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This essay argues that the efficacy of meme coins as a speculative asset relies primarily on the proliferation of a coherent persona that represents a corresponding digital asset. As it stands, this is a working draft of an academic paper. I welcome any feedback you're willing to offer! Safe trading, Max.
January 2021 marked the tipping point for a digital subculture of financial risk taking. WallStreetBets, a reddit forum comprised of self-proclaimed[1] “degenerates” who speculate on high-risk investments, coordinated what is now known as the “GameStop Squeeze” or “Mother of All Short Squeezes” (MOASS). Simply put, a short squeeze occurs when a stock’s price rapidly rises as a substantial number of traders have placed bets, with brokerage-borrowed shares, that the price would go down. Those traders must “cover” their bets to avoid sustaining further losses as the price of the equity or asset continues to rise. As those traders buy back their borrowed shares so they can return them to their broker, the buying creates a positive feedback-loop, amplifying the losses of short-sellers who continue to hold their positions. The WallStreetBets subscribers found a rallying cry when they discovered several Wall Street hedge-funds had placed large bets on the falling price of GameStop, a video game retailer that appeared to be going under. The legion of aggressive retail investors co-constructed a unifying, counter-cultural narrative: if we band together and drive the price of GameStop to stratospheric heights, we can financially hobble sophisticated hedge-fund institutions that have an edge over small-time investors. They constructed the perfect villain to orient their heroic, if flippant actions towards. Inextricably tied to this narrative is an impulse for immediate and astounding financial gain for individual investors. One of the most popular WallStreetsBets posts by the user “uwillmire” evokes this duality in the forum’s native tongue:
"Buy more during dips if you can, but at least hold. We just have to hold until they fold. Today's actions by several brokers just show how desperate the hedge funds are getting. Hold with your immovable diamond hands for all that you hold dear and we will be breaking Wall Street TOGETHER while making gargantuan tendies in the end!" (Qtd in Daniel)
“Buying dips” refers to buying more shares when the price of an asset drops, “diamond hands,” confidently holding onto assets, and “tendies,” legal tender (derived from the term “chicken tenders”). The forum drew even more attention from neophyte retail investors when Telsa owner and pop-entrepreneur, Elon Musk Tweeted “GameStonk!!” along with a link to the reddit forum. GameStop, along with a handful of other heavily shorted equities, came be known as “meme stocks.”
In the midst of the meme stock craze, Musk’s Tweeting also served as a catalyst on multiple occasions for the astronomical rise in the daily price of the popular meme cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. On one instance, the price of Doge rose 800% after he Tweeted an image of a dog wearing a turtleneck sweater on the cover of the fictitious Dogue magazine (a play on the fashion magazine, Vogue) (Browne). This social media hype and historical price action ushered a wave of retail investors into both the stock and cryptocurrency markets. While the WallStreetBets short squeezing uses a David and Goliath mythic to take on Wall Street specifically, Dogecoin and similar cryptocurrency communities embody a tongue in cheek mythic that prods at traditional financial rationality in general. This essay is an exploration into latter, placing special focus on how such communities develop camaraderie and coordinate action for the sake of speculating on digital assets. Specifically, it investigates a case of how blockchain technology and social media converge to create a decentralized, largely unregulated, and high-risk speculative tool.
To that end, this essay heeds the call of G. Thomas Goodnight and Sandy Green, who wrote the following in the wake of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990’s:
“As more numerous and ever greater attention economy spirals open up, and transform risk cultures in the digital age, rhetorical studies are challenged to position and extend critical capacity under conditions of accelerating complexity” (133).
Meme coins represent an “attention economy spiral” par excellence. Unlike traditional stock market equities that derive their fundamental value from revenues of the company they claim stake to, meme coins’ fundamental value derives from the expansion of social networks and the “stickiness” of cultural content that drives this expansion. In this essay, I argue that the efficacy of meme coins as a speculative asset relies primarily on the proliferation of a coherent persona that represents a corresponding digital asset. Social and economic aspirations are woven into mimetic, speculative personalities, each one a bricolage of sensational metaphors, images, and strategies. By examining this cultural trend, this essay attempts to supplement the writings of Lana Swartz, who argues that money is essentially a medium of communication and that transactional communities are shaped by the infrastructure of financial technologies. Using the meme coin KONG as a case study, I probe into the dynamic process of how one such transactional community forms. To do so, I read meme coin communities through Victor Turner’s framework of rites of passage. This processual analysis helps us track how spatial metaphors, temporality, imitation, and performances of hierarchic roles all play key functions in the investment and promotion of meme coins by neophyte investors. I argue that the confluence of blockchain and social media technologies create a liminal space for a subversive mode of speculation that contests traditional norms of financial rationality.
