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.

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

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... See more

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

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

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.

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.

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.