Within the dark caverns and crevices of Twitter, there is a singular sunny corner: the lair of the non-fungible token influencer. Their tweets are littered with optimistic acronyms: LFG for “let’s fucking go.” WAGMI for “we’re all going to make it.” GM to bid fellow crypto believers a good morning. It’s a place where meme-inspired jokes sing in harmony with calls for a radical, utopian future. However, on a fateful day in early December, the worst fear of every internet subculture became a reality.
The brands arrived.
On Dec. 9, Pepsi tweeted that it would release NFTs (a series of microphones, for some reason), rewarding reply tweets with a copy-and-pasted LFG. In response, Budweiser congratulated Pepsi as its “brand friend.” They both declared WAGMI—just two sentient canned beverage juggernauts encouraging each other through tough times. “Every group chat I was in was talking about how that was the most cringeworthy thing they’ve seen,” said Anil Lulla, co-founder of cryptocurrency research firm Delphi Digital.