The Crypto-imaginary from Bitcoin to Kong: A brief evolution
From its inception, cryptocurrency has been a memetic enterprise fueled by social media communities. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, Bitcoin was introduced to an online forum for cryptographic coders by the pseudonymous developer named Satoshi Nakamoto. The white paper introducing the rationale and code for the digital currency reasoned that Bitcoin would serve as “an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,” which would allow “any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party” (Nakamoto). Positioning itself as a solution to the failures of traditional financial institutions, Bitcoin and its underlying technology, blockchain, introduced a new financial imaginary. Lana Swartz has aptly summarized this imaginary as the “radical blockchain dream”:
"a vision of an alternative society made possible by blockchain, a technological infrastructure. This infrastructure, like the society it is meant to power, is incipient, a powerful vision that feels to believers as though it already exists. It springs into being seamlessly, then persists seamlessly, providing a similar seamlessness int the relations it animates" (“What Was Bitcoin” 85).
While some of Bitcoin’s early adopters considered it to be the cryptocurrency that could foster this vision into a reality, a proliferation of imitators, “alt-coins,” flooded the internet boasting grandiose price projections and society-transforming potential.
Amidst the early cryptocurrency boom, Billy Markus, an IBM engineer, teamed up with Adobe developer Jackson Palmer to create a token, Dogecoin, that would lampoon this burgeoning techno-economic vision while bringing serious consideration to the underlying technology. In a 2018 reflection on the project, Palmer said he hoped “through the power of community, a project such as Dogecoin may help drive further awareness of and innovation [to blockchain] technology” (“My Joke Cryptocurrency”). To brand the coin, the two developers co-opted the Shiba Inu meme, an image of puzzled looking dog surrounded by terse expressions written in Comic Sans font. They embellished their own renditions of the dog’s internal dialogue with phrases such as “much wow” and “such currency.” Beyond what the developers could have ever imagined, the token caught on as the most popular and heavily invested joke cryptocurrency on the market. As the “cryptocurrency of the people,” Doge was used primarily as a currency for tipping fellow social media users an allotment of tokens that were typically worth a minuscule amount of monetary value. However, on several occasions, Doge was successfully used as a viral fundraising tool, once to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Sochi Winter Olympics and another time to raise $50,000 for a Charity: Water, a non-profit that provides drinking water to developing nations. “By fusing Blockchain technology with a meme,” Sarah Jeong points out, “Dogecoin straddles the valley between the functional and the inane” (58). It at once serves as a tongue-in-cheek critique of traditional financial infrastructure and an increasingly legitimate (albeit incredibly risky) investing tool.
Despite an embattled history of being leveraged as a tool for scammers, Dogecoin came roaring into the mainstream with the help of the meme stock mania, the astronomical rise of Bitcoin, and endorsements by and increasing number of celebrities who have influence the price of the asset with mere Tweets. Personalities such as restauranteur Guy Fieri, Shark Tank host and Dallas Mavericks basketball team owner, Mark Cuban, have joined the ranks of Musk in assuming Dogecoin’s promotional persona. A Tweet by Fieri depicts him in a space suit with the Shiba Inu logo emblazoned on his chest with the caption “Rollin’ out to the moon ?? #Dogecoin.” Cuban, who declared that the Mavericks would accept the cryptocurrency for tickets and merchandise Tweeted “Mavs sales in @dogecoin have increased 550pct over the past month. We have now sold more than 122k Doge in merchandise! ?????? We will never sell 1 single Doge ever.” At the time of writing, the price of Dogecoin is surging in anticipation of Elon Musk’s Saturday Night Live debut in which it is anticipated that he will name drop the coin in his opening monologue.
Amidst the influx of retail investors and the rising popularity of cryptocurrency in general, a proliferation of Dogecoin imitators were launched on a daily, even hourly basis. One of these many projects was a self-identified spin-off of Dogecoin, Hoge. The Hoge whitepaper draws directly on Doge’s socially derived value but proposes an enhanced incentive structure:
"If we have learned one thing from DOGE making its way into the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap, it’s that there is plenty of room in the crypto space for a token whose value rests on internet subculture... However, as DOGE is inflationary by design, its tokenomics are questionable. As the number of Dogecoins in circulation increases, their individual value may diminish over time. This is where Hoge comes into play. There will never be more HOGE in circulation than there are right now!" (“Hoge,” emphasis added)
Hoge co-opted the same community-driven logic as Doge but positioned itself as a better investing tool by coding in a feature that incentivizes holding the coins over time by making the token deflationary. After each transaction, the protocol “burns” or erases just over 1% of the total coins in circulation, which eventually diminishes the supply and, with the help of memes and promotion campaigns, will increase the demand. Despite the inherent Ponzi-nomics of Hoge slating itself as a more serious version of Doge as a speculative tool, its price trend tells a story of benign intention compared to the myriad “rug pull” schemes that plague the crypto space. Such ploys are characterized by a developer launching a project, soliciting investors to drive the price of the asset up, and then “pulling the rug” by trading out of their large position, effectively taking money from the unwitting investors. As for Hoge, the price stayed flat for weeks before promotional efforts slowly generated upward momentum in the price trend.
