CryptoDickbutts and Nouns look silly on the surface, but they succeed for serious memetic reasons. They are not just images; they are coordination devices.

Most people dismiss them as jokes or scams. That's a category error. These projects succeeded precisely because they understood something fundamental about how meaning spreads, and communities form—something most "serious" projects with elaborate roadmaps and utility promises completely missed.

What follows is an analysis of why these projects achieved memetic durability when most NFT projects from the same era faded. The patterns that emerge have implications beyond JPEGs.

CryptoDickbutts worked because it accidentally nailed several deep properties of durable memes.

First, it was culturally transgressive but low-stakes. Juvenile, absurd, vaguely forbidden, yet not threatening. That made it sticky and shareable without requiring ideological alignment. You didn't need to believe anything to share a Dickbutt. You just needed a sense of humor and a tolerance for the absurd. That's a much lower barrier than "believe in decentralized finance" or "commit to this community's values."

The transgression mattered because it created social sorting. When you bought or displayed a Dickbutt, you were signaling something specific: you didn't take yourself too seriously, you understood internet culture, you were comfortable with vulgarity as play rather than threat. These signals sorted people with almost zero cognitive cost. You either got it or you didn't. No explanation required.

Compare this to Bored Ape Yacht Club, which became associated with signaling wealth, status aspiration, and tribal affiliation with celebrity culture. Or World of Women, which became associated with values alignment around representation and empowerment. Both are successful projects, but both require substantially more ideological commitment. Dickbutts asked for nothing except a willingness to be in on an obvious joke.

Second, it was radically legible. You understood it instantly. No lore, no roadmap, no explanation deck. The entire concept fit in the image itself: a cartoon character with a dick for a butt. Done. Complete. No further clarification needed.

This matters more than most founders realize. Projects that die fastest often require extensive explanation. "It's a gamified DeFi protocol combined with generative art that unlocks exclusive community access and future airdrops based on staking mechanisms..." Stop. You lost them. Compare that to: "It's a dick butt." Instant comprehension. Instant decision point. In or out.

Radical legibility also makes memes spreadable by non-experts. You don't need to understand blockchain to share a Dickbutt. You don't need to read a whitepaper. Your mom could get the joke even if she doesn't get NFTs. That dramatically expands the transmission surface.

Third, it arrived before meaning. Early holders bonded over recognition, not utility. There was no promise of future value, no staking mechanism, no metaverse integration roadmap. Just: here's a stupid thing, do you think it's funny? Meaning accreted later through shared history—the community that formed, the floor price that held, the cultural moment it captured.

That sequence matters enormously. Memes that explain themselves too early tend to struggle. They front-load meaning, which creates premature consensus about what the thing "is for." That freezes the meme. It can't evolve because everyone has already agreed on its purpose.

Dickbutts stayed fluid longer because it arrived in its pure form. Early holders projected their own meanings onto it. Some saw it as art commentary. Some saw it as crypto culture satire. Some just thought it was funny. All those interpretations coexisted because none was canonical. The ambiguity created space for the community to construct meaning together, which created much stronger bonds than any preset narrative could have.

It also benefited from asymmetric commitment. Buying or sharing a Dickbutt was an insider signal. You were either in on the joke or you were not. That created social sorting at almost zero cognitive cost. Memes love low-cost signaling with high cultural yield.

The asymmetry works both ways. From inside: "I'm part of this absurd thing, which means I understand internet culture and I'm comfortable with irreverence." From outside: "Those people bought dick butts, they're not serious." Both readings reinforce group cohesion. The insiders bond over being dismissed by outsiders who "don't get it." The outsiders confirm their own good judgment by not participating in something "obviously stupid."

This is classic tribal boundary formation, but with almost zero friction. No manifesto required. No values statement. No community guidelines. Just: Do you think this is funny or do you think it's dumb? That binary creates two populations that sort themselves.

The Dickbutts success spawned hundreds of imitators. The vast majority failed to achieve comparable staying power or cultural resonance. Understanding why reveals what actually mattered.

Some projects tried transgression without legibility. They were offensive or weird, but in ways that required explanation. "It's a commentary on consumer culture," or "It's satirizing crypto greed." The moment you need that sentence, you've lost the memetic property. Dickbutts never explained itself.

