The h.wood Group to open doors on first nightclub in the metaverse

The Future. The h.wood Group (the brand behind L.A. institutions like Bootsy Bellows and The Nice Guy) has plans to open the first nightclub in the metaverse. The virtual Bootsy Bellows will be accessible with a themed NFT, showing that communities centered around digital tokens may act as literal keys in the metaverse.

Get your bits down to Bootsy Bellows
The h.wood Group wants to mint the first velvet rope of the metaverse.

• The company partnered with Looks Rare Studio and Sounds Rare Studio to open a virtual version of Bootsy Bellows.
• To get into the club, you’ll need to score a Bootsy Bellows NFT, which will hit the auction block sometime early next year on the Solana blockchain.

No word yet on how much drinks will cost or how they’ll be consumed.

NFT, please
The h.wood Group has already begun testing how NFTs can build community in real life. Over Halloween, the brand sold NFTs as a way to get into the Bootsy Bellows nightclub in West Hollywood, and it turned out to be a success. So, founders John Terzian and Brian Toll became bullish on the crypto-backed tokens.

Bored Ape Yacht Club (probably the kings of NFTs at this point) tried out a similar strategy. It recently held a warehouse party in Brooklyn where attendees had to show NFTs. Welcome to the future of wristbands.

Does Instagram want you to make a finsta?

The Future. Instagram is prompting users to open up a second account to encourage single-account users to post more (and boost the company’s metrics and advertising). But with Gen Z increasingly deeming Instagram "uncool" and separating their public and private personas, the new feature may actually be a covert way to reel back the younger generation. 

Day account, night account
Bored with your Insta? IG suggests you make a new one.

• Over the past year, Instagram has rolled out a prompt that asks users if they would like to “try a new account.”
• The prompt targets those who currently only have one account.
• Users can either link their current account to the new one, so they’re under one login, or build an entirely separate account.

Instagram says that the feature is meant to re-engage users who either have bloated accounts with random followers or would like a fresh account to explore new interests.

Double trouble
Although Instagram currently has 108 million daily active users in the U.S., it actually has 126 million active accounts... which means roughly 18 million users already have more than one account.

So is Instagram promoting the use of finstas (fake Instagram accounts)? Kind of. To Instagram, a “real” or “fake” account doesn’t really matter — they’re both accounts, which gives the company a bigger reportable metric and attracts fresh advertising.

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It’s a lot of work to find (good) work

The Future. Despite the labor shortage, many Americans are still struggling to find decent work. With supply-chain issues, inflation, and remote work creating challenging economic conditions for many people, the country is hopefully just going through a much-needed adjustment from an economy that stopped working for people years ago.

Labor woes
Even though the unemployment rate dropped to 4.2%, the Bureau of Labor Statistic's November jobs report wasn’t too hot.

• Only 210,000 jobs were added, failing to reach the projected 550,000.
• 7.4 million Americans are still unemployed and actively looking for work.
• 2.2 million of that 7.4 million have been searching for a job for over 27 weeks.
• An additional 4.3 million Americans are partially unemployed because they’re still working part-time, either after reduced hours or because of an inability to find full-time work.
• Another 5.9 million Americans aren’t actively looking for work but would like to re-enter the workforce as soon as they find the right opportunity.

That’s a lot of people the economy isn’t working for, for reasons like a lack of childcare options, low wages amid rising living costs, and uncertainty surrounding an ongoing pandemic, especially for those working in leisure and hospitality.

While everyone would love to get matched with the job of their dreams, we may all need to just accept that the economy is going through prolonged growing pains.