The data for Kong tells a much different story. Kong is a “fork” of Hoge, meaning that its software protocol split from the parent software and creates a distinct public LEDGER with a novel digital asset to trade. In other words, the underlying code of Kong looks similar to that of Hoge but creates an entirely new network of transactors. While the Hoge developers had no intention of “pulling the rug,” Kong appeared to be a scam from the moment it launched. Before the developer and their associate were able to introduce any promotional materials, buyers had discovered Kong using bots that track new listings and quickly invested, sending the price upwards almost immediately. The anonymous developer and associate posted promotional memes and a “shill” list, a selection of chat groups to pitch the token project to. As the money of new investors flowed in, the money of the initial holders flowed out. Yet, the story of Kong as a token that could very well have sharply declined, never to significantly appreciate again, was rewritten when a leader who came to be known as “Ape Uplifter” took the reins of the project. He set up a team of administrators of Telegram and aggressively pushed the “community-based” narrative. An increasing number of group members joined the Telegram group which served as a community forum and command post that was active around the clock in Kong’s early days. After the initial holders had exited the scene, Kong took on a life of its own. Eventually, the “Ape Uplifter” maliciously turned his back on Kong, taking community-raised funds and exiting from the cohort. Several new administrators rebranded the token and release this statement as part of the project’s post facto white paper:
The story of KONG DeFi [Decentralized Finance] started when a group of developers created the project with malicious intent. The project was, like many others, a pump and dump. People lost funds and morale, and in a critical turning point, $KONG was salvaged by a core group who believe in the fundamental possibilities of DeFi as a global changemaker, and it became a community project. We bonded together over the events that took place. Every person on the leadership team stepped up from the community to drive a change, and that’s when new project expectations were set. The following section traces some of the key elements in Kong’s narrative, placing them in the framework of Turner’s rite of passage to demonstrate how temporality, personae, and the mystification of community function in this speculative project and similar projects within the broader risk culture of crypto speculation.
Liminality and Communitas in Meme Coin Speculation
The intertwined concepts of liminality and communitas are foundational to Victor Turner’s theory of passage rites. Rituals of social status, either upwards or downward, are marked by a passage through a “cultural realm” that exists “betwixt and between” one’s previous and coming social state (RP 94). This realm is what Turner refers to as liminal and is characterized by a set (often) subordinating, transitional conditions:
“[In the liminal state, one’s] behavior is normally passive or humble; they must obey their instructors implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without complaint. It is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life. Among themselves, neophytes tend to develop and intense comradeship and egalitarianism” (RP 95).
Meme coin investors enter into a liminal state by investing their financial resources and efforts into meme coin projects. A condition of uniformity is inherent to meme coin speculation and the attendant promotional efforts used to secure more investors. While there are dynamic ways to promote a particular digital asset, the most common and most effectual way to do so is to perform an apostolic persona that mimics thought leaders in the digital community of speculators. Social media influencers and project administrators serve as the “village elders” in Turner’s liminal calculus. The role models motivate and guide neophyte speculators with ecstatic messages of faith and unity that mitigate fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) regarding an asset’s price performance by cultivating a loyal community of evangelists. In solidarity, the story goes, the price will continue to rise and the community will be rewarded for their cooperative efforts. The reward for this type of speculation and promotional behavior is, at least metaphorically speaking, status transcending success. Inside of this cultural realm, neophytes derive ritual powers from their relatively undifferentiated and integral role of in bringing about success for themselves and the community. In doing so, they more or less embody a host of unified characteristics: homogeneity, anonymity, absence of status, uniform presentation, humility, lack of wealth distinctions, heeding to “sacred” instruction (such as holding one’s position), foolishness, acceptance of risk, and heteronomy (RP 106-7). Inflections of these transitional status elements will be riddled throughout the following pages.
Turner describes liminality as a “cultural manifestation of communitas,” which is the intuitive dimension of cultural action as opposed to the discursive and normative (RP 109). It marks a communal moment of imagination, emergence, innovation, transcendence. It is “anti-structural” insofar as it is the co-activity is counter-structural; it is subversive, if only ephemerally so, insofar as it can only be grasped in relation to structure (DFM 50; RP 127). It challenges structure from a variety of angles. As Turner states, “Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority” (RP 128). When familiar technologies converge with novel ones, organic, co-creative action ensues. Existing or dormant aspirations find a new vitality in the novelty. Horizons of social possibilities open. Those who find themselves subdued by the normative economic reality may see new lines of flight out of those perceived constraints. The convergence of blockchain technology and social media allow meme coins to thrive as a playful, yet serious tool to operate outside the bounds of traditional economic rationality. Communitas itself is often a speculative phenomenon, claims Turner (RP 133), and the communitas that arises from the meme coin speculation brings a ludic element to this high-risk endeavor.