Some projects had legibility but no transgression. Cute animals, pleasant illustrations, immediately comprehensible but also forgettable. No social sorting. No insider signal. Just... nice pictures. They couldn't create the boundary between "gets it" and "doesn't get it" because there was nothing to get.

Some projects tried to add utility too early. Staking mechanisms, token airdrops, and metaverse land claims. They killed the joke by taking it seriously before the community decided it was worth taking seriously. They optimized for financialization before they'd established cultural coherence.

The worst failures are front-loaded with meaning. They arrived with elaborate lore, detailed roadmaps, and explanations of what the project "stood for." All of that prevents the community from constructing meaning together. It treats the NFT as a product to be consumed rather than a primitive to be remixed.

Dickbutts avoided all these traps accidentally. It had no roadmap because it wasn't really trying to be anything except a stupid joke. That accidental wisdom—arriving incomplete, staying ambiguous, letting community construct meaning—is something most projects are too planned to achieve.

Nouns are a different beast, but the same physics apply.

Where Dickbutts stumbled into memetic durability, Nouns engineered for it. The project understood that the art wasn't the asset. The mutation layer was the asset.

Nouns achieved memetic durability because they are intentionally unfinished. The core visual—pixelated characters with distinctive glasses—is deliberately minimal. It's a primitive, not a complete aesthetic. The glasses became the identifying marker, the irreducible element that says "this is Nouns-derived." Everything else is variable.

This design choice was structural, not stylistic. By keeping the core primitive simple, Nouns made remixing trivially easy. You don't need permission or sophisticated tools. You just need to include the glasses. That lowered the barrier to participation from "sophisticated artist who can match a complex style" to "anyone with basic design tools."

The daily auction created rhythm. One new Noun every day, forever. Not a limited drop. Not a phased release. A drumbeat. That rhythm became ritual. Communities formed around bidding patterns, around ownership milestones, around the daily reveal. The predictability created reliability, which created habit, which created culture.

Compare this to the standard NFT drop model: huge launch, sell out in minutes, then... silence. The energy dissipates. The community fragments. There's no ongoing reason to pay attention. Nouns inverted this. The launch was boring. The ongoing ritual was where the energy went.

The DAO treasury functioned as a memetic battery. Resources accumulating daily from auctions, controlled by token holders, are available for funding derivatives and experiments. As of late 2024, the treasury held approximately 3,760 ETH (roughly $10.7 million), down from peaks of over 29,000 ETH in earlier years. That drawdown isn't a failure—it's evidence of the system working. The treasury didn't just accumulate—it deployed resources to fund mutations, derivatives, and cultural experiments. It made the ecosystem generative rather than extractive.

Most NFT projects treat derivatives as threats. Forks are competition. Remixes dilute the brand. Nouns treated them as proof of concept. Every derivative, every fork, every spinoff was evidence that the meme was working. The more variations emerged, the stronger the core primitive became.

This is counterintuitive but correct. Memes don't die from mutation. They die from stagnation. A meme that can't be remixed can't adapt to new contexts. It competes for attention in its original context until that context shifts and the meme becomes irrelevant. A meme that invites remixing can jump contexts. It can mean different things to different communities while maintaining recognizability.

Mutation is not just part of Nouns' success; it is the success. The project explicitly invites remixing as a first-class behavior. Forks, spinoffs, derivatives, subcultures. That keeps the meme adaptive across contexts. A static meme competes for attention. A mutating meme recruits collaborators.

Lil Nouns emerged as a more accessible version. Same glasses, smaller scale, different aesthetic choices. It didn't compete with Nouns; it expanded the addressable market. Gnars targeted skate culture. Same primitive, different context. Each derivative proved the thesis: the glasses were sufficient to maintain memetic coherence while the variations adapted to different communities.

The CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) licensing was crucial here. Nouns explicitly surrendered IP control. Anyone could use the art for anything, including commercial purposes, without permission or payment. Most brands would consider this insane. For a meme trying to achieve maximum spread, it was optimal.

This wasn't simply generosity. It functioned as a structural optimization. Traditional competitive advantage comes from control—owning IP, managing distribution, protecting brand. Memetic competitive advantage appears to come from spread—maximum recognition, effortless reusability, rapid adaptation. These represent opposing strategies. Control and spread optimize for different outcomes. You can maintain tight control, or you can achieve maximum mutation, but pursuing both simultaneously creates internal contradiction.

