tl;dr: When reality is increasingly subjective and filtered, belief takes over.
There was an Op-Ed in the Wall St. Journal the other day called Biden and Nothingness: Costless spending, the ‘closed’ border and other manufactured alternative realities.
If you are super pro-Biden, you’d hate it and if you hate Biden, you’ll love it, but the point of this post isn’t to be political.
It’s just to say that I found a lot of what was presented in the Op-Ed to resonate.
Of course, Biden is just taking the ball that has handed to him by Trump and continuing it.
The President of the USA is just the most obvious example of what is going on in society, as well all get increasingly narrow in our perceptions of “reality” by virtue of the fact that the 50 year transition from the proverbial 3 channels (ABC, CBS, NBC) to the 300 billion channels is upon us with full force.
That’s why it’s no surprise that, as I shared recently when it comes to the Nouns DAO, we have entered what Harry Jones calls “The Meme Economy.“
I probably need to read it all again to understand better what the components of it are, but the key takeaway is a quote from the VC godfather, Fred Wilson, who writes in Meme Investing
Memes are fun and memes are also something to come together around. Speculating on the popularity of memes and their staying power is no different than any other form of speculation… I’ve decided that I am going to stop ignoring and dismissing meme investing and start trying to understand it better. I think it is not something that is going away anytime soon and may turn into something even more interesting.
It’s probably why You Aren’t Bullish Enough on NFTs and why the NFT demand marketplaces (and networks like Unique) will thrive in this era.
While I haven’t outright dismissed memes as an investing strategy, I haven’t taken them as seriously as I probably should have and, like Fred (this is where the similarity ends), I need to do more of a deep dive to understand it.
Whether we like it or not, the post-truth world is here (and when I say that, I mean ‘a dominant narrative that most people just accept), which means our individual realities are going to take front and center stage.
We can lament this for what it does to society or we can recognize that this is a tectonic shift and accept it.
We can be sad that the earthquake happened but it doesn’t change the fact that there’s a ravine there today where there wasn’t one yesterday.
That rift has opened up a new world where Memes can dominate.
With a slight tip of the hat (very slight) to Karl Marx, the next economy will be owned by those who control the Memes of Production.
