Is selling MEME culture a secret to wealth or a bubble trap?

Original author: JJ Alicea

原文翻譯：方塊獨角獸

Memes have historically been part of the human experience, and they represent the migration of cultural artifacts across generations—ideas that are enduring, meaningful, and snowball across the ages. Memes are a focal point of society, and they carry value in the form of collective influence.

Today, people often associate memes with triviality or even funny things, mainly because Internet memes are usually humorous. However, the reason why humor resonates is that it contains a trace of truth.

“Memes propagate themselves through the meme pool by being passed from one brain to another, a process that can be broadly called imitation. Just as genes propagate themselves through the gene pool by being passed from one body to another via sperm or egg, memes propagate themselves through the meme pool by being passed from one brain to another.” – Richard Dawkins

Memes are the basic unit of cultural communication. In ancient societies, religious stories and shared histories were often passed from person to person orally, with each teller adding their own perspective or embellishment. This process helped solidify the beliefs and values of a community, embedding them deeply into the cultural fabric. Similarly, in modern societies, memes are cultural fragments or ideas passed from one mind to another, evolving with each retelling or reinterpretation. Both modes of communication rely on repetition, resonance, and the subtle shifts that occur as people interpret and share them, allowing the essence of an idea to persist and adapt over time. In this way, memes are modern storytelling tools that distill complex ideas into simple, easily spreadable forms, transmit cultural messages, and spread rapidly around the world.

社群

Meme is the basic unit of cultural communication, and community is the ecological environment in which meme accumulates value. In other words, meme is important ideas, and community is the people who are concerned about those ideas.

Communities usually have the following notable characteristics:

1. Common interests and goals

2. Communication and interaction

3. Structure and identity

4. Knowledge and resource sharing

5. Collective Identity

Communities often begin with a small number of individuals committed to disrupting mainstream culture. The open source software movement began with a small group of developers, such as those who drive the Linux project, who challenged the dominance of proprietary software and advocated for freely accessible and modifiable code. The punk rock movement began in cities like New York and London, driven by a small group of passionate musicians, artists, and fans who rejected the refined sounds of mainstream rock and the consumerism of pop culture. The VaccinateCA organization is a group of technological optimists dedicated to spreading information about vaccine availability to as many people as possible to combat a logistically constrained government system.

These communities, which began as highly localized communities of a small number of devoted believers with a shared vision and collective belief in the malleability of the world, ultimately had a profound impact on fields such as technology, finance, culture, art, entertainment, and medicine.

The Linux operating system saves businesses and governments more than $60 billion in licensing fees each year, Linux powers more than 90% of network infrastructure, and Android, built on the Linux kernel, powers about 70% of the worlds smartphones. Punk rock became the soundtrack to political and social uprisings in regions such as Eastern Europe (such as the Solidarity movement in Poland) and Latin America. Punk fans and bands popularized zines, small, self-published magazines that often focused on music, politics, and alternative lifestyles—becoming grassroots forerunners of modern blogs and independent digital journalism. VaccinateCA provides reliable vaccine supply information to more than 1,000 vaccination sites, while Google only provides 127 options—thereby improving the efficiency of vaccine distribution.

This is bottom-up, community-driven, grassroots value creation.

迷因

The first uses of gold can be traced back to ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and parts of Eastern Europe. By 4000 BC, people prized gold for its unique beauty, rarity, and malleability, fashioning it into jewelry, ritual objects, and status symbols. At the same time, copper, silver, and bronze also gained popularity for tools and ornaments. So, what makes gold so unique?

Unlike other metals, gold neither tarnishes nor corrodes, which gives it a lasting quality that symbolizes eternity and stability. Golds longevity means it resists change, obsolescence, and competition, and thus has a chance to survive into the future. Gold has become a meme with lasting influence because it is important, unique, and resonates with humans.

Gold is one of the world’s largest asset classes, but it has no utility—no productive use, no cash flows, no business model. It has value only because we collectively assign it value. It is a metal with limited inherent utility, but its perceived value is derived from its beauty, rarity, and its symbolic significance in human culture. It is not a useful commodity like crude oil, nor a valuable representation of ownership like Apple stock. However, as gold’s collective influence grows and more people adopt it, it becomes a store of value and has the potential to become the world’s reserve currency, perhaps replacing another meme, the dollar.

One could argue that Bitcoin (BTC) is the original “meme coin” in a digital sense — an asset that initially seemed worthless but has now become a global store of value across economies.

Bitcoin has not only sparked a financial revolution, it has inspired a cultural movement. Through decentralized technology, it has enabled peer-to-peer value exchange, financial autonomy, and the rise of global grassroots communities bound by shared beliefs.

Bitcoin’s creation, right after the 2008 financial crisis, was a moment of significance, tapping into widespread distrust of the traditional financial system and creating a new narrative of decentralized value. People buy Bitcoin not for its potential cash flow, but for its unique value proposition: it’s a store of value, a belief in future gains, and most importantly, a symbol of a new financial ecosystem, free from corporate or individual control. It’s a trustless asset that can support a trustless economy.

