Money Still Can’t Buy Cool

A new way to ruin NYC nightlife: NFTs and crypto

Dancers on the dance floor at the El Morocco nightclub in New York, 1988.
(Rita Barros / Getty)

An anecdote: When I was in graduate school (not very long ago), we were reading ZZ Packer’s short-story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (excellent), when my professor—at least 10 years my junior—remarked that she was surprised I had not actually read this book yet. I flipped to the copyright page, saw that it was published in 2003, and explained: “Oh, this came out when I was in da club.” Which was true.

Though I rarely venture out of the house past dark anymore, I spent much of my teens and 20s in da club. And by da club, I don’t mean a bar or a lounge or a music venue (I spent a lot of time in those places too), but a place with deep bass that you feel in your chest, where you dance till your legs hurt and commune with strangers because the DJ just played “that song.” And, while I was not of age for New York nightlife at its absolute best (the ’80s), I was definitely out on the streets to see the peak—when the Club Kids and the doormen ruled the day—as well as the decline, when we were forced to cede all that was interesting to all that was expensive, in the form of bottle service and tables presided over by investment bankers.

For the unfamiliar, a very brief history of contemporary New York nightlife: In the beginning, there was danger and despair and opportunity. The fiscal crisis of the 1970s left a lot of empty, undesirable real estate available at reasonable costs, and the creative got creative. Yes, there was Studio 54—which was all glitz, and celebrity, and production. But there were also the grittier, but no less exclusive, spaces—the Loft, Paradise Garage, Danceteria—places that were less about an expensive cover or celebrities, and more about gathering the most interesting assortment of people you could come up with and creating ambience and community. Yes, they were exclusive, but that exclusivity was based on who you knew, not how much money you made or what you did for a living. Eventually, AIDS put a major damper on this more freewheeling, heterogenous scene, leaving us only with iconic images of a New York where Basquiat’s world collided on a dance floor with Madonna’s while uptown socialites sipped drinks and Fab Five Freddy sprayed graffiti on a wall.

For a time, though, in the early ’90s, the nightclub endured as spectacle, the clubs themselves bigger in size than ever. This was the era of the Club Kids dancing to techno at the Limelight, Hip-Hop Sunday at the Tunnel, and the power of the doorman. Yes, there were cover charges (if you didn’t know somebody to put you on “the list”), but they were reasonable. The bigger barrier to entry in this era was “seeming cool” to the person manning the door. Did you seem like a person who would add value not just to the bank book, but to the party? Because if the party seemed cool, people would stay, and if people stayed (and drank), the club would make more money.

Then, as Michael Musto so brilliantly breaks down in his piece for Vice, Mayor Rudy Giuliani came to “take the fun out of ‘Fun City’” via crackdowns on increasingly hard-to-procure “cabaret licenses.” Small lounges with nary a dance floor (to avoid needing a cabaret license) like Bungalow 8 became the de facto mode of nightlife and—unable to make the same revenue off cover charges as their dance-club cousins—turned to bottle service. Seeing this model’s success, and its profit margins, owners of larger aughts-era clubs like Marquee adopted it as well, and, soon enough, “bottle service” seized the day. This era ushered in a fundamentally different kind of exclusivity for New York nightlife. No longer did it matter if you, an individual, could add to a party’s “atmosphere”; it only mattered if you could afford a $500 bottle of Grey Goose. Yes, it was more elite, but not necessarily better. Because that elitism had nothing to do with taste, or creativity, or style; it was simply based on if a person could afford the price of entry. And as that price kept creeping up, the kind of person who could afford it became, well, less cool. Suddenly, nightlife, like New York itself, became “Bro-ified.” It was a good time to find oneself aging out of the scene.

Last summer, in those few hopeful weeks before the Delta variant took hold, I allowed myself to get dragged to a megaclub in Bushwick, Brooklyn. And I was delighted. It was two in the morning, and I looked out from an upper floor onto the dance floor below and felt transported in time, in the most delightful way. I saw throngs of dancing bodies, of various races and ethnicities and even ages, defined not by designer duds, but by whatever they felt like wearing. Drawn to this place by the sheer desire to dance. There was no doorman, no bottle service—just a reasonable cover and a wristband, brilliantly linked to your credit card so that you could buy drinks. It was perhaps the most democratic access to partying that I’ve experienced in all the years I’ve been going out in New York, and, for a moment, I was hopeful. Around this same time, Emily Witt published a piece documenting the return to nightlife, and again I was cheered by how unpretentious and socially good for the city this kind of creative revelry is. Commerce has always ruled the day in New York, but creativity is so often a nocturnal creature.

