The Financialization of Everything

Or, Memes without Coins

• This is the first piece in the Mars Review’s newest section: Kumin, All Too Kumin. I’ll write about literature, perennialism, New York City, the MRB itself. Let me know if there’s something you want to hear from me about.

• We’re setting a public mint date for Lil Skribblers, the MRB NFT, for August 20. If you’re the sort of person who likes to get in on things pre-mint, respond to this email and we can chat.

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The revolution will not be televised, they said. Well, the assassination attempt certainly was. This was the first assassination attempt on a President that we all watched and commented on instantaneously. We marveled in real time about the framing of the candid photograph below. We speculated in real time whether this might have been a false flag operation. In group chats, we analyzed the shooter’s skill, and scratched our chins at the fact that the bodyguard protecting Trump was a woman seemingly a full foot shorter than him.

All this instant discussion was normal enough for those who had grown up on television. But what was new was the immediate production of memes—and not only memes, but memecoins. Not just a few, but a dozen of them sprung up on the website pump.fun, with names like THE BLOOD STAYS ON (TICKER: BLOOD), EARS OVER BITCHES (TICKER: EOB), and CEVIL WAR (TICKER: WAR). Death—or at least an attempt on death—had become financialized. Not just for specialized traders, but for anyone with an internet connection. It was an eerie feeling to see it all happen so quickly, and it gave me the sense that we are not very far away at all from the decentralized assassintion markets predicted by the early cypherpunks. “Real life” events had descended one more layer down into the digital.

In its viral iPad advertisement from a few months ago, Apple had shown a hydraulic press crushing various items of cultural production, including musical instruments, arcade games, and cans of paint. Critics felt the advertisement was tone-deaf; could they not see that the flattening of all cultural production into a sleek piece of hardware was something to be mourned, not celebrated?

But in a sense Apple was right not to care—or even to celebrate its Shiva-like powers of destruction. What is destroyed by our age of technology is not the music and the paintings and the sculptures that we claim to love so much, but the peculiar auras with which we’ve invested them. By making these works so easily reproducible, we strip away the extra numinosity; we can no longer continue with the delusion that it is the works themselves we love so much. It was the something extra that we have worshipped, and have lost. A frightening proposition, because we have not yet developed something new to worship. In fact, we do not even know what it is that we have lost.

In this way accelerationism, which has been coopted in popular parlance to mean something like optimism about technology’s influence, actually spells the opposite: the destruction of all that we cherished as providing us our humanity. Perhaps so that we might cherish something better. Or so that we might cherish nothing at all. 

The writer and publisher Roberto Calasso liked to joke that Marx was a poor economist but a superb theologian. What he meant was that Marx was among the first to notice that for moderns, commodities possessed the powers once possessed by the gods. This is not merely a metaphor. A god is the most powerful compression of a concept that we can imagine—this is the literal meaning of apotheosis. The Greeks imbue a little bow-wielding boy with the very pith of eros, and tell stories of him. We moderns imbue a sleek phone, or a pair of high heels, or a concept of political resistance.

In his role as the eiron—a character who raises stupidity and lack of social graces to the level of the sublime—

Mike Crumplar

points out that while the memecoin seems to outsiders chintzy or scam-like, it is homologous to the rewards for games played in the the traditional culture industry. Comparing his own project to the $EGIRL coin that was launched this past spring by

Cassidy Angel Grady

and friends, Crumps writes with an undulating level of irony:

We have a different sort of cartel, though it’s based on the same self-aggrandizing drive for clout and relevance. But ours will be a just reward for our service to American literature. Proper and tasteful. Our only dishonesty will be in overstating the relevance and allure of this little world so that we can get bigger deals for the books we write about it. Six figures at least, from the start. Easily. That’s what everyone else is getting and they aren’t any better than us…

In this paragraph, whether intentionally or not, Crumps reveals a truth both terrible and obvious: Everything has its price. All our cultural production can be squished down into the iPad, reduced to two dimensions. (To resist this principle requires a a calculation that expands, temporally or geographically, beyond life on earth.) The memecoin merely accelerates the process of creating culture—that is, of creating a speculative bubble. I think of the resistance fighters, on either side of any given political divide, trading their passion for acceptance to a crew, or for a university gig on a tenure track, or a book deal, or sexual attention from another member of the resistance, or simply for a sense of good conscience, of making one’s parents or peers or ancestors proud—perhaps even trading attempted violence for attempted glory. These were our passions, our religions, our careers, our great loves: When we look back from the future on the travails of human history, will we see only memes without coins?