Building atop the conceptual framework of Arnold van Gannep, Turner introduces three phases of rites of passage that structure the experience of liminality and communitas: separation, transition, and reincorporation. In the following section I will elaborate how each step of the process generally unfolds in communities of meme coin speculators. Following each theoretical expansion of Turner’s framework into such communities, I offer a processual analysis of KONG’s Telegram group interactions. Specifically, I elucidate the key spatial and temporal elements that characterize the phase of separation; the role of neophyte-influencer relationships and the proliferation of persona that take place in the liminal, transitional phase; and the favorable and disfavor-able outcomes within the reincorporation phase.
Meme coin Investment as “Separation”
Separation is characterized by a spatial and temporal inversion for the neophyte from the profane to the sacred. The cultural “space” of cryptocurrency speculation is symbolically constituted through transactional communities on exchanges and social media platforms. There is a nearly ubiquitous set of spatial metaphors that characterize its imagined physicality. The most vivid and commonly shared image is that of outer space, especially rocket travel “to the moon.” The phrase analogizes the visual representation of an asset’s sharp price increase on a chart. The vertical movement is ecstatically represented by the image of a rocket ship in flight and often visually expressed with rocket ship emojis. Significantly, this phrase differs from another popular, yet less vivid phrase used by online retail traders to refer astounding price increases: “going parabolic.” While this phrase images a price sharply rising, plateauing, and declining, “mooning” or going “to the moon” images the top as a destination and deflects the possibility that the price will decline. Lunar landing is the utopian spatial end. Its ubiquity reflects a structure of feeling, an emergent collective trajectory that, in this case, summarizes the exuberant aspirations of investors.
Investing into meme coins and especially involving oneself in the promotion mechanism of any given project is an entrance into an aspirational “space” of cooperation to achieve this collective end: elevated financial status. One of the user generated GIF files aptly summarizes this spatial metaphor. The video clip displays the original Super Mario jumping up and hitting a brick block which releases the Kong logo. He flashes back and forth between his original form and an image of an ape before transforming into a Lamborghini with a rocket-equipped-rear-end (to “Lambo” is common parlance in these digital spaces for making large capital gains). The car lifts off and begins its assent into the stratosphere as the words “Ape the Dip” appear on the screen. To “ape” is a common term that is used throughout the digital space of speculation. It images a primal, pre-rational mimicry of other confident users buying an asset. Kong is able to seamlessly appropriate this term into its promotional vocabulary because of its branding focus on apes from the logo to the charities it seeks to raise funds for. The cooperative “space” of Kong is a visual ecology of generic and specific metaphors that community members rally around to generate aspirations, strategize to achieve those aspirations, and give the token project a distinct personality.
Entrance into this “sacred” process entails a shift into a communal temporality. In Randall Lakes’ essay, “Between Myth and History,” he points out it is “part and parcel of any group’s identity as a community is its own sense of togetherness in time, with a common history and future” (124). For meme coin communities, the legitimacy of the project (or at least the perceived opportunity to profit from an illegitimate project) is structured around shared notions of time. The mystification of longevity in these communities begins with promotional rhetoric that states the project is “still in its early stages” and “It’s not too late. We’re just getting started you monkeys.” The former is a commonly repeated clause in “shilling” (project pitching) messages while the latter is a brand-specific embellishment of this persuasive device. Getting in early can appear as both a buy signal for users who are privy to, or in expectation of a “rug pull” (when the developer or an early investor with a large position cashes out their funds after other investors have significantly driven up the price on an asset). Savvy, if ethically disquieting, investors who join early on can reap profits from the investors that come after them so long as they pull out before the “top wallets” (holders with the most coins) do. For those who are faithful that the coin will continue to show upside potential and that the “rug” will not be “pulled,” “getting in early” is an opportunity to multiply their earning potential more than the next investor. In either case, the mystification of longevity is at play. The more promise that the project appears to have in terms of growth, the more legitimate it becomes. So long as attention of new investors is perpetually being brought to the project, the more perceivable chance it has to grow. The material conditions of the price action and the discourse around it create a mimetic spiral, in which “time is articulated through narrative, but narrative conditions the times” (Goodnight and Green 116).