And then, the other day, my friend sent me this Instagram post by a famous party promoter, which featured screenshots of an article about a party they had thrown to launch their new venture, SOCIETE. You see, during the pandemic, with many nightclubs closed, pop-up parties have become popular. This particular promoter decided to take it to the next level and introduce an NFT that would provide exclusive “membership” to his parties. And I literally banged my head on my kitchen counter and thought to myself: Oh my God, New York! When will you learn that money doesn’t buy cool?

An NFT—or non-fungible token—is by nature, designed to be of limited supply, which is a way of ensuring “exclusivity,” but it also adds another layer that requires the purchaser to be well-versed and comfortable in the world of cryptocurrency. All of which didn’t sound to me like “cool” as much as it felt like a new way to make nightlife douchey again.

SOCIETE claims to have “a focus on a top-level nightlife experience filled with good energy in exclusive environments, to create a vibe remnant of old school New York and European nightlife,” according to the article the promoter had made a screenshot of. The piece went on to reference these bygone “exclusive environments” that they want to re-create, namedropping mid-aughts staples like 1Oak and Lotus: places defined by that drearily uncreative, intensely sexist, bottle-service era. The Bro era. A time many consider the dark days of New York nightlife.

Unfortunately, in order to write this piece, I had to go down the rabbit hole I’d been hoping to avoid and learn more about NFTs. While SOCIETE is more dance-club-oriented, it is not the first “social club” tied to the elite (and remarkably expensive) world of NFTs. Apparently, the most exclusive NFTs of them all are tied to a hybrid virtual/IRL club called the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Membership—which is currently limited to only 10,000 NFTs—comes with an original ape avatar that an artist creates, and membership to the “ape community.” These ape NFTs are owned by famous people and by, of course, very rich people. (One ape resold for $2.9 million, or 740 Ethereum.) And yet, when I was reading about the apes and their big bash, all I could think of was how lame this all sounded. Describing the apes, one journalist writes: “The BAYC members eat bananas (seriously) and wear branded sweatshirts to show that they belong. Some are dressed in leather jackets or Hawaiian shirts that match their cartoon apes’ outfits so fellow club members can recognize them IRL.” Another journalist, who managed to sneak into the yacht party held late last year, described it as “the longest line to a men’s room I’ve ever seen,” and noted that “the crowd was full of black-and-white Bored Ape Yacht Club hoodies and T-shirts, which have the look of mid-2010s streetwear, just north of minimal, and the Yacht Club members wore them like frat letters. The energy was very collegiate, sloppy. The partiers didn’t seem to care much about cleaning up their messes. The ground was sticky before long, and the spilled beer smell began rising from it.” If this is the most exclusive club in the world, I guess for the first time in my life I’m not mad that I can’t make it past the velvet ropes.

What clearly was achieved by Bored Ape—and what SOCIETE is seemingly aspiring to as well—is creating a sense of community. But it also creates the unnecessary illusion that community can only be obtained through acts of fiscal consumption, that “belonging” comes with a price tag. Has community become so evasive to us in our ever-more-digital lives that we think it’s something that must be paid for?

On Saturdays in my teen years, my friends and I would go hang out in Washington Square Park, where we’d commune with other artsy teenagers interested in skateboarding and self-expression and exploring this city of ours. We would cobble our money together for McDonalds or bagels and shop at the Salvation Army to try to create “looks” for our ventures into nightlife. We didn’t have much, but we had community. There was a place for everybody and every kind of freak flag, and we took joy in that. And we expressed the joy of that on the dance floor. This was what had struck me that night in Bushwick in 2021, and what Emily Witt so elegantly described in her piece about the restored, cabaret-licensed New York of the past five or so years: “Every year, the scene seemed to get younger, more diverse, more experimental, more lighthearted, more confident,” she wrote. “At the best parties, the door policies were democratic, the cover charges were fifteen or twenty dollars, and the parties lasted until the next day. The music sounded like the future…For the club kids, these venues and parties were more than drinking environments: they were therapy sessions, fitness routines, community centers, fashion magazines, dating apps, and foster families.”

This is what NYC nightlife was meant to be about. We had lost our way for a while, and recently, it seemed, we had found our way back.

And then I read about the nightclub NFTs. I realize that this is just one person, one promoter, as far as I can tell, but I remember when bottle service was a novelty, too. Capitalism is a seductive beast. What kills me about the idea of a nightclub NFT is that it takes a sacred space—the nightclub, the party, the dance floor, a space meant to be welcoming and enlivened by heterogeneity—and flattens it into a cyber-commodity, one even more rarefied and pretentious than bottle service. But, worst of all, it reinforces an idea that is antithetical to the spirit of nightlife: that economic means translates to cool. It does not. It just translates to rich.

Xochitl Gonzalez is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Brooklyn, Everywhere, about class, gentrification, and the American Dream. She is the author of the novel Olga Dies Dreaming and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.