Cryptocurrency is undoubtably the future of finance. We are dismantling the traditional finance systems and the power structures that it enables, piece by piece.

But that's not what I want to talk about today.

Let’s talk about why all value is imaginary, and how crypto has been a vehicle for exposing the absurdity of all financial systems.

Our understanding of value is shifting, increasingly veering down a path steeped in Simulacra. Here we reference Jean Baudrillard's seminal work, Simulacra and Simulation, which proposes that reality is often supplanted by symbols and signs in our contemporary society. If you’ve watched The Matrix, it was heavily inspired by the ideas in this book.

So, what exactly are Simulacra? They are representations or copies of objects that have amassed a sense of authenticity that eclipses the original, or, in some instances, the original has vanished altogether.

Take Mickey Mouse as an example.

Something that started as a doodle now transcends the mere identity of a "cartoon mouse." When children recognize Mickey, they don’t see a drawing of a rodent; they see Mickey Mouse. The essence of the character eclipses the reality of a mouse.

Similarly, Starbucks’ coffeehouse model has no true Italian origin. The Italian café experience is replicated in a way that may feel more authentically European to many Americans than the genuine experience itself.

This reimagining of culture is a prime example of a simulacrum at work. Starbucks now has a larger global brand presence than any authentic Italian café.

Simulation is the method by which symbols usurp the reality they originally represented, perpetuating this dynamic. Starbucks customers are simulating the experience of drinking coffee in Venezia, whether they are aware of it or not.

Hyperreality is what happens when the simulations we experience become so dominant that the line between simulation and reality is blurred.

Man creates symbols to represent ideas, and then symbols grow to replace the idea they were meant to represent.

Baudrillard wrote of the journey of images and signs through four critical phases:

1. Reflection of reality - an image that accurately depicts a basic reality.

2. Masking reality - an image that obscures and distorts genuine reality.

3. Absence of reality - an image masks the absence of reality.

4. Pure simulacrum - an image that exists independently, detached from any real-world reference.

Let’s trace the evolution of the cryptocurrency industry through each stage.

Bitcoin emerged in 2009 with a groundbreaking proposal: it would be "digital gold." The metaphors were deliberate and pervasive. You don't "create" Bitcoin, you mine it. You don't store it in accounts, but in wallets. The supply isn't unlimited but capped at 21 million coins.

This use of these symbols was not accidental. Satoshi Nakamoto understood that for people to perceive value in strings of numbers, those numbers needed to simulate something already valued. Gold became the perfect object to reference: scarce, requiring effort to obtain, universally recognized as valuable across cultures and millennia.

Consider the mining metaphor.

Real gold mining involves physical labor, geological reality, and chemical processes that transform raw earth into refined metal.

Bitcoin "mining" involves computers solving arbitrary mathematical puzzles. The puzzles don't produce anything, they simply prove computational work was done. The "difficulty adjustment" that occurs every 2,016 blocks doesn't reflect "deposits" becoming harder to reach or gold stores being depleted, but instead an algorithm maintaining ten-minute block times.

Even Bitcoin's scarcity, its foundational 21 million limit, is simulated. Gold is scarce because of physics and geology. Bitcoin is scarce because code says so. One is a natural constraint; the other is a collective agreement to pretend a constraint exists.

Yet in the hyperreal economy, this distinction becomes meaningless. The simulated scarcity generates real behavior: hoarding, speculation, the entire apparatus of commodity markets.

This is Baudrillard's first stage in action: Bitcoin successfully reflects a reality (gold-as-store-of-value) while being entirely simulation. It's not a degraded copy or a failed attempt at digital gold. It's a simulacrum that refers to the idea of gold while sharing none of its material properties.

This is partially why Bitcoin succeeded where earlier digital currencies failed. E-gold tried to be digital currency backed by gold. It maintained a connection to reality that ultimately constrained it. Bitcoin severed that connection from the start, creating a pure simulation that could evolve beyond its metaphorical origins.

The genius lies in how completely the simulation convinced us. The simulation became so complete that people experience Bitcoin mining as analogous to gold mining, despite sharing no actual characteristics beyond scarcity.

In phase 1, the masking of reality happens when the emperor wears virtual clothes, which appear to be real.

Decentralized Finance promised to simulate traditional financial systems - lending, borrowing, trading - without intermediaries. Compound, Aave, and Uniswap created algorithmic versions of banks and exchanges. The simulation grew more complex, but still claimed referential grounding.

