Eileen Isagon Skyers: From Speculation to Symbolic Release

Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) theorizes how modern societies undergo cultural transformation through moments of “engineered symbolic release”—structured breaks from normative social controls that absorb disruptive impulses rather than confront them. Every culture, Rieff argues, functions by organizing moral demands into symbo... See more

Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, meme coins have no intrinsic utility and derive their market value almost entirely from collective behavior, making them highly susceptible to volatility.

In today’s post-therapeutic market, irony, detachment, and self-optimization have become substitutes for justice, truth, morality, or political resolve.

Rather than advancing financial or technical solutions, meme coins operate primarily through the hyper-visual and social logics of internet culture. They inherit the self-referentiality and sarcasm characteristic of memes more broadly, understood here by Limor Shifman’s definition as “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and tran... See more

Meme coins perform what Wernick identifies as the “double function” of contemporary promotional forms: they serve simultaneously as products and as advertisements for themselves.9 Their appeal rests in the affective atmosphere that they generate across Discord servers, forums, and social posts: the promise of sudden wealth, the pleasure of particip... See more

Meme coins use visual and rhetorical cues like humor, irony, and absurdist lore to position themselves as accessible antidotes to traditional financial systems. They commodify our collective desire for economic empowerment, emotional gratification, and social belonging. It could be said that meme coins aestheticize financialization itself, using su... See more

They recast speculative investment as a valorized form of cultural participation—transforming economic risk into a mode of self-expression, and volatility into a kind of gamified solidarity.

Influencers, she argues, do not simply advertise products; they perform a deeper ideological labor, personifying aspirational lifestyles and mediating hegemonic values under the guise of personal authenticity.

The cutesy image of the Shiba Inu, the ambiguous volatility of Pepe the Frog, and the militant bravado of Trump meme coins do not contest economic logics so much as offer a cathartic participation within them. They perform precisely what Rieff recognizes as the function of “releasing symbols”—forms of engagement that facilitate emotional discharge,... See more