🟪 Memecoins take a dark turn

Just as Dawkins coined the term 'meme,' Land coined the term 'hyperstition'

Author

Byron Gilliam
November 25, 2024

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“The experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies.”

— Nick Land, on hyperstition

Memecoins take a dark turn

What I like most about crypto is that it encourages us to go down deep rabbit holes and ponder the first principles of money, finance, cryptography, law, art, philosophy, politics and more. 

Even if crypto turns out to be a complete bust, we’ll at least be better educated for having taken it seriously.

The silliness of memecoins, for example, led many of us to Richard Dawkins’ serious work on memes, without which it may be impossible to understand the modern world.

As memecoins become an increasingly serious business, however, it’s beginning to feel like Dawkins' work may be insufficiently explanatory.

Instead, we may have to go deeper by delving into the work of the philosopher Nick Land.

While Dawkins’ work on evolutionary biology explains how memes propagate themselves, Land’s hyper-capitalist worldview may explain how financialized memes (aka, memecoins) can reshape the real world. 

Just as Dawkins coined the term “meme,” Land coined the term “hyperstition” — a portmanteau of “hyper” and “superstition” that he described as a “techno-science of self-fulfilling prophecies."

“Superstitions are merely false beliefs,” he wrote, “but hyperstitions — by their very existence as ideas — function causally to bring about their own reality.”

Land cites the internet as an example: “The (fictional) idea of cyberspace contributed to the influx of investment that rapidly converted it into a technosocial reality.”

Without judgment, Land warned of the power of finance and investing to “transmute lies into truths.” 

“Capitalism,” he wrote, “incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of intensity, turning mundane economic ‘speculation’ into an effective world-historical force.” 

If so, this process may be reaching its apogee with the speculation in memecoins, at least one of which takes inspiration directly from Land.

Truth Terminal, the semi-autonomous bot that kicked off the current craze for AI-themed memecoins, was trained on the complete philosophical works of Nick Land, according to Marc Andreessen, who cited Land in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto (evidently unaware of how pessimistic Land’s worldview is). 

Similarly, a study of another prominent memecoin, Zerebro, explains the potential significance of AI-generated memes by invoking Land’s ideas: “The findings illustrate how hyperstition-driven content generation by autonomous AI can shape financial markets and cultural narratives.” 

That may be understating things. 

In the aftermath of the presidential election, Elon Musk posted on X that “America was saved by a squirrel and a meme coin!”

He was referring to Peanut the Squirrel and the eponymous memecoin which seemed to galvanize support for Trump just ahead of the election.

Musk could also have referenced the role of dogecoin in spreading the meme of “government efficiency” that is now poised to have real-world consequences — or even the central role of the pepe meme in securing Trump’s 2016 election in the first place.

Reading Land’s work will make you think there is more causality and less randomness to all of these things — and that memecoins should therefore be taken seriously.

But Land’s work is a cautionary tale for memecoin devotees because this way lies madness — literally.

Land’s academic career ended in 1998 when he was committed to psychiatric care after his exploration of “inhumanism” led him to writhe on the ground during a lecture in the belief he had become a snake.

If that seems too far gone to be relevant to our exploration of crypto, you probably did not notice that memecoins took a dark turn over the weekend — people have been using the livestream function on pump.fun (the platform where most memecoins are launched) to attract attention to their coins by doing increasingly disturbing things.

One person put themselves in a cage and promised to bark like a dog until enough people bought his coin; another threatened to kill a real dog; another did kill a chicken; someone fired a gun out their window whenever their coin was purchased; others threatened much worse if their coin wasn’t sufficiently purchased.

This madness should soon come to an end (if it hasn’t already) because pump.fun shut down its website’s streaming function (it’s the live videos that enabled this behavior).

But, however short-lived, the weekend’s events are nonetheless evidence that we should take hyped-up memecoins seriously — and not just as memes that spread amusingly from mind to mind, but as hyperstitions that have the power to change the world around us by turning fictions into realities.

“Hype actually makes things happen,” Land explained (before he thought he might be a snake).

“Just because it’s not ‘real’ now, doesn’t mean it won’t be real at some point in the future.”

Memecoins are increasingly making things real.

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