However, DeFi began masking reality rather than reflecting it:

• Yield farming generates returns from nothing but token emissions

• Liquidity mining rewards users for creating the appearance of market depth

• Governance tokens simulate ownership without legal claims

• Stablecoins claim to represent dollars while existing in regulatory gray zones

Consider the archetypal 2018-2020 era DeFi "success story": A protocol launches with a governance token. Users deposit cryptocurrency to "provide liquidity." In return, they receive newly minted tokens as rewards. These tokens grant "governance rights" over a protocol that exists solely to distribute more tokens.

The entire system is perfectly circular. It is a financial Ouroboros consuming its own tail while calling it "yield."

When a traditional bank lends money, the chain is relatively clear: deposits → loans → productive enterprise → returns → interest to depositors. DeFi obscures this absence of productivity through layers of abstraction.

You stake LP tokens to earn SUSHI, which you stake to earn xSUSHI, which earns trading fees from people swapping tokens that were created by other protocols engaged in identical circular token distribution.

Governance tokens represent ownership without ownership, control without control.

Holding UNI tokens grants you voting rights in Uniswap governance. But what exactly are you governing? The protocol's core functions are immutable smart contracts. Most proposals involve adjusting fee parameters or distributing treasury funds, essentially voting on how to redistribute the house's take from the casino.

Even so, having meaningful impact on the protocol via actual participation in on-chain governance is something completely out of reach to anyone but the biggest whales, who can sway votes in their favor.

This isn't failed democracy; it's simulated democracy.

The voting, proposals, and delegate systems create an elaborate performance of decentralized governance while actual control remains with core teams, whale token holders, and the immutable constraints of already-deployed code.

TradFi yield represents payment for productive risk: lending to businesses, funding mortgages, capitalizing ventures. DeFi "yield" most often represents nothing more than protocol inflation, with new tokens minted to reward participation in the simulation.

Users jump into yield arms promising "2,000% APY" and feel they're earning spectacular returns. But returns of what?

Often, it's more of the token that's being hyperinflated to create these yields. The number goes up, but purchasing power, the ability to exchange these tokens for anything outside the simulation, rapidly deteriorates.

The most telling aspect of DeFi's reality-masking is how protocols build on each other in recursive loops. Curve provides liquidity for stablecoins, which are used as collateral on Aave, which enables leveraged yield farming on Yearn, which deposits back into Curve.

While each individual layer can justify that it is providing a real service, if you zoom out, they are also extending the Ouroboros. Each layer adds complexity that further obscures the absence of external productivity.

DeFi's terminology systematically obscures its circular nature:

• "Total Value Locked" (TVL) sounds like funds are being productively deployed, not sitting in smart contracts

• "Impermanent Loss" frames guaranteed losses from providing liquidity as somehow temporary

• "Protocol Owned Liquidity" suggests protocols own something of value, when they're often just smart contracts holding tokens of their own creation

• "Real Yield" emerged to distinguish actual revenue from token emissions, inadvertently admitting most yield isn't real

This linguistic masking isn't accidental. It's essential to maintaining the simulation. If protocols clearly stated "deposit your tokens so we can give you more of our worthless tokens," the circular nature would be too obvious. The complexity and jargon create sufficient obscurity for the simulation to sustain itself.

This is Baudrillard's second stage perfected: not merely representing financial activity but actively masking its absence through complexity. The simulation has become sophisticated enough to hide its own emptiness, creating what appears to be a thriving financial ecosystem while producing little more than the circulation of tokens referencing other tokens.

Yet participants aren't entirely deceived. The term "degen" (degenerate) became a badge of honor in DeFi communities, an acknowledgment that everyone knows, on some level, that they're gambling in an elaborate casino rather than participating in revolutionary finance.

The masking operates not through deception but through collective agreement to pretend the emperor has clothes, at least until the music stops.

Non-fungible tokens marked the precise moment when cryptocurrency abandoned any pretense of underlying value. If Bitcoin simulated gold and DeFi masked its own circular nature through complexity and references to real-life processes, NFTs achieved something more radical: they are an attempt to mask the entire absence of real value.

Consider what an NFT actually is: a token pointing to a location where an image might be stored. Not ownership of the image, because anyone can right-click and save it. Not copyright, that typically remains with the creator unless explicitly transferred. Not even guaranteed permanent access; if the hosting service disappears, so does the "asset."

