he was obsessed with why religion was invented.

his answer: religion is the original crowd control technology. the first consensus engine. every ancient society ran one, because every ancient society had the same bug.

the bug is us. he gave it a name — mimetic desire.

the problem with consensus

people don’t want things because they’re good. they want things because other people want them. desire is copy-paste.

same watch. same girl. same house.

the bible is his proof. ten commandments: nine ban actions. the tenth bans a feeling. thou shall not covet what your neighbor has.

not “don’t take.” don’t WANT.

whoever wrote that understood that theft is downstream. the covet is the source.

and mimetic desire ends in violence.

the fix (the original one)

dump it all on one guy.

the scapegoat. everyone agrees: HIM. he’s the problem. kill him or run him off, and — peace. actual peace, overnight.

it felt like a miracle, so they made the victim sacred and ran the miracle on a schedule. with a goat.

that’s religion, the social consensus machine for ending the pressure before the pressure ends you.

the past: money that replaced god

in 1982, two of girard’s students — economists aglietta & orléan — said money took over religion’s job.

instead of wanting YOUR watch, your girl, your house, we all agreed to chase one neutral thing: money.

i don’t rob you. i outearn you.

and money can hold the job because money is built like a god: real because everybody believes everybody believes. a belief held by one person is a delusion. held by everyone, it’s a religion.

my (and this publication’s) claim goes further: every economy is anchored to some form of external consensus, like attention. gold. USA.

the present: the crisis

economy replaced religion. money replaced god.

but money inherited religion’s function WITHOUT its pressure release valve.

no sabbath, no jubilee, no ending. the market runs and the currencies limp.

and pressure with no valve finds one.

watch any crash: the crowd converges on one name. do kwon. SBF. zhu su — HE’S the problem with crypto.

do kwon got fifteen years. that is accountability. it is not the same thing as settling terra’s victims.

the violence of a bad market made the punishment of villains feel like the settlement of victims.

the future: death, for the lack of a better word, is good

girard said the bible is the first story told from the POV of the victim.

the social consensus was wrong; the victim was innocent. hence the group loses its alibi; forced to confront itself and believe something better, or find a new victim.

history mostly picked a new victim, but knowledge is power!

that is christianity’s upgrade: the crowd can reach perfect consensus and still be wrong. once you know that, sacrifice can no longer pass for settlement.

the market can die. the believers don’t have to.

give the machine its endings back

money should be social, and fun. a game is only fun when the rules are upfront and agreed upon.

the old world had this figured out: a rest day every seven days. debt release every seven years. jubilee every fifty. the calendar was the technology. we kept their god and threw away their calendar.

the goal is to design markets that die and believers who don’t.

mimetic is how desire copies from person to person. memetic is how markets move money through viral wanting.

call it memenomics.

PvP: how can you?

the game is making money & the fun is flexing. git good or you won’t have safety, status, sex.

trading. the crudest form of pvp. redistribution of existing value. gordon gekko, 1987: “money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred — from one perception to another.” he named the game. next one buys in. numbers go up.

making a business. creating value. youd think this is PvE, but capital is pvp. you need the next investor so your valuation goes up. the game is convincing people on some vanity metric — DAU, or “ARR” you & your YC bromates pay each other

PvP answers “how can you?” with tradable attention: price + n+1, a number that go up as more people join

PvE: who are you?

the other mode is you against entropy

selfmaxxing. communitymaxxing. meaningmaxxing. the room that knows your name

no opponent. no numbers. & none of it can be bought or sold — you show up & let the world and others record that you did

PvE answers “who are you?” the untradable self: the who that stays when no numbers exist

crypto and winning capitalism

crypto is interesting because it tries to compress meaning & money into one object. the coin is the membership. the self is the coin. one ticker answering both questions at once.

it’s the first financial instrument that tries to BE a self

but it’s more interesting to imagine some distant future where the belief finally separates from the bag: when we hear about “bitcoiners” who don’t hold bitcoin, worshiping satoshi as a he-who-never-sold god.

the law is in the essay about america: the self cannot be bought — you just had to be there. nobody minted pokémon people. veterans are veterans. your childhood memories can’t be sold

so a self tied to a number is, by definition, not a real self. we’ve established that all economies are born to die. when the number go down — all numbers die — the fake self dies with the chart. real selves don’t get margin called

post-capitalism and designing better games

the mistake isn’t pvp. number go up is a great game!

post-capitalism is looking a lot more Star Trek than Star Wars

more people will start enjoying the game once they adopt the abundance mindset: money, just like food, should be fun and enjoyed

i think the mistake is expecting money to be both the score & the player

because games are fun even when you lose, when the rules are explicit and agreed upon

so post-capitalism game design needs laid out rules:

tradable attention for pvp — infinite economies born to die, with ending printed on the ticket
the untradable self for pve — free, unbuyable, unaffected by numbers

memenomics (this publication) is the field of study to design such games

economy = demand + rules + identity.

