Ben McKenzie Says Crypto Has a Secret Ingredient: Male Loneliness

Ben McKenzie had a question: “When did WIRED die?” Specifically, the actor-director wanted to know when did WIRED “‘DIE,’ all caps.”

McKenzie wasn’t asking for himself; he was engaging in the time-honored celebrity tradition of reading mean tweets. Although, in this case, the object wasn’t himself so much as the publication hosting the event. McKenzie, who famously played Ryan on The O.C. before becoming a leading voice of crypto skepticism, was sharing the stage with WIRED senior correspondent Andy Greenberg for the first of what will hopefully be a series of smaller events that we are calling WIRED@Night.

On April 16, about 100 people gathered at event partner Ace Hotel Brooklyn to sip drinks from Aplos, Faccia Brutto, The Sorting Table, and Manojo and ponder the future of cryptocurrency.

McKenzie, coauthor of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, has a new independent documentary in theaters called Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. Greenberg, who often writes about crypto scams, talked to him about scenes from the book and movie, in which McKenzie traveled to places like crypto hub El Salvador to understand why the technology still has so much appeal despite its less-than-stellar reputation.

One of McKenzie’s explanations? Male loneliness. “It’s the longing for community, actual community,” McKenzie said, noting that crypto exists online as a kind of extreme gambling, something that really exploded into the mainstream during the Covid-19 pandemic. Here’s to more IRL antidotes to that kind of digital isolation.