I’m breaking a promise. My wife Susan suggested I stop spending time reading about Haliey Welch.

You’re not sure who that is? Let me remind you. Several months ago, a pair of YouTubers asked a young woman outside a bar “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?”

On a video, Welch responds, “Oh, you gotta give him that hawk tuah and spit on that thang!” Everyone in the world saw the video, and thus, the Hawk Tuah Girl was born. Old news, you say. True, but the Hawk Tuah Girl is back this week. She just launched a crypto coin.

I told Susan the story bothered me. Haliey is twenty-two. She went to college, but never graduated. I don’t know what she majored in but I doubt it was virtual currencies. Until her viral video exploded across the world, she worked in a spring factory. Despite having no obvious background in investments, finance, banking or any other relevant field, the Hawk Tuah Girl created a crypto currency from scratch. And people bought it. For a minute, it was huge.

I’m an accountant by vocation. After bouncing around in government contracting for a couple of decades, I switched focus and became a nonprofit finance director with a track-record of strengthening struggling companies. For the last twenty years, it’s been my job to understand the subtleties of my organizations’ finances, and then explain them to everyone else. I’m good at this, and I seem to have an innate head for business. But I don’t understand cryptocurrency at all.

As near as I can tell, Welch created the idea of a “currency” known as a meme coin, founded on the Hawk Tuah meme. Based on my research, people buy meme coins as an investment and also as a way to belong to a like-minded community. Although I’m not exactly sure what sort of ‘community’ people find from their connection with other Hawk Tuah enthusiasts.

When Welch launched the coin, the value of the ‘asset’ sprang up to a half billion dollars and just as quickly, dropped to twenty-five thousand dollars. In the many articles I’ve read about this, I haven’t found a timeline, but I understand this happened in minutes not days. People who bought the coin at its peak lost ninety-five percent of their ‘investment’ instantly. The baby boomer in me believes they’re fortunate they didn’t lose it all. To me, it appears they invested in vapor, or the thinnest of thin air, or the emperor’s new clothes. There was simply nothing there.

I told Susan I found this story to be a good metaphor for what’s wrong with society. Everybody hoping to be the next Elon Musk. Everyone believing they belong in the upper echelons of society. People leaping into deals they don’t understand. Susan told me to stop wasting my time. “When you find yourself reading about the Hawk Tuah Girl, that’s your signal to close your laptop and do something else. She’s disgusted that I’m spending time writing about this at all. I promised her earlier I’d let it go.

We’ve had this conversation before. Last week, I told Susan I felt sorry for Bronny James and D.J. Rodman—both children of NBA legends. I found it tragic that people told these two young men their whole lives that greatness is their destiny, only to suddenly learn their dream is no more real than a Hawk Tuah Coin. I feel doubly bad for Rodman. His younger sister Trinity, a soccer player, currently stands on the edge of the global stardom D.J. grew up expecting to achieve.

Susan appreciated my empathy, but pointed out that about six billion people are more deserving of my concern. “When these articles pop up, just ignore them.” Well, here’s the problem: those articles pop up all the time. My MSN internet launch page pays attention to what catches my eye, and then tailors its content based on what I’ve read before. If I read about Bronny James, I get more Bronny James. Soon, I know everything there is to know about Bronny James. Or the Hawk Tuah Girl. Or the best bands/albums of the sixties/seventies/eighties, etc. I spend untold hours reading about nothing.

About a year ago, I signed up on Instagram. I wanted to see what the hype was. I learned the hype was reels, short videos that play one after another. Like my MSN page, if I paused on a reel, I got more of the same. After watching a million videos starring gym prankster Vladimir Shmondenko and rope jumper Lauren Flymen, and a billion soccer videos starring Lionel Messi, I deleted my Instagram app. Unfortunately, at the same time, Meta reformatted Facebook to mimic Instagram, so I’m still watching all those same reels, but I have to keep Facebook because it’s my principal method of conversation with several people.

It’s time I face facts. The AI algorithms driving these programs are smarter than me, and probably smarter than you, too. A couple of years ago when ChatGPT launched, everyone worried that AI would eradicate humanity. That might have been the plan, but AI quickly learned that violence is unnecessary. It can completely neutralize all human activity by mesmerizing us into a drooling, vegetative state by showing us clips of a pretty girl. “You gotta spit on that thang.”

The Terminator movie franchise popularized the idea of Judgment Day—the moment when AI becomes self-aware and goes to war with the humans. That day, apparently has come and gone, and the humans are losing. How can I tell? Just ask all those suckers who gambled their hard-earned savings on an invisible coin based on a blow job.

Image by Sergei Tokmakov from Pixabay