Nouns chose spread, which required surrendering control. That choice created a moat that competitors literally cannot cross. A company that needs to protect IP cannot adopt a CC0 strategy without fundamentally restructuring its business model and value proposition.

CC0 did something subtle: it made every remix function as an advertisement for the original. When someone created a Nouns derivative, they weren't stealing from Nouns—they were proving Nouns was worth deriving from. They were demonstrating that the primitive had generative power. Each derivative increased rather than decreased the value of the core.

This relates directly to power dynamics. Traditional IP law concentrates power in the hands of creators. They control who can use their work, how, and in what contexts. That control seems valuable, but it creates brittleness. If you control all uses, you also limit all uses. You can't benefit from creative applications you never imagined because you've structurally prevented them.

Nouns decoupled authorship from control. The original creators made the primitive, then surrendered control over its evolution. That made the meme resilient to capture and boredom. When a meme can be improved without consensus, it evolves faster than taste cycles.

Anyone can extend the meme without asking permission. That distributes creative authority across the entire community rather than concentrating it in the founding team. It means the meme can't die from founder burnout or bad decisions. Even if the original team disappeared tomorrow, the ecosystem could continue evolving.

The governance structure reinforces this distributed model. Each Noun represents one vote in the DAO, and a minimum of four Nouns is required to submit proposals. As the project matured and the supply grew (one Noun per day since August 2021), governance thresholds increased to maintain decision quality. This evolution demonstrates adaptive governance—rules that adjust as the community scales while maintaining the core principle of distributed authority.

This represents a sophisticated understanding of how cultural durability works. Memes that survive long-term aren't the ones with the most careful stewardship. They're the ones that become infrastructure—basic enough and open enough that many different people can build on them for many different purposes.

Both examples reveal a pattern: the memes that achieved durability weren't optimized for aesthetics or logic. They were optimized—accidentally or intentionally—for transmission, recognition, and reuse.

Dickbutts spread because it was funny and socially catalytic. It gave people a reason to signal tribal affiliation ("I'm the kind of person who thinks this is funny") at almost zero cost (just buy or share a cartoon). The humor was the delivery mechanism. The tribal sorting was the function.

Nouns grow because they are a protocol for shared meaning. The glasses are recognizable enough to maintain coherence but minimal enough to adapt to any context. The daily auction provides rhythm. The treasury provides resources. The CC0 license provides permission. Together, these create a system where mutation is encouraged rather than prevented.

In both cases, the success came from understanding transmission dynamics better than competitors. Most NFT projects optimize for initial appeal. Beautiful art, compelling narrative, celebrity endorsements. All of that helps with the first sale. None of it necessarily helps with long-term memetic durability.

Dickbutts and Nouns optimized for different things: recognition over beauty (can you identify it instantly?), reusability over completeness (can others build on it easily?), social function over individual value (does it help people signal something?), and evolutionary fitness over static perfection (can it adapt to new contexts?).

These optimization targets only make sense if you understand memes as coordination devices rather than aesthetic objects. A beautiful painting hangs on a wall. A functioning meme recruits collaborators.

The coordination function is what actually matters. Dickbutts coordinated people around shared humor and cultural literacy. If you owned one, you were signaling: "I understand internet culture, I don't take myself too seriously, I'm comfortable with absurdity." That signal lets like-minded people find each other.

Nouns coordinate people around shared infrastructure. If you own a Noun, you're participating in a daily ritual, contributing to a treasury, joining a community that values remixing and mutation. That's a different kind of coordination, but still coordination. The NFT is the ticket to the ongoing game, not the game itself.

Both projects succeeded by understanding that memes are inherently decentralized transmission systems. A centralized entity can create the initial primitive, but the primitive only gains power through decentralized spread and mutation. The creator's competitive advantage comes from getting out of the way after creation, not from managing evolution. Dickbutts stumbled into this accidentally by having no management structure. Nouns were engineered for it intentionally through CC0 and treasury design. Both benefited from the same physics: memetic power grows through uncontrolled spread, not careful stewardship.

This maps directly to broader questions about power and coordination. Traditional power structures work through control—if I own this thing, I control who can use it and how. Memetic power works through spread—if I create this primitive, my power grows as more people use it in more contexts, even if I don't control those uses.