Bitcoin holders feel like they are part of something bigger — a community, not just financial investors. If you doubt this, search for “Apple tattoo” or “Uber tattoo” and compare it to “Bitcoin tattoo.”

Assessing the value of the community

Outsiders often overlook the power and value of communities, just as they initially misunderstood Bitcoin. In the traditional financial world, professionals often rely on analytical methods taught at schools like Wharton – discounted cash flow, comparative analysis, cash flow, and EBITDA. As a result, companies shape their metrics and reporting around these frameworks. This limited perspective is why many people initially misunderstood the value of GameStop, and why 加密貨幣 assets like Bitcoin and 模因幣 are still misunderstood by traditional finance.

Today, there is tremendous value in the communities created by these “companies.” “Company” here can mean anything — a startup, a public company, a crypto protocol, a KOL, an idea, or even a subreddit. Over time, a company is valued not only by its profits, but also by the value created and accumulated by its community — both internal and external (e.g., Reddit + GameStop).

When it comes to learning about new products and brands, more than 86% of internet users trust Reddit and its community more than advertising; adults under 45 trust news on social media platforms more than traditional news networks; and 63% of Gen Z and Millennials trust influencers more than brands. Gen Z members spend an average of 8.5 hours online per day, 55% use their smartphones for more than 5 hours per day, and the average American sends 94 text messages per day.

TikTok’s book community has single-handedly driven bestsellers in the publishing industry, with some books seeing sales increase by 1,000% after the community’s endorsement. Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets community was able to drive GameStop’s stock price from less than $20 to over $300 in a matter of days. Following the collaboration, Bud Light sales fell 26% and AB InBev’s stock price fell 20%, resulting in a $26 billion loss in market value—all caused by its conservative community.

Communities cannot be accurately predicted by traditional financial valuation frameworks because their significance and impact are dynamic, often growing, shrinking and shifting. They cannot be easily incorporated into the tables and lists of investment prospectuses or financial models.

Financial firms often overlook the enduring power of communities, viewing them as anomalies and underestimating their impact as futile efforts.

We believe that communities will continue to grow and become more influential as connectivity accelerates and online interactions continue to grow. The ubiquity of digital platforms has made it easier than ever for individuals to find and connect with like-minded groups, breaking down the geographic and social barriers that once limited community formation.

Meme Coin: A Vehicle of Community Ownership

Meme coins are the perfect tool to measure the value of a community. They are a tokenized expression of culture.

Similar to social networks, Meme coins derive their value from the communities they bring together. However, they represent a fundamental shift in how value is distributed and controlled. Unlike platforms like Instagram or Facebook, where the value generated by user activity (content creation, interactions, and data) is primarily captured by the platform and its shareholders, Meme coins subvert this model, allowing users to become both creators and owners of network value.

Bonk was distributed to users via airdrops and quickly became Solana’s Meme coin of choice. The initial recipients were members who continued to contribute to the existing community, protocol, and core infrastructure after the FTX collapse. Bonk became a tokenized symbol of resilience in the face of adversity, and the enthusiasm of the initial recipients quickly spread to the wider user base, driving up the value of Bonk and creating wealth within the ecosystem. This wealth stayed in the community, supporting the development of projects such as Bonkbot, bringing tremendous value to Solana, product users, and the Bonk token itself.

This is grassroots value creation – bottom-up, community-driven, with no external investors, only human capital within the community creating value for the community.

As the world’s assets become further digitized, more memes can be monetized, manufactured, and spontaneously created—expanding the concept of “meme” to anything that has social significance and turning it into a tool for community monetization through tamper-proof smart contracts.

未來

The future will look like a continuation of the past, technology will continue to develop, cities will continue to expand, and culture will adapt to the tools and media of the times. However, machines cannot take away the right to produce memes. Culture – including its creation, dissemination and persistence – cannot be outsourced to large floating point matrix operations (referring to the technology of using floating point numbers to perform matrix operations). Although machines may be able to produce products that look like memes – but they are empty, algorithmically optimized snapshots of familiar ideas, reproduced in large quantities for fleeting attention – they will lack the deeper resonance and transformative power of true memes.

Throughout history, culture has always been the result of collective efforts, and memes are the smallest unit of cultural transmission, encoding the ideas and values of their time. Memes are not just simple media fragments, they are also carriers of shared meaning. The vitality of memes comes from being accepted, not created. Their birth is not an isolated creation, but a chemical reaction of common understanding, humor and emotion.

There’s a tiny Puerto Rican restaurant on Loisaida Avenue in Manhattan called Rinconcito. There are no reservations, rewards programs, points systems, or digital membership cards. They don’t ask for your email address to send targeted ads, and there’s almost no way to contact them. You won’t see them compromising on TikTok to cater to some outrageous trend, nor are they bottling their patented sauce and selling it to the masses.

What they trade is culture, good food cooked by honest people with heart, at a fair price – and it has been that way for decades. In every community, this approach resonates deeply, and people agree: this is how life should be. And this is their secret sauce – culture, for sale.

This article is sourced from the internet: Is selling MEME culture a secret to wealth or a bubble trap?

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