I’ve been fascinated with bubbles for as long as I can remember. As a child, I didn’t have the language for it, but I now understand I was watching ideas form. In hindsight, those delicate spheres reminded me of neurons, of somas pulsing with possibility. I loved seeing them grow, rise, and inevitably, pop.
Later, I lived through the dot-com crash and the housing collapse, two macroeconomic bubbles that reshaped not just markets, but belief systems. Now, something subtler is emerging: a new wave of micro-bubbles, flickering and fleeting, yet just as telling. Think prediction markets. Meme coins. Social tokens. Fleeting assets of attention that rise fast, shimmer, then vanish.
What gives these bubbles their power isn’t infrastructure, it’s behavior.
Unlike traditional macro bubbles built on slow accumulation, research, and capital, micro-bubbles are animated by behavioral transits, shifts in attention, urgency, and mood. They are not engineered. They are felt. They surge through communities like emotional electricity. They are the “likes and follows” of a pre-onchain world.
Meanwhile, macro bubbles are quietly forming elsewhere, within platforms and agents, the systems and intelligences building the long game.
The deeper inquiry, then, isn’t “what’s valuable?” but who is shaping the narrative? In a post-offchain era of overstimulation and digital fatigue, many are beginning to feel a quiet numbness. A societal response is building. Not loud. But deep. Mental health is becoming the economic indicator we haven’t learned how to measure.
And yet, there’s something anchoring us beneath the noise: stablecoins. Quietly, they’re emerging as the ballast of a new economy. But beyond price stability, we need something more profound: liquidity reversion, a return to meaning, utility, and values that endure beyond the moment.
The pop, when it comes, won’t be a spectacle. It will be a silence.
Not panic. Not collapse. But a drying out. A moment when micro bubbles evaporate. Only then, in that quiet correction, can the macro truth of a new industry begin to surface.
Until then, I’ll be watching the bubbles.
And maybe, so will you.
Caro 🫧✨
caro.eth
Back with the 44th edition of Paragraph Picks, highlighting a few hand-selected pieces from the past couple of weeks. ⬇️
@caro.eth reflects on the emotional and economic significance of both macro and micro bubbles, exploring how attention, behavior, and meaning shape our evolving digital economy. "The pop, when it comes, won’t be a spectacle. It will be a silence." https://paragraph.com/@caro/the-thought-bubble
@ramina13 shares the highs and lows of building a solo Mini App with ChatGPT as her co-pilot, offering practical lessons and encouragement for non-technical builders entering web3. "I didn’t have a co-founder or a team. What I had was ChatGPT." https://paragraph.com/@ramina13/what-i-wish-i-knew-before-building-my-first-farcaster-mini-app
@albertwenger argues that subjective experiences are fundamentally inaccessible to science, highlighting the inherent limits of objective understanding and the value of preserving diverse consciousnesses. "A world with many different subjective experiences is thus in an important way a richer world." https://continuations.com/philosophy-mondays-qualia-and-scientific-incompleteness
thank you so much for reading and sharing! I’m very inspired to continue writing here ✍🏽✨
didn't expect to appear on the list. thank you!!