There used to be an honorable way to try to profit from online infamy: selling nearly worthless memecoins. The machines could take it over.
I’m not afraid to admit it, right here in the newspaper: It finally happened to me. I saw an A.I. video, and I thought — if that’s the right word — it was real. It showed a guy standing on a street corner somewhere in Europe, with an insane haircut and a houndstooth suit, shadowboxing while a French rap song played in the background. In his misplaced confidence and swagger, he called to mind a protomemetic figure from my youth, Napoleon Dynamite.
This was Jean Phil, someone who — as far as anyone can tell — doesn’t exist. Has never existed. Was conjured from a bunch of NVIDIA chips in a low-slung building outside of Kenosha.
I didn’t think I had to ask myself if it was real. There’s this white rapper who’s short and wears a Lord Farquaad hairdo, and has made a name for himself on Instagram from this fact alone. Jean Phil seemed to me like a European analog. His haircut was nearly identical to that of the Dutch Boy Paints mascot. I assumed there was some guy out there; I figured he was Dutch. (To whatever extent a statement like this can be true: Jean Phil is, in fact, French.)
The internet abounds with people like this, who go all-in on one thing in some way that leads to online notoriety, often on terms different from those they expected. Perhaps they thought sharing their likeness on the internet would lead them to find community. Instead it leads to them being mocked, pathologized, judged. I assumed Jean Phil was a victim (or beneficiary) of this cruel tendency on the internet.
Then things took an interesting turn. Once Jean Phil was sufficiently viral, it came out that his Instagram page linked to a memecoin, $JEANPHIL. A memecoin is a form of cryptocurrency that is more transparently pointless and speculative than the other forms of cryptocurrency. They’re tradable assets, typically worth fractions of a cent, named for (and in some vague sense, indexed to the value of) internet memes. There are millions of them.
If you get in on the right one early and the price starts moving up — from some combination of awareness of the meme and self-fulfilling market momentum as everyone tries to ride the upswing — you can make a quick buck selling your coins to the even dumber money. According to a recent study by Coin Metrics, the typical memecoin reaches its all-time high soon after being issued and is essentially worthless within the space of a year.