A variety of promotional materials for these projects help achieve accelerate the centripetal force of the spiral, especially “roadmaps” that give the project a sense of medium to long term growth. In the case of Kong, the anonymous administrator in the early days of the chat began posting various iterations of the project’s roadmap, each one including new items and checkboxes for the project to meet. The very first iteration had categories for “Q1 ‘21”, “Q2 ’21,” and “FOREVER.” The last of these categories offered formless and ambiguous goals such as “UNLIMITED MEMES,” “COMMUNITY REACH,” and “ENGAGEMENT.” One of the most significant rhetorical shifts in the roadmap iterations was the inclusion and then absence of the “Harambe Burn.” In early iterations, it was advertised that there would be a token “burn” on May 28th, 2021 to honor the death of the fabled gorilla-turned-meme, Harambe. Having launched in March, this promotion functioned as mid-term, future orienting device that suggested the value of one’s holdings would rise on this date. As the project evolved and as various Kong team members assumed and relived their pseudo-formal duties, this supposed burn date was excluded from new roadmap iterations. At the time of writing, the Kong website does not mention anything about this “burn.” Regardless of the legitimacy of the event, the date was rhetorically productive in its ability to spin a meme-related date into a promotional device to gain investor confidence in the project’s trajectory and profit potential. As the project matured, the roadmap items became more ambitious and stretched further into the future. By the beginning of May 2021, the roadmap featured items for all four quarters with more tangible (though still opaque) charity-oriented goals such as “adopting” twenty apes by quarter three and “Volunteer at an animal sanctuary for a week.” In any case, the roadmap serves as a tool of stakeholder relations, a vision board that helps rhetorically project the growth and longevity of the token.
Temporality plays a central and thoroughly contradictory role in the perpetuation of meme coin projects. The communitas engendered by the meme-coin-speculation-machine creates for its users a moment “in and out of time” that commences once an investor enters into a speculative position. This includes a monetary position as well as a role within the community to promote the project. As Sherry Turkle suggests in her book Alone Together, networked devices have the ability to change a user’s perception of time since they are granted the potential to labor around the clock (164). The non-stop potential for practical activity and capital gain influences an individual’s metrics of success. Unlike the stock market, the cryptocurrency market is open 24/7 and is accessible around the globe. A nearly constant stream of transactions are made on myriad exchanges and communications pour into social media platforms Telegram, Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit. For meme coins, the potential for speculation and promotion is truly non-stop. Attending to the FUD expressed by a user on Kong’s Telegram chat, the head administrator responded with a long series of messages that grasps the nature of this perpetuity:
Have you been promoting Kong, if everyone who holds today promoted $KONG 3x today in a genuine way we would have instant success / Every minute that passes is an opportunity that you could either do something to help or decide to do nothing / If people started realizing that if you hold it, it’s a good time to show people what are [sic] community is like and grow our project.
For all levels of investors involved in the project, holding one’s assets is a sign of faith in the upward potential for the project. Public announcements of an individual’s holdings serves as a sign of loyalty. One user, citing the deflationary function of the protocol posted a screenshot of her Kong wallet, advertising about how her holdings grow everyday as she earns her 1% allocation from every transaction that takes place in the network. One team leader, the “Ape Enforcer” once made his loyalty explicit in a poignant, if rhetorically strategic message:
I was in a bad place before Kong then I invested everything and was in a worse place after one day haha. But the initial crash caused me to form a bond with all the apes here almost as strong as family. Thank you guys all so much for giving me purpose. I love this coin but I love the people more / Man that was supposed to be some heartfelt shit. You apes gotta get pumped / (posts a GIF of a solemn stick figure poking the ground with the caption “COME ON DO SOMETHING”)
Such performances of loyalty are simultaneously aspirational and rhetorically instrumental. By letting other community members know that they are holding their position, sometimes even publicly stating the size of their position, they are helping confer legitimacy to the project. “Holding” is the act of waiting to sell. Yet, when one person sells, it betrays their loyalty to the community. For those investors who suffer a downside, there is perhaps even more incentive to funnel their time and efforts into the project so that they can pare their losses or secure a profit. Here lies another paradox that the community leaders and fellow community members have to rhetorically attend to. Community enter this calculus as a support system for strategizing, commiserating, celebrating, and even compensating for temporarily poor performance (as the Ape Enforcer demonstrates above).
When there is a dip in the price, especially a significant dip, the community has to attend to the FUD of their fellow group members. The rises and dips of the trendlines for each coin fluctuate in cycles of upwards and downwards momentum. As Lake points out, “Time’s cycle,” and in our case the bullish or bearish cycles of the market, “can postpone indefinitely the ultimate victory without undermining essential validity” (“Between Myth” 137). He goes on to argue that, for a collective vision to prevail it must be rhetorically framed to keep individual members oriented to the collective end: “No setback, no matter how horrific, is final because utopian vision can be cast as unconsummated rather than fundamentally mistaken” (“Between Myth” 137). It is up to the leaders to step in and, without giving direct financial advice (typically by adding the caveat “DYOR” – Do Your Own Research), offer the investors encouragement that, so long as the community invests their faith and efforts into the project, the price will go back up. This ritual of community leaders attempting to mitigate community members’ FUD by either ensuring dips are an excellent occasion to buy more coins or reassuring them that continued faith in the project will eventuate profit. One user who claimed expertise in the space offered this message to users expressing FUD after a significant dip:
Dipping is part of hodling[2], it is what we do…. What cannot happen is the 15 minute dark times her on [Telegram]. What cannot happen is sideways movement [it the asset’s price] for days. I plan strategic token launches and marketing for a living.. don’t care for accolades, just want everyone to know that Kong ban be fucking awesome if we can keep the [Telegram] running 24/7 and the token news flowing consistently.