The NFT is pure reference without referent, a certificate of authenticity for something that needs no authentication.

When Beeple's "Everydays" sold for $69 million at Christie's, the art world struggled to comprehend what had been purchased.

The buyer, MetaKovan, didn't acquire exclusive access to the images, they remain freely viewable online. He didn't gain reproduction rights. He obtained a signed pointer saying he owns the pointer.

The sale's staggering price made explicit what Baudrillard predicted: in hyperreality, the simulation of ownership becomes more valuable than ownership itself.

This wasn't a failure of the system but its perfection. The buyer knew exactly what he was purchasing: the status of having purchased it. The $69 million bought entry into art history, transformation of capital into cultural relevance, and most importantly, ownership of a moment when the simulation became undeniable.

The PFP phenomenon revealed how completely NFTs embrace absence. These collections offer:

• Membership in a "community" that exists primarily online

• "Utility" in the form of promises of future NFT drops

• Identity through a cartoon avatar that is not of your own creation

Members signal belonging through Twitter avatars, creating identity from the absence of their own.

When you buy an NFT, you own a receipt pointing to a description pointing to a location where an image might be hosted.

It's simulacra all the way down.

The search for utility makes the absence more visible. Why would a JPEG need utility unless it was fundamentally nothing? Traditional art never promised buyers additional benefits, the art itself was the point. NFTs' utility roadmaps are confessions of emptiness.

Virtual land NFTs, like plots in Decentraland, Sandbox, various "metaverses", achieved peak absence.

Brands even paid millions for metaverse "real estate" adjacent to other brands' virtual headquarters, creating a simulation of commercial districts in worlds no one visits.

Traditional art markets always contained elements of simulation, with prices reflecting social capital rather than aesthetic value. NFTs made this explicit by removing the physical object entirely. What remains is pure market abstraction: the artwork as price chart, ownership as blockchain entry, community as token-gated Discord.

This isn't art's failure but its logical endpoint in hyperreality. Once art became primarily an investment vehicle, why maintain the pretense of objects? NFTs strip art to its market essence: coordinated speculation on social consensus. The absence of actual art becomes irrelevant when art itself had already become simulacra.

Derivative NFTs reference the absence that came before them. Fractional NFTs divide absence into smaller absences. NFT funds collect absence into portfolios of absence. Each iteration adds another layer of simulation without ever reaching ground.

In Baudrillard's third stage, images mask the absence of reality. NFTs don't fail to represent ownership, they succeed in representing ownership's absence. They're the perfect commodity for an economy that has detached from material production: pure circulation without substance, value without object, ownership without possession. A strong hint to what was coming in the next stage.

The genius of NFTs lies not in solving digital scarcity but in revealing its irrelevance. When everyone can see the JPEG, when the blockchain proves your ownership of nothing, when the community celebrates rather than conceals this absence, that's when the simulation approaches its purest form.

NFTs are the emperor's new clothes as a feature, not a bug, with the crowd applauding the nakedness while bidding up the price of invisible fabric.

Memecoins achieve what Baudrillard saw as the final stage: pure simulacra with no relationship to reality whatsoever. They don't pretend to be currency, claim technological innovation, or promise future utility. They exist as pure self-referential symbols, celebrating their own meaninglessness with a kind of ecstatic nihilism.

Dogecoin began as programmer humor.

It was a deliberate parody of Bitcoin using a Shiba Inu meme. Created in two hours, it mocked the self-serious cryptocurrency space by embracing absurdity. This origin story contains the DNA of all memecoins: they begin as jokes about value and become valuable through the joke itself.

The progression is clear. Bitcoin simulated gold, Dogecoin simulated Bitcoin as comedy, Shiba Inu simulated Dogecoin without the humor, Baby Doge simulated Shiba Inu's simulation, and so on. Each iteration grows more explicitly meaningless

By the time we reach tokens like PEPE, BONK, or the many I don't want to mention by name lmao, we've achieved complete severance from referential meaning. PEPE doesn't represent the frog, Pepe the frog doesn't represent anything real, and the token's value derives from collective recognition of this infinite recursion of non-meaning.

