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Behind every beautiful degen project there is a little ember of genius. Most of the time, these embers are better off buried below the surface… a subtle truth embedded in the core of a project that brings everything else to life. But I wanted to (fittingly) break that pattern with nothing, and bring the essence of what started this project to light. I think it will add depth and colour for the ones who are really listening. I’m starting to write this this 6 hours before launch to keep things as raw as possible.

In theatre, there are 4 walls. The three walls that the audience can see, and then the fourth - the invisible barrier between you and the audience. An energetic line not to be crossed. People can go to hundreds of shows with that invisible wall remaining intact… until one day a performance decides to break the fourth wall. To shatter the barrier between the audience and the stage. To address audience members by name, to run through through the aisles, and to scream onstage about how much of a pain in the ass the director is. In essence, they shake shit up.

Memecoins and nft’s broke the fourth wall of capitalism. They let the world peek behind the cogs of the global financial system, and quickly discover a bunch of pepes and apes saying “poompa” and pulling random levers. All at once, the systems that governed our world began to look far less sophisticated than they posture to be. The scaffolding that the mind has constructed can collapse in an instant if poked in the right spot. Memecoins delivered that poke. They stripped our financial systems down to their rawest, most primal truths. They were the actor jumping off the stage and inviting everyone into the show… into the clusterfuck that it is to be human. Memecoins and NFT’s broke the “professional” barrier that we had attributed to trading and financial markets in a way that said “Don’t you see it? It’s all just one big game. Always has been.”

I think it led everyone in the space to reconsider what value actually means at it’s core. I’ve had people laugh and look down at me for saying that I work in memecoins and NFT’s. I always laugh with them. But memecoins are powered by the same thing that powers literally everything else in our world… they are just a far more raw look into market dynamics. We all do mental acrobatics to justify our viewpoints as being the most sober and objective. We unknowingly close ourselves off to truths because they don’t fit with our worldview.

Hating on memecoins is the same thing as the classical theatre purist saying that “the actors shouldn’t address the audience” or the 90’s hip hop head talking about how “they hate autotune” or how “music isn’t what it used to be”. The cycle of people breaking the chains of conformity is as old as humanity itself. It is that same energy that leads us to continuously advance forward. For culture to remain ever-changing and interesting. Apple’s “think different” slogan appealed to creatives everywhere because that’s really what this whole journey of life is all about. Listening for, and standing in your truth, and not in the echoes of the truths around you or before you.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the fourth wall as an analogy to life. How many arbitrary constraints do we put on ourselves as we go through this world? In childhood, we assemble a semblance of our identity… typically just by ricocheting off of what we think other people’s perceptions of us are. By the time we reach adulthood, we’re kind of just handed this condensed operating system of an identity by our younger selves. This identity brings us comfort and stability, but it also boxes us in. Before long, most of us start to forget that the walls of our identity are simply constraints that we constructed when we were too young to know any better.

It takes something remarkable to shake up those constraints. To realize that you can step out of the box that you had created for yourself. To proactively partake in the world and to come online again. To break your own fourth wall. Memecoins were just that. A crack in the seams. A ripple in the act that before long, had the whole stage coming down with it.

Nothing is digital hot air. It’s an encapsulation of all of this. Unironically laying bare the linkage that has always been there between degeneracy and philosophy and art and capitalism and technology. It’s not even a middle finger to the system… it’s frolicking naked through the system and shitting memes out everywhere, dying of laughter in process. It is a different flavour of anarchy. In fact, it’s what anarchy should actually feel like. Something so fun, and so intuitive, that serves as such a cathartic relief, that you join in simply because it’s the more human thing to do. Laughter, playfulness, coming back online to the fact that we’re all just kids posturing as adults, and we’re all just doing the best we can to figure it out. That’s what nothing is about.

We’ve built a lot of very ridiculous systems on top of each other and taken ourselves far too seriously for far too long. Shitcoins are not the deepest layer of excrement from the asshole of society… well they kind of are tbh… but that excrement is also the fertilizer for planting the seed of a new perspective.