america is just the biggest instance ever run:

demand. millions of businesses inside one container, anyone free to start one.

rules. infrastructure backed by the least mutable laws.

identity. who you are across time, stamped.

build one term & you have a product. two & you have a market. only all three make an economy, because each holds up the next:

the united states > the dollar > the americans.

the world above the money, the money above the member. the internet keeps collapsing all three into one number — a ticker, a floor price, a follower count — & one number can't be a country.

what most gets wrong: the price & the flag must never be the same object.

the united states = demand

america is millions of economies inside one container — every diner, every startup, every gold rush. & they die constantly: half of all businesses are dead within five years. nobody calls america a rug when a restaurant closes.

that's the design. the container expects its economies to die; every death releases people, money & lessons for the next one to pick up.

online, same rule: let anyone start an economy inside your world — a shop, an app, a token — & design for the deaths, not against them.

demand: let anyone start, and die, gracefully.

the dollar = rules

when a business dies, you don't get beheaded for failing. your restaurant failed; your dollars still work. the agreed-upon rules are what back the people creating demand. think Shopify, App Store, token launchpads.

& the agreement is more than the currency. in 1971 the dollar dropped gold entirely — & kept working. the backing was never the metal; it was the laws & the courts — the least mutable things the country had. the reserve was credibility all along.

rules: the container still standing when demand dies.

the americans = identity

the top layer is the one nobody can print: identity must be free — & it levels.

what costs nothing to hold can't be margin-called — that's why being american survives depressions, wars, & every failure inside the container.

& it levels, because identity is witnessed history: the stories, the ideals, the beliefs. immigrant, citizen, veteran, founder — you don't buy the next rank. you live it, you become it, & history remembers. nobody minted pokémon people either; they spent a childhood in that world. you can sell every card you own & still be one. identity is who you are in a world, on the record. a receipt can be faked. having lived can't.

this is the layer the internet keeps selling by mistake. "i am my ape" made an asset do the job of belonging — so when the price fell, the identity took the loss & belonging became bagholding.

identity: free to hold, impossible to buy, you just had to be there.

building the next online economies

economy = demand + rules + identity.

nobody has run the full equation online. steam came closest — one wallet, thousands of game economies — but nobody is "a steam citizen." the wallet works; the flag is missing. that gap has been open for twenty years.

so that's the plan, all three at once: economies free to start & die. rules still standing at every funeral. & an identity you can't buy & can't lose to a chart — only progress, by being there when it happened.

the united states started as thirteen colonies & a currency nobody trusted. this one starts with one game & a group chat.

same equation: honest deaths, credible money, & a flag that flies for free.

if you think the news is fake, imagine history.

so if the good guys never actually saved us — who did?

the third god

mold blew through an open window while the scientist was on vacation — that’s penicillin.

1962: four soviet submarines, & on exactly one of them launching the nuclear torpedo required a third signature. the man holding it — vasili arkhipov, exhausted, half-suffocating, having a genuinely terrible day — said no.

in cloud atlas, a lawyer being slowly poisoned for his money is saved by the stowaway slave he helped free — he becomes an abolitionist. then the climax: “what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”

what do these have in common? nothing heroic. that’s the point.

randomness is a sad troll with a grin. it hands out tired men & open windows, & the world gets saved by ordinary people who weren’t trying to save anything, choosing right at the wrong time.

in other words: the world is saved by retards like you and I.

retards choosing right over wrong 51% of the time is what saved us.

& maybe it was intended this way — we evolved (or were made in the image of some God) this way so we couldn’t finish destroying ourselves. deus ex ends there. the hero blows up the tower of the great men & says: “So now, I’m leaving the future up to ordinary men and women to decide.”

third god = exit

randomness is the exit. it prevents any system—good, evil, political, ideological—from becoming perfectly closed.

when you can’t win inside a system, can’t vote it better, can’t out-argue whoever holds the pen — somebody leaves & starts a new one.

the usa is an exit: thirteen colonies that couldn’t win inside the empire. & the fix for slavery didn’t come from inside either party — the whigs collapsed, a brand-new party got created in a wisconsin schoolhouse, & six years later its first president won.

every closed system bans the exit first. the berlin wall wasn’t built to keep enemies out.