Platforms like Pump stripped memecoin creation to its essence: anyone can create a token in seconds, no pretense required. The names are sometimes keyboard mashes, the "projects" last minutes, and everyone participating knows exactly what's happening. A typical lifecycle:

1. Token creates at 3:42 PM

2. Anonymous dev buys with 0.5 SOL

3. Telegram raiders coordinate pump

4. Chart goes vertical

5. Everyone tries to exit before others

6. Token dies by 3:47 PM

7. Same participants move to next token

This isn't a corrupted system, it's the system perfected. Pure price action divorced from any pretense of underlying value, speculation as its own reward, the game acknowledged as game.

Memecoins respond to events with algorithmic precision. Within minutes of any viral moment:

• Biden stumbles: $BODEN launches

• Trump tweets: $MAGA pumps

• Hawk Tuah girl goes viral: $HAWKTUAH appears

• Celebrity dies: memorial coins flood the market

These tokens don't necessarily comment on events or represent political positions. They're pure momentum plays on attention itself.

Traders aren't necessarily expressing support or mockery, they're betting on other traders betting on collective attention patterns. It's simulacra of sentiment, speculation on the simulation of cultural moments.

Memecoins compress market cycles from years to hours. Traditional speculation at least pretended to span quarterly earnings or product launches. Memecoins eliminate temporal pretense.

This acceleration reveals markets as pure coordination games. Price movements create narratives rather than reflecting them.

Traders look at charts when deciding what to buy, so teams launching tokens want to have a “good” chart. The chart becomes the fundamental reality, not representation of value but value itself.

Memecoin communities exhibit radical honesty about their participation in nothing:

• "Dev is based" means the anonymous creator hasn't stolen funds yet

• "Community takeover" means the original scammer left and new scammers arrived

• "Diamond hands" and "HODL" become ironic, because everyone knows everyone will dump

• "We're all going to make it" (WAGMI) said with full knowledge most won't

This isn't cynicism , it’s something stranger: sincere participation in acknowledged meaninglessness.

Traders form genuine communities around tokens they know are worthless, creating real social bonds through shared recognition of participating in nothing.

This isn't depression but liberation. Freed from maintaining value's pretense, traders can engage in pure play. The casino admits it's a casino, the players admit they're gambling, and somehow this transparency creates its own meaning.

Memecoins won by abandoning the fight for legitimacy. While Bitcoin argues about digital gold and Ethereum positions as world computer, memecoins say: we are nothing, we represent nothing, we promise nothing, and that's exactly the point.

This victory is complete. Market cap rankings include obvious jokes, serious projects launch with meme aesthetics, and traditional finance creates memecoin ETFs. Every new chain invests, time, money, and resources into fostering a “meme” environment.

The simulation absorbs its own parody.

In memecoins, Baudrillard's prophecy reaches fulfillment. These aren't failed currencies or corrupted investments but successful pure simulacra. Signs refer only to themselves, value exists only as collective hallucination, meaning consists entirely of its own absence.

The terminal phase isn't collapse but proliferation. New memecoins launch faster than humans can process. Attention becomes the only scarcity. The market doesn't discover price but creates it out of thin air through coordinated button-pressing.

We've built the perfect machine for manufacturing value from void, and everyone involved understands exactly how beautiful and terrible this achievement is. Everyone who is paying attention, and has the means to see this game for what it is, at least.

The joke is complete: we created decentralized systems to escape traditional finance's arbitrary value creation, only to discover we wanted arbitrary value creation all along. We just wanted it faster, more transparent, and with better memes. In the end, memecoins aren't cryptocurrency's failure but its climax: money freed from the burden of pretending to be anything other than collective belief crystallized into tradeable form.

Cryptocurrency's descent into pure simulacra might seem like a departure from "legitimate" finance, but this narrative misunderstands both. Traditional finance has been trafficking in simulacra for decades, crypto simply removed the veneer of respectability. The difference isn't between real and fake value, but between concealed and admitted meaninglessness.

Tesla trades at valuations that assume every human will own multiple electric vehicles while colonizing Mars.

The stock price detached from any reasonable projection of future cash flows long ago, becoming instead a referendum on Elon Musk's Twitter presence.

Investors aren't buying shares in a car company, they're buying participation in a narrative about the future, a narrative that exists primarily in the collective imagination of other investors.

This isn't unique to Tesla. The entire equity market has undergone what we might call "memeification." GameStop's squeeze revealed this perfectly: a dying retailer became a rallying cry, its stock price a weapon against hedge funds rather than a reflection of business fundamentals. The apes of r/wallstreetbets understood something the financial establishment pretended not to know: stock prices are coordination games, not value discoveries.