That's a fundamentally different power model. It values reach over control, mutation over purity, and evolutionary fitness over designed perfection. It works better in networked environments where coordination happens peer-to-peer rather than hierarchically.

The Dickbutts and Nouns cases are about more than JPEGs. They're about how meaning spreads, how communities form, and how coordination happens without traditional authority structures.

Most organizations still operate on the control model. They create IP, guard it carefully, license it strategically, and sue anyone who infringes. That made sense in a world where distribution was scarce and expensive. If you needed TV networks or retail distribution or traditional publishers, you needed to protect your IP because each use was rivalrous—someone else using your shelf space meant you couldn't.

In networked environments, distribution is abundant and non-rivalrous. Someone else using your meme doesn't prevent you from using it. Actually, it makes your use more valuable because it increases recognition and reach. The economics flip completely.

But most organizations haven't updated their mental models. They still think in terms of ownership and control rather than primitives and mutation. They still try to prevent unauthorized uses rather than enabling creative remixing. They're playing a 20th-century game in a 21st-century environment.

Dickbutts and Nouns accidentally (and intentionally) discovered 21st-century rules. Create recognizable primitives. Make them easy to reuse. Let communities construct meaning. Reward mutation. Distribute creative authority. Those rules appear to work better for memetic spread than traditional IP protection.

The organizations that figure this out fastest will likely dominate coordination in networked environments. Not because they control the most resources, but because they create the primitives that everyone else builds on. That's a different kind of power—infrastructure power rather than ownership power.

In other words, one was a joke that accidentally became a flag. The other is a flag designed to generate infinite jokes. Both succeeded by understanding something most serious projects missed: memes don't survive because they're protected. They survive because they're useful for coordination, easy to transmit, and adaptable to new contexts.

The stupid cartoon with a dick for a butt and the pixelated characters with distinctive glasses aren't just NFTs. They're working examples of how power and coordination function in permissionless, networked environments. Understanding why they work helps explain much larger shifts in how culture spreads, communities form, and collective action happens.

That's why they matter. Not because they're valuable JPEGs, but because they're functioning prototypes of post-institutional coordination mechanisms. The joke is real. The primitives work. The future looks more like this than most people realize.

CryptoDickbutts and Nouns look silly on the surface, but they succeed for serious memetic reasons. They are not just images; they are coordination devices.

Most people dismiss them as jokes or scams. That's a category error. These projects succeeded precisely because they understood something fundamental about how meaning spreads, and communities form—something most "serious" projects with elaborate roadmaps and utility promises completely missed.

What follows is an analysis of why these projects achieved memetic durability when most NFT projects from the same era faded. The patterns that emerge have implications beyond JPEGs.

CryptoDickbutts worked because it accidentally nailed several deep properties of durable memes.

First, it was culturally transgressive but low-stakes. Juvenile, absurd, vaguely forbidden, yet not threatening. That made it sticky and shareable without requiring ideological alignment. You didn't need to believe anything to share a Dickbutt. You just needed a sense of humor and a tolerance for the absurd. That's a much lower barrier than "believe in decentralized finance" or "commit to this community's values."

The transgression mattered because it created social sorting. When you bought or displayed a Dickbutt, you were signaling something specific: you didn't take yourself too seriously, you understood internet culture, you were comfortable with vulgarity as play rather than threat. These signals sorted people with almost zero cognitive cost. You either got it or you didn't. No explanation required.

Compare this to Bored Ape Yacht Club, which became associated with signaling wealth, status aspiration, and tribal affiliation with celebrity culture. Or World of Women, which became associated with values alignment around representation and empowerment. Both are successful projects, but both require substantially more ideological commitment. Dickbutts asked for nothing except a willingness to be in on an obvious joke.

Second, it was radically legible. You understood it instantly. No lore, no roadmap, no explanation deck. The entire concept fit in the image itself: a cartoon character with a dick for a butt. Done. Complete. No further clarification needed.

This matters more than most founders realize. Projects that die fastest often require extensive explanation. "It's a gamified DeFi protocol combined with generative art that unlocks exclusive community access and future airdrops based on staking mechanisms..." Stop. You lost them. Compare that to: "It's a dick butt." Instant comprehension. Instant decision point. In or out.

Radical legibility also makes memes spreadable by non-experts. You don't need to understand blockchain to share a Dickbutt. You don't need to read a whitepaper. Your mom could get the joke even if she doesn't get NFTs. That dramatically expands the transmission surface.

