A social currency is a tokenized asset that represents value within a specific community, often used to incentivize engagement, reward participation, and strengthen brand or community loyalty. It operates similarly to traditional currency but derives its worth from social interactions, reputation, and influence.
Last month, trailblazing Chinese rapper Jackzebra told Dazed that China’s youth “don’t fuck with techno anymore” and are instead gravitating towards the “freedom and chaos” of hardstyle and hyperpop.
“You can play games with it,” she said of stardom (in another unexpected place, “The Howard Stern Show”), “and I think that’s a very interesting part of being an artist as well, when you can use that thing — fame, publicity — as a tool.”
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.
4/ The internet is rewiring not only the media sector (as with streaming) but the public itself, which is breaking up, or being broken, into multiple — some say parallel — realities.
As you can tell from my attempt to describe it, we do not have a good language for this shift.
Influencer culture, self-enhancement medicine, cheatware, min/maxing... the signs were coming for a while, but now we have legit, permanent systems at the heart of everyday life that force the decoupling on all of us.