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It has been A Week. So I’ve only just caught up Jay Springett’s weeknote from last week, in which he talks about the $TRUMP memecoin. Money hasn’t had any intrinsic value since the major currencies left the gold standard decades ago. Memecoins are like cryptocurrencies on steroids.

TRUMP Coin has sort of got lost in the noise in UK media due to the Tiktok shut down. But its way way way more insane, and way more significant news. In the last 48 hours Trump’s net worth increased by FIFTY BILLION (ILLIQUID) DOLLARS. Just days before he becomes president.

Jay quotes himself about real time attention markets and ‘economic entertainment’. It’s fascinating, especially if you read books like Clay Shirky’s Here Cones Everybody back in the day:

The rise of real time attention markets, economic entertainment, prediction markets (and the coming era of Power Fandoms) are a kind of revenge of late 90’s early 00’s Utopianism. The idea of cognitive surplus. We’re starting to see the kinds of swarm/group intelligences predicted by Shirky / Tapscott – but distorted through contemporary capitalism’s relentless logic. It took super liquid markets and meme coins for them to emerge.

He and some others have been discussing what all this means which led to a post by RM which channels the TV show Black Mirror. Even reading about this kind of stuff makes me feel about a million years old:

Personally, seeing your “value” as a volatile ticker must be truly psychologically draining. Imagine scaling that to a presidency. One day, your market cap soars; the next, an unpopular move collapses the coin. It’s like living in a Black Mirror episode where “market cap” equals self-worth and “24h volume” measures relevance.

[…]

Is this the world’s most ingenious social experiment, rewriting power, brand, and money dynamics? Or an accidental time bomb threatening presidential credibility? Unlike stocks reacting to politics, this directly monetizes an individual’s persona, allowing real-time buying and selling of reputation.

What does all of this mean in practice? I have no idea.

Source: thejaymo

Image: Maxim Hopman