Sales on one well-known platform have dropped to less than one-seventh of what they were in January, and the purchaser of the so-called “Mona Lisa of the digital world,” a $2.9 million NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, was forced to sell it for only $6,800. Since January, the market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) has been in a downward spiral.
The vibes manager is a brand-new position that NFT projects have adopted to stabilize the situation.
The vibes manager, also known as a “Chief Vibes Officer” or “Director of Vibes” at some companies, is tasked with promoting NFT projects to newcomers and assuring existing funders. This position is a hybrid of a marketer, influencer, and investor relations officer. The aim is to remain optimistic at all times.
TropoFarmer, a thirtysomething Minnesotan who was among the first purchasers of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs (one of the most hyped and expensive collections) and is an advocate for vibes management, asserted that “vibes are everything.” There are strategies for swing trading based on momentum, which is primarily supported by vibes.
According to Business Insider, an NFT startup by the name of Fractional was one of the first to hire a vibes director. The position was filled by an influencer by the name of Deeze, who a spokesperson referred to as “the most public-facing employee at the company alongside the founder” and “a super influential commentator and tastemaker in the NFT space.”
Deeze oversees the organization’s Twitter and Discord accounts in addition to managing “collector relations” and serving as the “internal ‘vibe checker’ for events and content,” according to the spokesperson.
Such work is essential for an industry that depends on the promise of social exclusivity to hold the interest of potential investors and divert holders’ attention away from the troubled market. Holders of Bored Ape NFTs were granted access to a special concert series that featured performances by Lil Baby, Timbaland, and Haim during a recent NFT conference in New York.
Because of how upbeat the festival was, according to tropoFarmer, “people there honestly could not give much of a shit” about the NFT market crash.
Michael Jerome, a 20-year-old NFT investor, left college last year to pursue full-time trading and online posting about NFTs. Shortly after, he was hired by a startup called Tally Labs to serve as their “director of vibes,” a position that was modeled after Deeze’s.
According to Jerome, the title is “obviously a little bit intimidating, maybe something you laugh at if you don’t really understand it, but if I had to sum it up in one word, I would say it’s marketing.”
Many of these initiatives blatantly depend on a steady influx of new suckers to maintain the value of these tokens or NFTs.
The work entails creating “hundreds” of posts every day on Twitter, which hosts the vast majority of NFT discussion and pays him a salary and full benefits. “I serve as the neighborhood’s eyes and ears. Jerome used a slang term for high-risk cryptocurrency investors when he said, “I’m a full-time employee, I work for the team, but before anything, I’m a holder and I’m just another ‘degen’ on Twitter who wants to make a quick flip and have fun. And I believe that makes it possible for our community to view me as just another friend and member.
Blockchain investments like NFTs and cryptocurrencies have developed a sense of camaraderie based on feverish optimism, which is expressed through the community’s unique online jargon over time. Users came together in the early days of bitcoin’s growth over the price going “to the moon.” Since then, “WAGMI,” which stands for “We are going to make it,” has taken its place. The investments, which are essentially unregulated, have experienced wild price swings over the years, driven by claims that blockchain could solve a variety of real-world issues, such as poverty and democratic collapse.
That utility has not appeared at all. The current enthusiasm for vibe management, according to blockchain detractors, has a straightforward explanation: existing investors need new targets to hustle.
According to software engineer Molly White, many of these projects “plainly require a constant inflow of new suckers to prop up the prices of these tokens or NFTs or whatever the project is centered around.” White’s website, “web3 is going great,” mockingly documents significant crypto collapses in a scrolling timeline.
“They disguise that by talking about things like culture, vibes, and community. But it’s difficult to separate that fact from the fact that the project wouldn’t exist without new recruits. This nefarious weaponization of the concept of community is what it is.
Tech company publicist and writer Ed Zitron described vibe managers as “somewhere between an evangelical and a pure old con artist… People are meant to feel good about staying in the cryptocurrency industry, about losing money, or at the very least, about thinking they are on the side of history.
They will feel much more welcomed if they enter and are greeted by people who are hugging, slapping, and cheering them on.
The director of Tally Labs’ vibes, Jerome, acknowledged that there is “a lot of smoke and mirrors, a lot of manufactured marketing, and a lot of hype-driven crap” that can cause prices to skyrocket. However, he acknowledged that these issues were “frustrating as a real builder and working with someone you believe is doing real stuff.”
The author of The Game, Neil Strauss, is collaborating on a novel that will feature over 4,000 digital apes as part of the startup’s “massive” expansion plans for the fictional world of Bored Apes, he said. But the widespread use of NFTs is what he really wants to see. “Onboarding a billion, two billion, or three billion people is going to take a lot of work.”
It will take a lot of “welcoming vibes” for potential NFT owners, who tropoFarmer claims frequently have “a big financial commitment,” to reach that scale.
“I compare it to someone entering a bar for the first time after having paid thousands of dollars to do so. If they enter and no one says anything to them, that is a failure. They will feel much more welcomed if they enter and find people hugging, slapping, and cheering them on.
They’ll take part in the community much more effectively, which will benefit everyone and make it a better place to live in the long run.
