Meme magic and the animation of crypto capital

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• the Robert Schuman Centre Seminar Series

Join Annaliese Milano Merfield as she explores how memes shape belief, secrecy, and value in the cryptocurrency world

During the Great Meme War of the 2016 American presidential election, users of the controversial imageboard 4chan produced viral pro-Trump memes, which, some commentators argued, influenced the election outcome by acting as visual vehicles for conspiracy theories. Since then, scholars have regarded memes as a potentially dangerous media form contributing to the rise of the alt-right. Recent studies on the cryptocurrency community have similarly suggested that crypto's meme culture reflects right-wing or even fascist sympathies.

In this seminar, Dr. Annaliese Milano Merfield draws on two years of ethnographic research with the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities to offer a different interpretation of the memes used in both the Great Meme War and the crypto community. This perspective focuses on the agency memes appear to embody and their role in creating a spectacle of secrecy and disclosure, challenging the contours of the social order. Merfield argues that 'crypto people' are social constructionists who view memes as scaffolding belief—the process of ‘enchantment’—which underlies the social construction of value. For the crypto community, memes, in essence, animate capital.