& notice who builds the walls: both of the first two gods — whoever is winning imposes the status quo, & the status quo never includes a door. the world is saved by exit, & exit is only possible because of randomness. the first two gods build walls. the third god is the door.

you can only connect the dots looking backwards

steve jobs, stanford, 2005. a dropout wanders into a calligraphy class for zero career reasons; ten years later it’s the typography of the macintosh. the dots never connect looking forward. only in the rearview.

everything you ever did — every act of kindness and evil, every decision of good and bad, everything that made no sense at the time — is somehow connected and bound to others.

randomness takes care of itself

often earlier than you expect and later than you hope.

the only sin

camus stared at this exact universe & called it the absurd.

but he ends the book insisting sisyphus, owner of the most pointless job in mythology, must be imagined happy.

everything everywhere all at once. the bagel says nothing matters. Waymond says: I choose kindness either way.

the only sin in an absurd world is to give up

you are one in a quadrillion branching accidents. every decision you’ve ever made compounded into the miracle that is YOU.

because you are perfect in the absurd way the third God intended.

maybe nobody saw your years of good work, your act of kindness, your not giving up. it gets unnoticed.

but that’s the entire lesson of the tired man on the submarine: unwitnessed acts compound anyway. you’re not performing for the good god’s scoreboard or the bad god’s — those get rewritten by whoever wins. every dot you make is deposited with the only chaotic God who trolls you but never edits the ledger.

wasting the randomness that made you YOU is the only mortal sin.

believe

believe in randomness.

not “try your luck at the casino” believe. really believe: do the work, & randomness will take care of itself — sooner or later, earlier than you expect, later than you hope.

call it fate. call it karma. (i prefer randomness, or retardmaxxing, because it implies the correct amount of absurdity.)

because here’s the whole essay in one line: the world was never saved by the good guys. the world is saved by retards — ordinary people choosing right at the wrong time

arkhipov didn’t feel like a hero; he felt like shit. fleming was on vacation. Steve Jobs was a dropout doodling letters. none of them knew what they were doing. you don’t get to know either. you can’t see the consequences of your actions in real time — maybe not even in your lifetime.

a creature born in winter, living less than one season, can only infer summer: belief in a real thing it will never personally witness. that’s what believing in randomness is. plenty of us were born in winter. summer is real anyway.

do you want to live in a world where being born in winter stops you from dreaming of summer?

when a good person asks, do you believe in God? just reply, no, because I believe in you.

anyways: retardmaxx & believe. CHOOSE retard over math.

do the work. be nice. never give up. you are perfect

(we are math people here. people are double paying, once for food and once for ozempic, when they could’ve just… not eat? very economist joke)

to be fair — this is a US-first phenomenon, and only because FOOD IS NOW IN ABUNDANCE.

abundance and status

I eat the same food everyday. 2 acai bowl, 2 oatmeal, 5 collosal shrimp and 7 coffee. food is a solved problem for me, so I torture myself for fun.

but for most of history it was THE unsolved problem.

for ten thousand years calories were scarce, so fat was wealth. kings were fat, peasants were thin, and painters painted soft round bodies. you paint what’s expensive.

monopoly man has that belly because in 1936, that’s what rich looked like.

then abundance (and McDonald’s) flipped everything. calories got cheap.

thin became the flex, because thin was what still cost something — time, discipline, a trainer. scarcity doesn’t disappear. it migrates, and status follows it.

now ozempic deleted even that struggle.

so what’s left of food, after survival and status exit?

post-capitalism

the future is starting to look a lot more like Star Trek than Star Wars.

AI and robotics are about to do to wealth what industrial farming did to calories. agents that run your business, farm yields, and exit trades optimally while you sleep.

when money can be farmed, it proves nothing about you. a rich guy in a ferrari will be what a double chin was to a 1730 peasant.

ozempic for money

here’s the thesis: there will be ozempic for money.

when the struggle goes, the meaning goes with it. having a lot of money won’t be cool — the same way being fat stopped being cool the moment calories got cheap.

money is mid-arc. money in 2026 is food in 1900.

food is fun; so should money

right now, nothing about money is fun. working isn’t fun. trading isn’t fun. even gambling isn’t fun: a casino needs you to misread your odds to enjoy yourself.

there’s a field for fixing this (this publication) — memenomics, the study of liminal economies: economies born to die. every economy ends anyway; the rug is never the ending, the rug is the lie about the ending.

musical chairs is a market every five-year-old understands, and knowing the music stops doesn’t ruin the game — it IS the game.

games are fun even when you lose, because the constraints are explicit and agreed upon.

after ozempic, the best thing left to do with food is share a meal.

after the ozempic for money, the best thing left to do with money is play.

make money fun — making or losing. that’s the whole job.

(btw steam approved my anti-capitalist capitalist game that will somehow piss off the communists. wishlist it here)

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)