The best way to make yourself unpopular in crypto isn't to be a misogynist, a liar, or even a fascist - quite the opposite, those might even be somewhat celebrated.
Instead, all it takes is digging out Marx's works and pointing out that the man who gave Capitalism its name had some insights into the relationship between society and capital that weren't all about crushing the bourgeoisie and bringing about a revolution.
This much ahead, I am not a Marxist nor do I believe that we just need to find the right form of communism this time around. At the same time, I'm also not a reverent advocate of letting "free" markets reign in each small interaction of our lives.
I'm edging on pretty critical toward the idea that the current form of Capitalism (Technofeudalism, Vulture Capitalism, what you wanna call it) is creating the biggest benefit for the most people.
I even question whether our systems, in which large players dominate the market, can be called by this ideology, which Adam Smith thought would give rise to the best products (highest utility) thanks to healthy competition.
Some celebrate the market dominators, and none is as vocal about it as Peter Thiel. As much as I dislike his ideology, I admit he is at least honest when he openly says that competition is for losers, and ideally all the companies he invests in would be monopolies. Of course — that is the best way to max extract.
It's funny how much such dominators are celebrated, and yet... didn't we all learn early on in economics class that monopolies, or even duopolies, triopolies are bad for consumers. And also, just a question: how is a monopoly different from a company operating under a planned economy?
Sure, in one case the government tells you what to produce, in the other case it's the company doing the bare minimum it can get away with — neither leading to the greatest outcome for us (as workers or consumers).
The invisible hand of the market becomes the heavy hand of the powerful few. Nice.
Fun fact: did you know Adam Smith borrowed the invisible hand from Shakespeare? Now you know.
But I digress. The real topic of this post isn't general critique of capitalism.
Instead, I attempt to use some of Marx's ideas to explain weird things happening in crypto, namely memecoins. High-quality crypto outlets like CoinTelegraph butcher Jung's psychology to explain their appeal - so, I figured, I might as well go ahead and do better than that.
People who think they can learn about Nietzsche from Jordan Peterson, read one ChatGPT summary of Jung's idea and then submit this to Cointelegraph:
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Explaining memecoins as meaning-seeking exercise dismisses their ephmerality, unless you bunch all of them together, knead them into a melange of a "meta coin" that is a sort of religion for the financial nihilists.
Still, I have yet to meet a memecoin degen speaking about how beautiful a community they are now in and how much purpose they feel after becoming bag holders of a particular coin. The only altar they pray on is that of quick wealth. If you look deep enough, most aren't even in real communities, especially not for memes launched on pump.fun with a lifetime shorter than a fruit fly.
I understand the game is rigged, and accumulating capital through trading is a noble goal in a society that highly praises consumption. After all, if we all ran out of money to spend tomorrow and started subsistence farming, our GDP's precipitous downfall would make the white cliffs of Dover jealous.
In a world where the myth of hard work only persists to lure us into selling our souls, memecoins offered themselves as the quick hack to break out and finally be able to buy that lambo.
Why the lambo? Good question. Objectively, its price can't be explained by the utility of getting you from one place to the other. A Toyota Corolla does as much.
Those more in love with Elon and dystopia might opt for a cybertruck instead.
Again, practically, there's no reason it should cost that much (plus it costs your dignity on top of it - but that might be the least of a crypto bro's worries).
All these two cars do is identify their owners as bearers of a Napoleon complex or some other insecurity worth covering.
Fortunately, for the cases where a good seems outrageously out of touch with its production (and utility) value, Marx has a great explanation.
Commodity Fetishism
"...[commodities] analysis shows that it is in reality a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties... its mystical character does not originate in their use value."
"As against this, the commodity form, and the value-relation of the products of labour, within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity, and the material relations rising out of this. it is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves, which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things."
Karl Marx in Das Kapital about commodities
What Marx is explaining in convoluted English (originally German, but I'll spare you with that one), is exactly how that gap between the price of a product and the cost of materials and labor that went into it comes into the world. In the case of lambos, they shouldn't cost that much. In the case of objects sold on Temu, how can they cost so little?