Third, it arrived before meaning. Early holders bonded over recognition, not utility. There was no promise of future value, no staking mechanism, no metaverse integration roadmap. Just: here's a stupid thing, do you think it's funny? Meaning accreted later through shared history—the community that formed, the floor price that held, the cultural moment it captured.

That sequence matters enormously. Memes that explain themselves too early tend to struggle. They front-load meaning, which creates premature consensus about what the thing "is for." That freezes the meme. It can't evolve because everyone has already agreed on its purpose.

Dickbutts stayed fluid longer because it arrived in its pure form. Early holders projected their own meanings onto it. Some saw it as art commentary. Some saw it as crypto culture satire. Some just thought it was funny. All those interpretations coexisted because none was canonical. The ambiguity created space for the community to construct meaning together, which created much stronger bonds than any preset narrative could have.

It also benefited from asymmetric commitment. Buying or sharing a Dickbutt was an insider signal. You were either in on the joke or you were not. That created social sorting at almost zero cognitive cost. Memes love low-cost signaling with high cultural yield.

The asymmetry works both ways. From inside: "I'm part of this absurd thing, which means I understand internet culture and I'm comfortable with irreverence." From outside: "Those people bought dick butts, they're not serious." Both readings reinforce group cohesion. The insiders bond over being dismissed by outsiders who "don't get it." The outsiders confirm their own good judgment by not participating in something "obviously stupid."

This is classic tribal boundary formation, but with almost zero friction. No manifesto required. No values statement. No community guidelines. Just: Do you think this is funny or do you think it's dumb? That binary creates two populations that sort themselves.

The Dickbutts success spawned hundreds of imitators. The vast majority failed to achieve comparable staying power or cultural resonance. Understanding why reveals what actually mattered.

Some projects tried transgression without legibility. They were offensive or weird, but in ways that required explanation. "It's a commentary on consumer culture," or "It's satirizing crypto greed." The moment you need that sentence, you've lost the memetic property. Dickbutts never explained itself.

Some projects had legibility but no transgression. Cute animals, pleasant illustrations, immediately comprehensible but also forgettable. No social sorting. No insider signal. Just... nice pictures. They couldn't create the boundary between "gets it" and "doesn't get it" because there was nothing to get.

Some projects tried to add utility too early. Staking mechanisms, token airdrops, and metaverse land claims. They killed the joke by taking it seriously before the community decided it was worth taking seriously. They optimized for financialization before they'd established cultural coherence.

The worst failures are front-loaded with meaning. They arrived with elaborate lore, detailed roadmaps, and explanations of what the project "stood for." All of that prevents the community from constructing meaning together. It treats the NFT as a product to be consumed rather than a primitive to be remixed.

Dickbutts avoided all these traps accidentally. It had no roadmap because it wasn't really trying to be anything except a stupid joke. That accidental wisdom—arriving incomplete, staying ambiguous, letting community construct meaning—is something most projects are too planned to achieve.

Nouns are a different beast, but the same physics apply.

Where Dickbutts stumbled into memetic durability, Nouns engineered for it. The project understood that the art wasn't the asset. The mutation layer was the asset.

Nouns achieved memetic durability because they are intentionally unfinished. The core visual—pixelated characters with distinctive glasses—is deliberately minimal. It's a primitive, not a complete aesthetic. The glasses became the identifying marker, the irreducible element that says "this is Nouns-derived." Everything else is variable.

This design choice was structural, not stylistic. By keeping the core primitive simple, Nouns made remixing trivially easy. You don't need permission or sophisticated tools. You just need to include the glasses. That lowered the barrier to participation from "sophisticated artist who can match a complex style" to "anyone with basic design tools."

The daily auction created rhythm. One new Noun every day, forever. Not a limited drop. Not a phased release. A drumbeat. That rhythm became ritual. Communities formed around bidding patterns, around ownership milestones, around the daily reveal. The predictability created reliability, which created habit, which created culture.

Compare this to the standard NFT drop model: huge launch, sell out in minutes, then... silence. The energy dissipates. The community fragments. There's no ongoing reason to pay attention. Nouns inverted this. The launch was boring. The ongoing ritual was where the energy went.