If stocks are simulacra of company ownership, derivatives are simulacra of simulacra. The notional value of derivatives markets exceeds global GDP by orders of magnitude. We're betting amounts that exceed all possible real economic activity.

A credit default swap on a mortgage-backed security backed by subprime loans represents at least four layers of abstraction from anything in the real world. You're betting on the performance of a bet on the performance of loans that were fraudulent from the beginning.

When these instruments collapsed in 2008, it wasn't because reality reasserted itself, it was because one layer of simulation failed to maintain suspension of disbelief.

The recovery from 2008 didn't involve returning to fundamental value but adding more layers of abstraction. Central banks created trillions in new money, itself a simulacrum, to purchase these derivative products, placing fictional instruments on fictional balance sheets funded by fictional reserves. The solution to a crisis of simulation was more simulation.

Corporate earnings undergo similar transformation. Non-GAAP earnings, adjusted EBITDA, "community-adjusted" metrics, and tricks more complex than we have time to cover.

Companies report numbers that exclude any inconvenient reality.

WeWork wasn't a real estate company losing billions but a "technology platform" with "community-adjusted EBITDA" that somehow excluded the cost of their core business. The simulacra was so complete that it achieved a $47 billion valuation before anyone noticed the emperor's nudity.

Traditional finance maintains its distinction from crypto through what we might call respectability arbitrage. A pension fund investing in complex derivatives backed by student loans appears responsible. A retail investor buying Dogecoin appears foolish. Both participate in elaborate fictions about value, the only difference being institutional blessing and temporal duration.

This respectability shield is cracking. When the Federal Reserve's balance sheet expands by trillions to purchase corporate bonds, when zombie companies survive solely through constant refinancing, when SPACs raise billions for companies that don't exist to make acquisitions they haven't identified, how exactly is this more legitimate than trading pictures of apes?

The traditional financial system's great achievement was hiding its nature as simulacra behind complexity, jargon, and institutional reputation. Cryptocurrency's innovation was making the simulation explicit.

A memecoin that dies in five minutes is more honest than a CDO-squared that takes two years to collapse. Both are worthless, but only one admits it upfront.

We're witnessing the convergence of all financial markets toward acknowledged simulacra. Traditional finance adds meme dynamics: retail coordination, narrative trading, momentum over fundamentals. Crypto adds traditional structures: ETFs, options, institutional custody. They meet in the middle: equally fictional, differentiated only by speed and self-awareness.

The question isn't whether your retirement account filled with index funds is more "real" than someone's Solana memecoin portfolio. Both represent claims on collective fictions, valued through circular logic, sustained by mutual agreement to pretend. The only difference is that crypto traders have dropped the pretense, achieving a kind of nihilistic clarity that traditional finance still resists.

In the end, the emergence of memecoins doesn't represent finance's degradation but its unveiling. They're the market's moment of self-recognition, the point where it sees its own reflection and laughs. Every trade in $PEPE is functionally identical to every trade in Tesla: speculation on collective belief about collective belief.

The joke isn't that memecoins have no value. The joke is that nothing has value in the way we pretend it does, and crypto simply made this punchline explicit.

The emperor hasn't acquired new clothes, he's started an OnlyFans.

We stand at a peculiar moment in human history. For the first time, we've built economic systems that openly acknowledge their own emptiness. Memecoins don't hide their meaninglessness, they celebrate it.

This isn't the failure of money but perhaps its final honesty. After millennia of pretending that colored paper, metal discs, or digital entries have intrinsic worth, we've created currencies that admit the joke.

I mean, shit, this tweet pissed me off so much at the time. Now I think he was right.

So what is "value" in this post-meaning economy?

Value has become pure coordination. It is the ability to predict and participate in collective attention movements.

A token worth $100 million one hour and $0 the next hasn't failed, it has successfully facilitated a coordination game among thousands of participants.

The value was never in the token but in the shared experience of watching numbers change together, of belonging to a temporary tribe united by nothing more than simultaneous button-pressing.

This represents a profound shift. Traditional concepts of value relied on at least the pretense of underlying utility: gold's industrial uses, companies' productive capacity, currencies' nation-state backing. Now value exists as pure social phenomenon, openly acknowledged as such. We've returned to something primal: value as collective belief, without the obfuscations of traditional fiat systems.

There's something unexpectedly liberating in this acknowledgment. Once you accept that all value is essentially arbitrary, that the dollar in your pocket is no more "real" than Dogecoin, certain anxieties dissolve. The desperate search for fundamental value, for the "true" worth of assets, reveals itself as a category error. There is no bedrock; it's simulacra all the way down.

