By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | January 3, 2022 |
By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | January 3, 2022 |
Let me just preface this by saying that I finally watched The Last Duel over the weekend, and honestly, it may have been my favorite movie of 2021, along with The Harder They Fall. I know that when it was announced — not that long after Matt Damon had said some dumb things about #MeToo — that the idea of a movie about two men dueling over the rape of a woman seemed about as tone-deaf as possible for Damon and Affleck (who co-wrote the movie), but I suspected there would be much more to it than that given the involvement of Jodie Comer and, especially, co-writer Nicole Holofcener. I absolutely loved it. Matt Damon plays a 14th-century controlling, man-splainey douchebag and Ben Affleck plays a preening womanizer (and the comic relief), which is to say: They’re perfectly cast for roles they wrote for themselves (I can only assume that Holofcener wrote Jodie Comer’s role as a direct response to theirs).
Matt Damon appears to be leaning into his douchebag persona these days, recently starring in a commercial for cryptocurrency. And look: I admit that I don’t know a lot about crypto. I mean, I know what it is. I know the basics. But I had no idea how much power it consumed until I saw this thread over the weekend, and while some I asked knew about the amount of power consumed mining crypto, others had no idea. It’s insane:
The power consumed per Bitcoin transaction on average could power an average US household for more than 1.5 months.
— Digiconomist (@DigiEconomist) January 1, 2022
The carbon footprint of just one Bitcoin transaction amounts to 658kg of CO2, which is equal to the carbon footprint of almost 1.5 million VISA transactions.
Crypto mining consumes seven times more power than the entire global operation of Google. It consumes more power than Finland, more power than the state of Washington. I don’t know if it’s true that cryptocurrency wipes out the environmental gains of electric cars, but I also saw that comparison made several times.
The irony of "doing something meaningful" by producing electric cars and investing $1.5bn in cryptocurrency, which equals the carbon footprint of 1.8 million cars. pic.twitter.com/MLU7JWqjvw
— Thymeline (@NewThymeline) January 2, 2022
Letting people buy electric cars with crypto currency to "save the planet" is like cooling your house by leaving the refrigerator open.
— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) April 25, 2021
Somehow it makes perfect sense that Matt Damon is not only promoting it but comparing it to the moon landing. Good God (and yes, I know this ad is months old, but it’s only now catching fire):
Matt Damon doing a crypto ad. Jesus Christ does he not have enough money already pic.twitter.com/mS3tUgJ6HT
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) January 3, 2022
In addition to all the power used to mine crypto, think of all the power used to flood Twitter with jokes at Matt Damon’s expense:
I will buy Crypto from Matt Damon after he climbs Everest without supplemental oxygen.
— ✨☮💙 Kim Ruxton 💙☮✨ (@KimRuxton) January 3, 2022
So never.
Correction: there isn’t enough yuck in the world to describe Matt Damon advertising a Ponzi scheme *and comparing it to the moon landings*
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) January 3, 2022
did matt damon secretly buy his zoo with crypto :(
— Mackenzie Chance Harte (@MackHarte) January 3, 2022
Huh. Never thought Matt Damon would reprise his role as talented grifter Tom Ripley.
— MINT THE COIN (@davenookum) January 3, 2022
I was wrong: https://t.co/C6wjFoVkD8
Someone please reach out to Matt Damon's agent and fire them. Damon reminds me of the time a cat died on the side of the road on my bike ride to school, and nobody did anything about it. Every day I just peddled by and watched that cat decompose. That cat is Matt Damon.
— Stephanie Flynn (@stephaniemflynn) January 3, 2022
I'm curious about the series of conversations that resulted in matt damon not only doing an ad for crypto, but one that compares a libertarian private money scheme, which is built to defraud people and wreck the environment, to climbing Everest or the invention of flight
— fleur de l’hiver (@fleur_de_livres) January 3, 2022
[matt damon strolls past a spanish galleon] are you going to put your life savings into the pretend computer dog money that you can’t spend or are you a pussy
— Ulysses S. Cocksman (@USCocksman) January 2, 2022
The only thing I can ever think of when I watch that Matt Damon crypto commercial pic.twitter.com/ZcXOyqbgga
— Blake Dobyns (@BlakeDobyns) January 3, 2022