Eileen Isagon Skyers: From Speculation to Symbolic Release

For models like these to explain the value of TRUMP and MELANIA, there would have to be someone out there who thinks these memecoins have long-term value. But in fact, the models will work just as well if there are people out there who love to gamble , even when they know it’s likely to lose them money. We know from the existence of craps and roule... See more

By shape shifting between utopian global computer and Ponzi dispenser, crypto both indoctrinated New Internet practitioners and implicated them amongst a crowd of day traders that they otherwise would have been repulsed by. In crypto's effect on the New Internet, we see the subtle ways that access to capital can simultaneously accelerate and mutate... See more

The arrival of blockchains over the past decade created a new option for impatient VCs. Companies in the Web 2.0 era produced only goods and services, whose value was always denominated in dollars or other national currencies. But companies in the web3 era offer a third product — tokens — and the value of those tokens is far less tethered to realit... See more

The internet + crypto is starting to reveal this with the explosion of interest in meme stocks, meme coins, and NFTs.

Today’s economic constraints may be enforcing a degree of sobriety, but even before the pandemic, the easy money was clearly concealing a stagnation. This is the thesis of the Umami essay: that material progress had plateaued, leaving us to manipulate symbols and create the mere illusion of value (this is also what David Graeber argues in his “we w

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