This liberation manifests in the behavior of memecoin communities. Freed from pretending their tokens represent anything, they create genuine human connections through shared absurdity. The social bonds formed in a Telegram group collectively pumping a meaningless token are no less real for the token's emptiness.

If anything, the honesty strengthens them. We’re here together, doing something pointless, and that shared pointlessness becomes its own point.

Young traders who've grown up in this environment display a fascinating relationship with nihilism. They're not depressed by meaninglessness but energized by it. If nothing has inherent value, then value can be created anywhere, anytime, through collective will alone.

This isn't the nihilism of despair but of possibility. It is a blank canvas where value can be painted and erased at will.

What comes after pure simulacra? The question assumes there's somewhere else to go, some further stage of abstraction to reach. But perhaps we've arrived at the terminal point, not because we can't abstract further, but because we've achieved complete transparency about the nature of abstraction itself.

The trajectory from Bitcoin to memecoins represents a kind of enlightenment speedrun. What took traditional finance centuries to obscure, crypto revealed in less than two decades. We've reached the end not of money but of money's ability to hide its own nature.

Yet markets continue. People still trade, value still circulates, fortunes are still made and lost. The revelation of meaninglessness didn't end the game, it just changed the rules. Or rather, it revealed that the rules were always what we collectively agreed they were.

The simulation doesn't need to pretend to be real anymore because we've discovered that "real" was always just a particularly convincing simulation.

Viewing this through a doomer lens misses something crucial. Yes, we've built elaborate systems for trading nothing, but we've always been trading nothing. The innovation is admitting it. This isn't the end of finance, this is finance maturing.

This is the moment we stop telling ourselves bedtime stories about intrinsic value and face the beautiful, terrible freedom of acknowledged construction.

Consider what this recognition enables. If value is purely consensus, then consensus can be manufactured anywhere. Communities can bootstrap economies from nothing, create wealth through coordination, establish parallel financial systems with game-like ease. The democratization isn't just of access but of value creation itself.

Any group, anywhere, can declare something valuable and, through collective belief, make it so.

This terrifies traditional power structures precisely because it's so liberating. When teenagers can create multimillion-dollar markets in afternoon jokes, when anonymous developers can summon millions in liquidity through Discord servers, when value flows to whatever captures attention regardless of institutional blessing, the old gates have fallen.

We're witnessing not economic catastrophe but the catastrophe of old economic thinking.

The deepest paradox is that acknowledging meaninglessness creates its own meaning. Memecoin communities aren't nihilistic voids but vibrant social spaces. The traders who know they're buying nothing form real friendships, experience genuine emotions, build actual wealth (however temporarily). The simulation, fully acknowledged as simulation, generates authentic human experience.

This points toward a new form of economic existentialism. Like Camus's Sisyphus (not 0xSisyphus lol), we must imagine the memecoin trader happy. They push their boulder (buy their token) up the hill knowing it will roll back down, finding meaning not in the destination but in the act itself.

The absurdity is not a bug. It is the feature that makes the whole system honest.

We are living through an apocalypse in its original sense: a revelation. The veils between value and void have dropped. What's revealed isn't pretty by traditional standards but possesses its own beauty. We've built the most sophisticated technologies in human history to trade self-acknowledged nothingness.

If that's not a kind of twisted achievement, what is?

The future isn't a return to "real" value. That ship has sailed and NFT'd its own image. Nor is it the collapse of all economic activity. Humans will always find ways to coordinate, compete, and create hierarchies.

The future is learning to live with radical transparency about value's constructed nature, building new forms of meaning on the explicit foundation of meaninglessness.

In the end, maybe Baudrillard was too pessimistic. He saw simulation as trap, hyperreality as prison. But what if it's playground? What if the revelation that everything is simulacra isn't humanity's defeat but its next stage?

Maybe this is the moment we stop searching for bedrock and learn to dance on air.

The memecoins aren't laughing at us. They're laughing with us, at the cosmic joke of value itself. And maybe, just maybe, getting the joke is the first step toward transcending it, not by finding "real" value but by creating meaning in the midst of acknowledged meaninglessness.

The simulation hasn't failed. It has become self-aware. And in that self-awareness lies either our doom or our liberation. The choice, as always, is ours.

WAGMI, or won't we?