“Correctly performed,” Lake argues, “ritual ensures communal life in perpetuity” (“Between Myth 131). Victory is something that is always necessary to imagine as being on the horizon (“Between myth” 137). At the micro, individual level, victory is profit, especially profits that are multiplied several times over. At the communal level, victory is also profit. Paradoxically, when one person declares “victory” by taking profits, they are fundamentally dissenting from the communal goal of assisting in the growth of an assets price. This instrumental-consummatory dialectic “plays” out in the promotional personas that form around the coin and communally participate in the digital liminal space of meme coin speculation.
Liminality & Promotional Personae in the Hype Machine
In liminal spaces, neophytes participate in structured activities under the guidance or commands of cultural authorities in order to transform their social status either upwards or downwards. In the context of meme coins, an elevation of socio-economic status is accompanied by a temporary reduction to a homogenized, instrumental figure in the plight of the communal goal to maximize profits. This participation entails an ephemeral bond with fellow community members that is formed through a co-adoption of a promotional persona. There are at least two levels of this promotional persona in space of cryptocurrency speculation. Generic personas appropriate the general nomenclature and promotional tactics used by speculators who are active on social media. While these individuals evoke the common slang, memes, and grandiose speculative visions, they remain relatively individualized and display a limited allegiance to any specific asset or asset community. Voiced-personas, as we will call them, perform an allegiance to a particular digital asset or set of assets and draw on a constrained repertoire of cultural meanings to cultivate an on-brand promotional identity. Turner suggests that “ludic recombination” is the “essence of liminality, liminality par excellence” (FRT 28). Furthermore, neophytes are given the opportunity to either “innovate new patterns themselves or to assent to innovation” (RP 15). Promotional personae are free to mimic or embellish on a set of perceivably effective cultural materials to hype the token(s) they are invested in.
The community of folks who assent to the project and take on its promotional calling embody a particular kind of influencing persona. While Goodnight and Green suggest that economic bubbles, like Kong and myriad other meme coins, “are the result of populations observing and imitating successful buying and selling” (118), I argue that meme coin bubbles are driven by imitations of successful influencing in addition to trading. The fundamental value of these digital assets is not primarily reliant on the replication of memes either, rather they are primarily reliant on a proliferation of a voiced persona. The “community-based” mystification is the rationale for this efficacy. The more people who embody a coin’s cause (which is an ambiguous cluster of motives including community cohesion, charity, and securing a profit), the more likely they are to give the brand a sense of coherence and identifiability. By identifying with the coin, the community identifies with the memes surrounding it, embody those memes, and become the meme personified. Advocacy is thus a blend of straightforward promotion (discourse) and enactment of a persona (ritual). Leveraging an argument from Paul Campbell, Lake maintains that “ritual, being more poetic and dramatic [than discourse], utilizes imaginary personae and appeals insofar as people ‘emphatically inhabit,’ or engage in ‘the constitutive act of becoming,’ these fictitious beings” (“Implied Arguer” 73). The thoroughness of commitment to a persona connotes a thoroughness of loyalty to the project’s end (which is always inherently a personal end: profit). Meme coin communities are primarily driven by these replicable personae.
Lake argues that “both ritual and argumentation are, broadly speaking, rhetorical acts that invite assent” and “merge together in the phenomenon of persona, that is, the implied actor that both argues for a claim and enacts a role, thereby inviting audiences to ‘be as I am’” (“Implied Arguer” 71). To don the trappings of an influencer is to become one. Regardless of the size of following a user has and despite the unique stylistic embellishments they perform, their function is similar insofar as they mimic the perceivably successful influencers. Influencing is a creative act. Assuming this role implies appropriation of an idiom typically characterized by hyperbolic discourse or presentational self. For the generic personae that promote Kong, such evocations include Tweets that communicate things like “Loading up on $KONG. Can’t miss this one!” or “Don’t miss out or you’ll fomo in [buy because on Fears Of Missing Out on profits] $KONG.” A repertoire of memetic resources are also deployed my administrators and contributed by community members that often leverage popular, proven memes to create unique, brand specific recombinations. Some of these early pastiche images that were developed for Kong place an image of Harambe in a rocket ship. Another photoshopped an image of Kong from the 2021 film Godzilla vs. Kong aggressively guarding a pile of bananas with the words “Buy $KONG” in the Nintendo’s video game classic Donkey Kong font. As Turner states, “in liminality people ‘play’ with the elements of the familiar and defamiliarize them” (FRT 27). The recognition of already popular cultural icons are woven into promotional texts with generic combinatorial logics of speculation in the contemporary risk ecology.