As we become more alienated from the actual labor and production, some consumers might even grow up with the perception that fruits grow in the supermarket (ok, this might be exaggerated but you get the point). 🍏
Outside of fresh produce, there are plenty of products we feel enticed to buy all the time, from fashion to tech gadgets. We rarely seriously question their prices.
Yet, the subconscious lingering doubt sometimes pierces through the thin veil of excitement over a thing we didn't need to begin with.
In the absence of answers to the question of what went into a product, and who created it — the alternative being that the answers are such we do not want to hear, like child labor or worker exploitation in the global south — we turn to commodity fetishism.
That means we imbue the things we purchase with magical properties. Take the lambo, or even smaller items. Fashion is one of the best examples to talk about commodity fetishism. Every once in a while, tbh every week, there is a new must-have item that won't just make the purchaser a few thousand dollars poorer ( thank god for buy now pay later), but also fix their life and make them desirable.
Or at least make them fit in with a certain category of aesthetics - xyz girl.
Let me be real, it's rarely about fashion in those instances. Instead it's all about social signalling. The worth of the items isn't defined by their material costs, it's only defined by the collective delusion they bathe in.
The wealthy class pours further fuel into the fire of fetishization with their cultivation of envy. Don't we all want to be them?
That's something aspiring TikTok fashionistas and memecoin degens might have in common.
It goes without saying that a certain shoe won't make you a better athlete, neither will smoking make you a better feminist (yes there was a campaign around this) - but advertising suggests so.
What does any of this have to do with memecoins?
Well simple.
Since memes have no real material costs, nor "labor" put into them if you subtract the 10 minutes it took someone to screenshot an image and connect their wallet to pump.fun social relations is all there is to them.
These relations start to look an awful lot like those between the owners of the means of production, and the workers once you get deeper into who makes all the money.
The value of a memecoin as reflected in price is best defined by who is endorsing it. If said person has a high social standing, or at least a large social media following, more people buy into the meme, assuming it confers some of that magical property of popularity onto them, or at least allows them to cash out before others do.
This holds particularly true for the memes launched in this cycle that weren't all wholesome forks of Litecoin and lived a niche existence for the longest time until a billionaire picked up on it...
In sharing the memecoin with your unsuspecting friends and telling them to buy, you're engaging in surplus labor, especially assuming you won't get out before the insiders start selling. In that sense, the result of your work is captured by someone that isn't you. Sounds like... capitalism. Or feudalism.
But memes go beyond just pure commodity fetishism in that ironically they position to be the answer, the contrarian opposite to the heavily VC-invested infra projects.
They sell you the promised land of manna raining from the sky, even though the current crop has simply repackaged the existing unfair dynamic of a few in the know against the rest of us in the trenches.
Another kind of delusion. Or, as Debord would put it, they've become part of the Spectacle.
The Spectacle
In his short book, the Society of the Spectacle, the French philosopher Guy Debord took it on himself to figure out how commodity fetishism evolved. He describes with poignant accuracy the impact of consumerism, and how a system arose to keep it afloat.
"The spectacle is a permanent opium which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own law."
Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle
Debord decries the alienation that the Spectacle deepens, not only in that it alienates workers from the product of their labor (that much Marx has said), no it also alienates us from each other and our selves.
How it does that? By diminishing what it meant to be and replacing it with the question of appearance.
"All that once was directly lived has become mere representation."
Social media is the best, most visceral representation of what he means in our time - even though Debord was writing this more than 50 years ago.
Online, we commodify ourselves; it's not a coincidence that we speak of personal brands as if we were an unchanging product that at best gains additional features, not a human being with a self consisting of a fluctuating sense of self.
"Each man — if he is man at all — is an ever-changing entity himself, as too is the world around him."
Benjamin Myers in The Offing
We curate who we are, and for some the lines between these two worlds blur. The impact of the representations we see and how we change the physical is seen everywhere, from tourists queuing at the "instagrammable" hot spots to coffee shop owners renovating their store to look like a typical hipster cafe for better Google Maps visibility.