The DAO treasury functioned as a memetic battery. Resources accumulating daily from auctions, controlled by token holders, are available for funding derivatives and experiments. As of late 2024, the treasury held approximately 3,760 ETH (roughly $10.7 million), down from peaks of over 29,000 ETH in earlier years. That drawdown isn't a failure—it's evidence of the system working. The treasury didn't just accumulate—it deployed resources to fund mutations, derivatives, and cultural experiments. It made the ecosystem generative rather than extractive.

Most NFT projects treat derivatives as threats. Forks are competition. Remixes dilute the brand. Nouns treated them as proof of concept. Every derivative, every fork, every spinoff was evidence that the meme was working. The more variations emerged, the stronger the core primitive became.

This is counterintuitive but correct. Memes don't die from mutation. They die from stagnation. A meme that can't be remixed can't adapt to new contexts. It competes for attention in its original context until that context shifts and the meme becomes irrelevant. A meme that invites remixing can jump contexts. It can mean different things to different communities while maintaining recognizability.

Mutation is not just part of Nouns' success; it is the success. The project explicitly invites remixing as a first-class behavior. Forks, spinoffs, derivatives, subcultures. That keeps the meme adaptive across contexts. A static meme competes for attention. A mutating meme recruits collaborators.

Lil Nouns emerged as a more accessible version. Same glasses, smaller scale, different aesthetic choices. It didn't compete with Nouns; it expanded the addressable market. Gnars targeted skate culture. Same primitive, different context. Each derivative proved the thesis: the glasses were sufficient to maintain memetic coherence while the variations adapted to different communities.

The CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) licensing was crucial here. Nouns explicitly surrendered IP control. Anyone could use the art for anything, including commercial purposes, without permission or payment. Most brands would consider this insane. For a meme trying to achieve maximum spread, it was optimal.

This wasn't simply generosity. It functioned as a structural optimization. Traditional competitive advantage comes from control—owning IP, managing distribution, protecting brand. Memetic competitive advantage appears to come from spread—maximum recognition, effortless reusability, rapid adaptation. These represent opposing strategies. Control and spread optimize for different outcomes. You can maintain tight control, or you can achieve maximum mutation, but pursuing both simultaneously creates internal contradiction.

Nouns chose spread, which required surrendering control. That choice created a moat that competitors literally cannot cross. A company that needs to protect IP cannot adopt a CC0 strategy without fundamentally restructuring its business model and value proposition.

CC0 did something subtle: it made every remix function as an advertisement for the original. When someone created a Nouns derivative, they weren't stealing from Nouns—they were proving Nouns was worth deriving from. They were demonstrating that the primitive had generative power. Each derivative increased rather than decreased the value of the core.

This relates directly to power dynamics. Traditional IP law concentrates power in the hands of creators. They control who can use their work, how, and in what contexts. That control seems valuable, but it creates brittleness. If you control all uses, you also limit all uses. You can't benefit from creative applications you never imagined because you've structurally prevented them.

Nouns decoupled authorship from control. The original creators made the primitive, then surrendered control over its evolution. That made the meme resilient to capture and boredom. When a meme can be improved without consensus, it evolves faster than taste cycles.

Anyone can extend the meme without asking permission. That distributes creative authority across the entire community rather than concentrating it in the founding team. It means the meme can't die from founder burnout or bad decisions. Even if the original team disappeared tomorrow, the ecosystem could continue evolving.

The governance structure reinforces this distributed model. Each Noun represents one vote in the DAO, and a minimum of four Nouns is required to submit proposals. As the project matured and the supply grew (one Noun per day since August 2021), governance thresholds increased to maintain decision quality. This evolution demonstrates adaptive governance—rules that adjust as the community scales while maintaining the core principle of distributed authority.

This represents a sophisticated understanding of how cultural durability works. Memes that survive long-term aren't the ones with the most careful stewardship. They're the ones that become infrastructure—basic enough and open enough that many different people can build on them for many different purposes.

Both examples reveal a pattern: the memes that achieved durability weren't optimized for aesthetics or logic. They were optimized—accidentally or intentionally—for transmission, recognition, and reuse.

Dickbutts spread because it was funny and socially catalytic. It gave people a reason to signal tribal affiliation ("I'm the kind of person who thinks this is funny") at almost zero cost (just buy or share a cartoon). The humor was the delivery mechanism. The tribal sorting was the function.