Voiced personae go one step further and construct their digital identities around the brand personality of the asset they are promoting. Kong-based personae multiplied on Twitter in its early days and, as of May 2021, are actively engaged on social media. Such profiles are usually marked by an anonymous, brand laden profile images, affiliative text in their bios, and the coin’s name in their handle. For instance, one such Twitter persona, “Le Kong” has a photoshopped image of the Kong logo as their profile picture, a picture of a gorilla as their banner, and a series of Kong related links in their bio. In anonymity there is a protection of identity, which may serve as a hedge if the project turns out to be disreputable. Anonymity is further strategic because it allows the user to center the persona of coin rather over any number of social media personae they may enact. This allows for a visual immediacy of project affiliation. Folks will often use a photoshopped image of the coin’s logo, sometimes layered on a picture of themselves. This assures anyone simply encountering their profile will readily see the affiliation prior to any further engagement. Such immediacy has the potential for identification and replicability within the community when it comes to the engagement (whether that be retweeting, @ing, or following). Insofar as the user takes up the persona, they instrumentally invites other users to “‘Be as I am,’ and is consummated in each and every person who accepts the invitation and gives the persona life, both the rhetor and the audience” (80).
In an extreme case, one user went as far as adopting a mascot-like role by developing and actively engaging multiple social media outlets as “Kong Man.” Similar to the voice of Doge, in which the Shiba Inu’s thoughts were expressed in a dog-like voice (“much wow”), Kong Man messages in a gorilla-esque voice in which he states his name in the third person before offering a promotional message. Take for instance this moment of disrupt when Kong Man broke character when he discovered in a conversation with fellow Telegram users that Kong’s team leader had scammed the Kong community and left the project:
"Kong man have confidence in new leadership. Kong Man want to know more about what happened with [Ape Uplifter] / So this guy [Ape Uplifter] oversees this project get to rock bottom and then bounces. Kong man pissed Kong man defended [him] in the past but also questioned his work on other projects / So why wasn’t this foreseen then. I knew nothing about anyone here. I just joined this forum after I bought into kong to post stupid shit and make people laugh"
Kong man’s break of character points to the fragile loyalty constructed by one of the most (seemingly) dedicated community members, the social value derived from the speculative enterprise, and the surveillance of other community members’ behaviors.
In cryptocurrency speculation, the promotional personae are inherently structured by the technology itself. Loyalty, which is key to the voiced persona, is based on the principles of surveillance and visibility in the world of cryptocurrency.[3] All transactions are individually instrumental by nature and enact either loyalty or disloyalty to the community depending on whether a buy or sell order is made. Loyalty of “whales,” “top wallets,” and “dev[eloper] wallets” is enacted on the blockchain by the act of buying and holding (although this “loyalty” can also be conversely emphasized as the magnitude of market power one has over fellow transactors). As for other retail stakeholders that have less significant positions, loyalty is enacted through various forms of social media messaging. The act of asking the social media group how to buy a particular token – a common occurrence on Telegram – is one initial form of commitment, or at least the intention to commit. Once the tokens are purchased, the act of contributing to the community by promotional efforts is a way of demonstrating one’s loyalty to the success of the token.
Loyalty is most powerfully enacted by taking up the persona of the token. The more visible one is in their promotional efforts and even sharing the size of their position (through text or screenshots) are all ways to enact community loyalty. Such public displays of loyalty are hoped to function as a positive feedback loop. The more other users are able to build trust in the investment by witnessing others who have made financial gains off of it, the more likely they will be to invest their own money. Loyalty mitigates perceptions of risk. Moreover, loyalty is compensatory to risk in meme coin communities. Loyalty takes on a sequential, even rhythmic quality in this speculative space. By entering into a particular investment, one enacts their belief in the potential for the token to appreciate. To that extent, it enacts legitimacy. When an investor holds an asset when the price plunges, loyalty serves as a sign of hope and diligence the price will rise again, and at very least, it serves as a consolation for the investment that has at least temporarily gone afoul. Loyalty is thus a key feature in the mystification of meme coin communities.