We cultivate our identity - and lacking other ways to show who we are in this fragmented life, we resort to using commodities to fill the gap. What we buy becomes who we are, a signifier of how unique we are. We buy into the meaning others have put onto certain items rather than define it ourselves.
And that's how the Spectacle manages to alienate us from ourselves. There's no need to stop and ask what I want when it's dictated to you that you're a Dark Academia type, thus expected to dress the part, and listen to the romantic dark academia playlists readily provided by an algorithm. The image becomes all there is to it. All is reduced to an aesthetic; an evanescent drip in the puddle of consumer culture.
Appearance trumps substance.
A long detour to get back to the memecoins. Because what are they if not pure appearance lacking substance? They're not all that different from an influencer whose personality is defined by fitting into whatever the current thing is.
We might assign the memecoins magical attributes such as providing us a sense of meaning, a token of our quixotic quest to making it, a piece in the puzzle of our cultivated identity.
Still, they really aren't all that much in 99% of the cases.
I admit there might be an odd one out, higher for one seems to aspire to be more - but I don't count it as part of the cynical memes that recently polluted our industry.
Beneath it all there's but social relations.
In fate's twisted irony, it took presidents getting entangled with memecoins to rip off the glittering appeal and show what's happening.
Just like a girl on a scholarship might opt to clothe herself in the rich white girl uniform when attending a prestigious university to fit in, a president launching memecoins exposes them. It's not really about the actual meme which isn't usually even remotely funny to begin with.
You're drip-feeding your liquidity to the insiders. Congrats. You've bought into the criticism of the Spectacle dressing up as the way to escape the matrix. Or as Debord calls that process: recuperation.
"It's laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence"
Guy Debord in Society of the Spectacle
I couldn't care less about rich people yolo-ing their funds into yet another meme, I seriously doubt though that they are the target audience for such extraction mechanisms. Especially because our current system does not reward hard work, disillusionment takes hold.
Ultimately, what's sold as the solution is that you just need to become rich to shield yourself from the downside effects of inequality.
Keep consuming, and keep the system running. Never stop asking why it feels like a glass wall stands between you and the world.
In the memecoin trenches, it's just you against the other bag holders, trying to get out ahead of them. When really what we need is consciousness that what's rigged is the game itself, and that we shouldn't see other people - even if just presented to us as a wallet address - as a potential idiot to dump on.
Quite the opposite.
In this game, there's only one winner, and it isn't the broad mass.
Is there any escaping the Spectacle you might wonder?
Debord didn't really think so initially, although he was a big fan of people who'd just live in the moment, going for random walks across Paris and not buy stuff on those they didn't need.
Another potential tactic is detournement - using the methods of the system to dillute its message. An example of that is subvertising. Since the problem with the Spectacle is that it sells you back its critique - a more contemporary example of that is Wall-E, or all the movies displaying class divide.
There might be no escaping the Spectacle or commodity fetishism, but at least there's recognizing they exist and that's a start to create something that might just be a little better.
Thanks for reading. 💚
I realize I had more thoughts on this topic than I initially assumed, hence this got long. In the future,e I might write some more exploring the Spectacle beyond memes, the new kinds of classes we got in crypto, or the topic of alienation.
A few of the sources that informed me:
Alice Chapelle's Video Essay on Temu and Commodity Fetishism
Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle
The Philosophize This episode on Debord
Fetishism of digital commodities and hidden exploitation - an essay by the Wu Ming Foundation
Commodity Fetishism in Fast Fashion by Fashion Elitist
Why No One Wins the Fast Fashion debate by Broey Deschanel
Karl Marx Das Kapital
Beautiful trouble: Commodity Fetishism
Social Media's Obsession with Aesthetics and Curated Identities by Shanespeare
Ok, I procrastinated on my real work writing this instead. This has accidentally become one of my longest posts in recent months... 😆 Anyway, if you wonder how Marx and Debord offer useful frames for thinking about memecoins - here's my attempt at making that happen.
Minted! An impressive argument. I wish there were more writers like you making these connections!
Aww thanks a lot, I find there is way too little actually deep philosophical discussion happening in crypto (sure in select corners but the majority is just superficial understanding of concept slapped onto something haha) so figured I can just do stuff.