If the visual rhetoric of meme coins trades in irony, nostalgia, and populist spectacle, their deeper logic might reveal an even more profound dynamic: the transformation of speculation itself into a mode of promotional and ideological production.

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

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... 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... 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.

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... See more

Indeed, the success of a meme coin depends on its ability to circulate semiotic fragments of itself—images, slogans, icons—that evoke a sense of belonging, rebellion, or humor, however fleeting or contradictory.

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.

Speculators, in turn, look to charismatic leaders as “social proof” that their risk-taking is warranted, and likely to be rewarded. The ritualism of meme coin culture might be described as what Victor Turner called a kind of “communitas”: a social condition in which individuals, connected by a collective suspension of normative hierarchies, adopt... See more