There is a recent term that crypto has become enamoured with, a term that supposedly accounts for the phenomenon that is memecoins: “financial nihilism”. The concept is fairly self-explanatory. By most objective measures, the economy is cooked. Consider interest rates, the housing market, the cost of education and healthcare, inflation and the rest of it. Not to mention the world is burning up all the while! How is anyone -- let alone “the kids” -- supposed to get ahead in such a dire circumstance? The apparent answer: gamble. Hence, memecoins. Indeed, against this economic backdrop, people are so disillusioned with things, so disenfranchised, so frustrated, that they have resorted to the most extreme and circular kind of speculation -- that is, speculating on speculation itself. Or so the rhetoric goes. However intellectually satisfying this hypothesis may be, it’s interesting to note that very few who actually partake in memecoins would offer this as an explanation for their behaviour. While those who stand outside the speculative fervour offer financial nihilism as a diagnosis -- as if the underlying behaviour were fundamentally pathological -- those who actually participate in it tend to have a very different perspective.

Although memecoiners are many and varied, and their personal situations equally so, what unifies them is their desire to make a dollar. In this respect, memecoiners are synonymous with investors or speculators generally. Fundamentally, they are economic agents acting in accordance with economic interests. In this sense, nothing is new under the sun. What separates memecoiners from traditional investors, however, is the fact that they have the audacity to believe that their “intrinsically valueless” magic internet coins might actually be worth something -- and hopefully more tomorrow than they are today. Of course, this notion of ‘intrinsic value’ that is so often levelled against crypto as a whole -- and memecoins, especially -- is ultimately naive, grounded, as it is, in a terribly constrained conception of value itself (as if value were somehow synonymous with discounted cash flows or industrial utility). In defiance of such a conception, what memecoiners grok, if only intuitively, is that there exists an underlying economic value to attention itself -- and in the case of memecoins, the community that underpins and facilitates the flow of attention. More broadly, all tokens, BTC and ETH included, can be seen as mechanisms for capturing the economic value of Internet communities. Memecoins simply take this logic to the extreme, having no claim on any additional utility or functionality beyond representing the interests or values -- i.e. culture -- of a particular online group. In the context of an Internet dominated by the logic of surveillance capitalism, what could be more fundamentally optimistic than this? That is, Internet communities coordinating around their own assets to co-construct value, independent of any intermediating authorities.

It’s not all so lofty though, of course. There is a sense in which memecoins are simply another manifestation of the human penchant for gambling. But here it’s important to appreciate that there is a far more porous boundary between gambling -- of the degenerate sort which we might deride -- and speculation, which fundamentally drives the techno-capital system, than we might appreciate. Instead of a binary dichotomy, the difference between gambling and speculation is, as with most things, more of a spectrum. However, even if we reduce the current memecoin meta to gambling, it’s interesting that we should attribute financial nihilism as the cause of memecoins where we ordinarily understand and perceive gambling as a form of entertainment. Except for the truly degenerate, most folks who bet on a sporting event or a few chips at the casino aren’t doing so because they have no other shot at financial freedom. Instead, they do it for the thrills -- the dopamine.

All this being said, it’s interesting to consider just why financial nihilism, of all the possible explanations, is the reflexive rationale for memecoins. On some level, it’s surely just a memetic, self-reinforcing phenomenon -- i.e. someone on Twitter made the case and now everyone repeats the dogma and the dogma becomes gospel. On another level, though, it might be seen as a reflection of the modern impulse to pathologise, or perhaps the implicit shame and self-hatred of the West. In any event, while there are plenty of positive explanations for why memecoins have popped off the way they have, we’ve latched onto the most cynical. Whatever it is, there