Nouns grow because they are a protocol for shared meaning. The glasses are recognizable enough to maintain coherence but minimal enough to adapt to any context. The daily auction provides rhythm. The treasury provides resources. The CC0 license provides permission. Together, these create a system where mutation is encouraged rather than prevented.

In both cases, the success came from understanding transmission dynamics better than competitors. Most NFT projects optimize for initial appeal. Beautiful art, compelling narrative, celebrity endorsements. All of that helps with the first sale. None of it necessarily helps with long-term memetic durability.

Dickbutts and Nouns optimized for different things: recognition over beauty (can you identify it instantly?), reusability over completeness (can others build on it easily?), social function over individual value (does it help people signal something?), and evolutionary fitness over static perfection (can it adapt to new contexts?).

These optimization targets only make sense if you understand memes as coordination devices rather than aesthetic objects. A beautiful painting hangs on a wall. A functioning meme recruits collaborators.

The coordination function is what actually matters. Dickbutts coordinated people around shared humor and cultural literacy. If you owned one, you were signaling: "I understand internet culture, I don't take myself too seriously, I'm comfortable with absurdity." That signal lets like-minded people find each other.

Nouns coordinate people around shared infrastructure. If you own a Noun, you're participating in a daily ritual, contributing to a treasury, joining a community that values remixing and mutation. That's a different kind of coordination, but still coordination. The NFT is the ticket to the ongoing game, not the game itself.

Both projects succeeded by understanding that memes are inherently decentralized transmission systems. A centralized entity can create the initial primitive, but the primitive only gains power through decentralized spread and mutation. The creator's competitive advantage comes from getting out of the way after creation, not from managing evolution. Dickbutts stumbled into this accidentally by having no management structure. Nouns were engineered for it intentionally through CC0 and treasury design. Both benefited from the same physics: memetic power grows through uncontrolled spread, not careful stewardship.

This maps directly to broader questions about power and coordination. Traditional power structures work through control—if I own this thing, I control who can use it and how. Memetic power works through spread—if I create this primitive, my power grows as more people use it in more contexts, even if I don't control those uses.

That's a fundamentally different power model. It values reach over control, mutation over purity, and evolutionary fitness over designed perfection. It works better in networked environments where coordination happens peer-to-peer rather than hierarchically.

The Dickbutts and Nouns cases are about more than JPEGs. They're about how meaning spreads, how communities form, and how coordination happens without traditional authority structures.

Most organizations still operate on the control model. They create IP, guard it carefully, license it strategically, and sue anyone who infringes. That made sense in a world where distribution was scarce and expensive. If you needed TV networks or retail distribution or traditional publishers, you needed to protect your IP because each use was rivalrous—someone else using your shelf space meant you couldn't.

In networked environments, distribution is abundant and non-rivalrous. Someone else using your meme doesn't prevent you from using it. Actually, it makes your use more valuable because it increases recognition and reach. The economics flip completely.

But most organizations haven't updated their mental models. They still think in terms of ownership and control rather than primitives and mutation. They still try to prevent unauthorized uses rather than enabling creative remixing. They're playing a 20th-century game in a 21st-century environment.

Dickbutts and Nouns accidentally (and intentionally) discovered 21st-century rules. Create recognizable primitives. Make them easy to reuse. Let communities construct meaning. Reward mutation. Distribute creative authority. Those rules appear to work better for memetic spread than traditional IP protection.

The organizations that figure this out fastest will likely dominate coordination in networked environments. Not because they control the most resources, but because they create the primitives that everyone else builds on. That's a different kind of power—infrastructure power rather than ownership power.

In other words, one was a joke that accidentally became a flag. The other is a flag designed to generate infinite jokes. Both succeeded by understanding something most serious projects missed: memes don't survive because they're protected. They survive because they're useful for coordination, easy to transmit, and adaptable to new contexts.

The stupid cartoon with a dick for a butt and the pixelated characters with distinctive glasses aren't just NFTs. They're working examples of how power and coordination function in permissionless, networked environments. Understanding why they work helps explain much larger shifts in how culture spreads, communities form, and collective action happens.

That's why they matter. Not because they're valuable JPEGs, but because they're functioning prototypes of post-institutional coordination mechanisms. The joke is real. The primitives work. The future looks more like this than most people realize.