Kong Man points to a cross-promotional phenomenon that frequently occurs in the realm of promotional personae. Voiced personae are liable to rhetorically attend to their efforts in promoting similar projects, which can seemingly detract from their loyalty to a specific meme coin community. The former leader who Kong man repudiated went on to launch two other meme coin project within a month after her assumed leadership of Kong, both of which turned out to be pump and dump mechanisms. He took to the Kong Telegram’s voice chat and message board to assure that the cross promotion of networks would be mutually beneficial and would not significantly limit his project-specific efforts. While he admitted that his time would be divided between the projects (“have you ever heard of someone coach basketball and football”), the cross-promotional potential was emphasized and a series of memes codified this sentiment, turning into a promotional strategy. Once his new project, Pipicoin, launched, memes of apes and frogs (the Pipi logo) were introduced on Telegram and posted on Twitter by the dual administrative team.
Reincorporation, Micro and Macro
Unlike the two previous phases that are hyper-visible across the convergent digital technologies, the reincorporation phase in this passage rite remains relatively opaque. When an individual investor exits the trade – which is to say, exits the transactional community – he or she can have either favorable or unfavorable outcomes across several metrics. The first and most explicit is the monetary metric. We might ask if the investor gained or lost money in this particular investment and whether or not that margin of profit or loss constitutes a change in their socio-economic status in traditional, normative financial terms. This notion of reincorporation is further complicated by the possibility that an investment in a particular meme coin is one investment among several or many. It is also the most difficult phase to assess when it comes to analyzing social media data. Occasionally, one will scroll across a message that marks one as “reincorporated,” such as one user who writes “Kong died I made out near top no way it recovers ??” or another who exclaims “phew, just got out in time. Thank you for the little pump so I could get my money back out. This is the end of shit coin investing for me / and…. I’m out!”
As this essay has attempted to show, investments in particular meme coins produce a concentrated loyalty to that specific exchange community and such loyalty is demonstrated through generic or voiced personas. A break from a generic persona can be as simple as excluding the token’s ticker from future social media communications and posting about it no longer. The voiced personas might be adapted to other projects or abandoned altogether. In other words, the exit from one meme coin community may not mean a complete exit from this risk culture, but a transactional and vocal migration to other communities.
Turner suggests that liminal spaces may not be conceived so simply as a clean-cut ritual process that open and close according to some predetermined or emergent structure, but can be characterized by unfolding, sequential liminal realms. For meme coins, that is to say that participation in one transactional community is participation in a specific instance of a larger risk culture. An investment in one meme coin may whet one’s appetite to invest in further coins, disgrace them out of the enterprise altogether, or introduce them to other ventures that may be more risk adverse, such as trading the more established cryptocurrencies. Dogecoin co-creator Jackson Palmer suggested that Dogecoin has functioned as an “educational gateway” into cryptocurrency and for neophyte investors, the same could be said about KONG or any of the other “alt-coins.” In any case, an individual investor is participating in a petite instance of a high-risk community that exists as one ephemeral point in a grand and sprawling cultural-economic imaginary. Our focus on KONG offers an example of a mini drama within a constantly morphing global movement
Conclusion
The GameStop squeeze captured the imaginations of neophyte retail investors. The dramatic narrative, the social media hype, and the historical price action demonstrated the prospect for easy entry into a digital risk culture with euphoria-inducing potential for profits. In the same moment, cryptocurrency began seeing rapid adoption and mainstream exposure. On the fringes of the crypto market, a proliferation of meme coins with playful branding and enthusiastic communities of investors have epitomized a fast-paced, round-the-clock risk culture. Kong is just one example of the thousands of such projects that have flooded into this unregulated digital territory. This essay suggests that investment and especially participation in the promotion mechanism attached to each coin can be regarded as passage rites into this digital risk culture. Such passages produce transformations of one’s experience of time due to the fact that the blockchain is “always on” and endless stream of social media communications that affect may affect price movements. The convergence of blockchain and social media allow for promotional communities to form around each unique coin and produce personae to evangelize new, loyal investors. In the new character of digital risk culture, traders are not pinned against each other in a struggle for profits. Rather, they are united under the trappings of community. In this version of risk culture, community is compensatory for risk. Regardless of one’s financial gains or losses, they are given the opportunity to incorporate into comradeship on a meme-driven journey to “the moon.” Participation in these communities amounts to more than individual risk taking, but contribution to an anti-structural subculture that operates outside the bounds of regulated financial activity.
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[1] Perhaps, “self-subscribed” is more accurate, considering the subscribers to the forum are labeled “Degenerates” as per the administrator’s web design.
[2] “Hodling” is a term that was coined by an early holder of Bitcon. The apparently inebriated man told fellow chat members “I am HODLing” – a misspelling of “holding” that has become a memetic way for cryptocurrency speculators to express they are holding an asset.
[3] Lana Swarts argues that “The techno-social imaginaries of Bitcoin and local currencies both, in different ways, resemble and are directly influenced by those of the early social web. But like today’s social media platforms, loyalty is constrained rather than open. It creates new hierarchies. It is fundamentally surveillant. It is resistant to democratic governance, and it offers few opportunities for redress” (New Money 156).
