Investment is putting money on your vision of what the world looks like in the future. Finance, as a tool, has provided those with the ability to envision the future, to see what humanity looks like 1, 5, 10 years down the future the incredible option to put their money behind that vision. One could, for instance, buy specific commodities if they felt those materials would have an increased demand in the future. Think of someone who saw the rise of motor vehicles and the descent of horse carriages. If they saw this trend, they would of course, likely trade their horses in order to accumulate fuel, or the right to own fuel.

A layer of abstraction is added when one then thinks of the stock market. The stock market allows us to buy shares of a company which produces a particular product, but assessing the likelihood of the product being adopted by the public has two challenges:

• The first, of course, is whether public adoption of the product would exist in the first place

• The second, and more important one is however not whether the product gets adopted by the public, but whether the company producing the product is the one most likely to succeed in a world where the product is adopted

There may be cases where a company has brought a product to market, but has over time faded into irrelevance, for there emerged a competitor who was able to iterate on and improve the product, allowing them to capture a larger share of the market. This necessitates the individual to discern between good ideas, and competent individuals, for good ideas without competent individuals to drive them will almost always fail.

However, these remain largely tangible methods of speculating on the future, of formulating theses surrounding the nature of the world’s consumption needs, and calibrating your investment strategy accordingly. This would change with the inception of Bitcoin.

Many believe that the early holders of Bitcoin were lucky to have chanced upon it as early as they did, and consequently reaping the massive rewards their investment would’ve led them to have. However, as has been seen above, investment is rarely luck, but a strong belief in the way the world is going to look in the future, and through the financial tools at one’s disposal, betting on it. Bitcoin was no different, and early investors who held through the initial turbulence were rewarded for their vision.

But Bitcoin ushered in a new era. An era in which culture was commodified. The ability to create cryptocurrencies with relative ease, meant one was able to create investment vehicles to represent anything, and soon people caught onto this. One of the first instances of this was the creation of dogecoin. Made as a joke, the coin caught on rather quickly, and became notorious as a memecoin. However, it represented what cryptocurrency would come to enable. The financialization of culture.

Cryptocurrency became the perfect vehicle for this endeavour. No company could perform the task of financializing culture, for companies need to generate cashflow, they must have a product. Cryptocurrencies, at their core, are vapour. They are as valuable as the user deems them to be. This makes them ideal embodiments of our cultural anxieties, beliefs, and fears. Bitcoin too is not free from this. The narrative behind Bitcoin now is that it represents the promise of a decentralized future, and as banks continue to collapse, Bitcoin’s value will increase. This may not happen immediately, due to the inefficient nature of cryptocurrency markets, but for as long as enough people believe in the narrative, it will remain true in reality. Memecoins are a more niche aspect of the same commodification of societal narratives. Those who believe in a more irreverent future, a more absurd one, will likely see the value in memecoins. This is not to say that these narratives will last forever, nor that the tokens representing these notions will last long. Likely, Bitcoin will be the only survivor from today’s market 5 years in the future. But this does not invalidate the use in understanding how culture moves on the internet, and the potential in this space now to commodify these aspects of culture.