ever felt like something about the current world is just...off?

nothing in this publication will be new to you. that’s a promise, you’ve already felt everything i’m about to say, in your bank account & group chats. what you haven’t had is the words. this field is esoteric in the old sense: it names what you already know from the inside.

the old field stops one step early

in 1637 a tulip bulb bought a house on an amsterdam canal. in 2021 a dog picture was briefly worth more than ford.

a story became a price. the price becomes THE story.

economists noticed stories move markets & called it narrative economics. handed out a nobel for it. true, useful — & it treats the whole thing like weather. something that happens to markets. an act of god with a bloomberg terminal.

wrong posture. everything i know about this i learned twice — once as a brainrot kid watching mrbeast, once reading economics. the kid version was more rigorous. because the mrbeast school teaches two theorems no textbook has caught up to: attention is engineering, not weather. & attention recruits — which is why it’s easier to make one video with 500 million views than 500 videos with a million. attention compounds. it wants to concentrate. the nobel committee needed a prize to discover what twelve-year-olds learned from a thumbnail.

& the recruiting part is the half the old field is missing entirely:

attention doesn’t just convert into a price. the price recruits.

you’ve seen the proof on your own timeline. why does a grown man with 2 followers post a new ticker every hour? he’s not confused. he’s a sales force of one, & the bags are his inventory — telling you about the coin is how the coin goes up. nobody does this for index funds. no one has ever put the s&p in their bio.

so why do you screenshot the gain? same reason. the flex is the funnel. every holder is a distributor. gold rushes ran this exact loop by mail — the price of a claim traveled home in letters, & the letters recruited the next wagon.

here’s the whole machine in five characters:

tradable attention = price + n+1

attention with a price on it, plus a built-in reason for person n to recruit person n+1. once both parts exist, attention itself is an asset. every machine i write about is built on that primitive.

the bad version (you’re soaking in it)

now the part that stings. all economies are liminal — temporary, bounded in time, every single one, always have been. every currency in every museum was once somebody’s forever.

so an economy claiming no end date has a problem, & it’s plumbing, not morality: a story with no settlement date has no honest source of exit money. if an economy can’t end, early exits get paid by late entries. that’s the entire mechanism. you already know the word for it.

luna was the word wearing a lab coat. a crypto “savings account” paying 20% a year, forever, on a “stable” dollar. the 20% wasn’t produced by anything — it was the marketing budget, paid to yesterday’s depositors to attract tomorrow’s. the yield was the ad. which means every new deposit had one real job: keeping the forever-story warm for the deposits already inside. the day new money slowed, the machine ran in reverse, & forever unwound in about a week. $45 billion.

& before anyone feels superior: a national currency is the same bet at civilizational scale, just slower — a forever-story defended by printing presses, good exactly as long as belief is. the coin section of any museum is a graveyard of forevers.

memecoins? memecoins aren’t a new species. they’re the oldest thing in economics at 1000x playback speed — the full arc of a currency, birth to mania to collapse, compressed from three centuries into a weekend. watch one die & respawn under a new ticker the same afternoon & tell me you don’t hear agent smith: you multiply until every resource is consumed, & the only way to survive is to spread to another area. he thought he was describing humans. he was describing an economy with no death date. it can’t end honestly — so it can only metastasize.

one more naming, the most important one:

the rug is never the ending. everything ends. the rug is the lie about the ending.

the good version (the field)

quick test. people hate sports betting. they side-eye options traders. they call prediction markets degenerate.

but nobody calls them a rug. why?

sit with that. the most morally suspect markets we have are the most structurally trusted — because the ending is printed on the ticket. the final whistle, the expiry date, the resolution. disliked, but never betrayed. meanwhile the word “rug” lives exclusively in the land of things that promised forever.

that’s the entire field, hiding in your own instincts. you already trust endings. you just never noticed.

so flip the shame: if every economy is born to die anyway, stop pretending. put the death date on the front door. design the ending like it’s the product — because it is. this used to be the normal: the medieval fairs that cleared europe’s money were scheduled events. the bible put debt resets on a calendar. today the knowledge survives in the corners we don’t take seriously — game economies deleted every three months while the players cheer, fashion dying every season & outliving every empire that sneered at it.

memenomics: the study & design of economies born to die — gracefully. declared endings. published odds. settlement in public. & a death that leaves everyone holding something: a payout, a trophy, a story.

the fuel

old economies ran on land, oil, steel. these run on attention. & the physics are not transferable:

attention is not oil. oil persists. attention perishes.

you can store oil for a decade. attention rots in an afternoon. an economy running on perishable fuel cannot be permanent — permanence isn’t on the menu. the only choice an attention economy actually gets is whether to admit it.

ai turns the observation into a deadline. when machines make infinite content, attention is the last scarce input on earth — the drilling is the scrolling — & economies will form around anything that can synchronize it, born & dying at whatever speed the culture swipes.

& here’s the prediction i most want to be graded on: ai agents kill the greater fool. the greater fool theory requires a fool — someone who holds too long, copes, hopes, buys the top because the chart felt inevitable. agents don’t cope. they exit optimally, every time, at machine speed. when half the market is agents, the ponzi-shaped economy starves — no late entries left to pay the early exits. the only economies that survive that era are the liminal ones: declared endings that settle in premiums only mortals care about. status. story. having-been-there. a machine can price anything except what it was like to be there.

the past knew how. the present forgot. the future can’t afford to.

what this is

this publication is my field notes — written as i research, build & design the past, present & future of economies born to die.

(gracefully, with a bang, in a sea of like follow subscribe)