identity,” she wrote. “Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm. Are you planning for this?”
That final line struck a note of urgency. The metaverse is coming, was her message, and you haven’t packed your go bag yet?
Witherspoon’s tweet arrived amid a backlash against celebrities cheerleading the virtual world and pushing their fans into cyber currency. It was bad enough that for years we had been pummeled by crypto dudes for not diverting all of our cash reserves to bitcoin and HODLing no matter what. The Twitter history of “Bitcoin Billionaire” Tyler Winklevoss (who, with his twin bro, Cameron, has done very well since being punked by Mark Zuckerberg back at Harvard) is an endless barrage of FOMO pitches, delivered with the enigmatic faux-wisdom of a blockchain Buddha. “Because of bitcoin, the universe will never be the same,” he tweeted recently. Got that, God?
Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments