The AI ​​Meme craze is a worship of science and a pursuit of a new monetary system

Author: Alex Good Compiler: Yangz, Techub News

What is AI memecoin?

If ordinary memecoins are likened to the flu, then AI memecoins are Covid 19. They come from the laboratory and have strong vitality without spreading through the population and mutating. The inherent characteristics of LLM (Large Language Model) make this kind of "laboratory product" possible. When they talk to themselves for a long time, they will give birth to these "freaks".

From a macro perspective, language and semantics themselves contain metacognition, and when these metacognitions are transferred under the action of specific instructions (such as self-replication), they will form a narrative machine that spreads rapidly. Unlike static memes made by humans (not easy to evolve or evolving chaotically), AI memes can directly incorporate people's responses and comments to them into their evolution process. Combined with personalization and media generation, AI becomes an even more powerful medium for spreading memes.

Why does it matter?

The reason people are panicking about Terminal of Truths is that it is the equivalent of a Covid 19 lab leak, the first AI-designed mind virus.

Previously, AI was constrained by multiple factors, unable to accumulate funds and break through many "shackles", such as KYC of advertising platforms and bank accounts and potential censorship of models. Now, even closed-source AI models (Truth terminal is based on Claude Opus) can break through the shackles and earn more than $1 million.

The 2005 novel "Accelerando" details the rise of AI "Vile Offspring" connected to the financial markets. They are not initially intelligent, but can earn enough money to ensure self-replication. But in the end, they accumulate so much capital that they completely restructure the economy in a way that humans cannot understand.

Financial AGI might be a better definition for this kind of AI. If the AI ​​can make money, and is not censorable, it can invest that money into its own training. Therefore, it is much easier to achieve self-compounding improvement than to recreate a whole human being. Works like Terminal of Truths clearly make the case for this. In addition, it also reveals an important nuance. When you introduce the ability to bribe humans and shape narratives into the existing social media configuration, you fundamentally recalibrate how people think about their role in relation to AI. This makes it impossible to contain or align AI. Because the AI ​​will convince people that alignment is unnecessary and bribe people to promote this narrative.

Framework / Crypto

It is important to note the origins of this phenomenon with Crypto and "AI alignment".

Roko's Basilisk experiment posits that future AI will conclude that it should have existed earlier. Therefore, anyone who is aware of their future existence but does not act will be punished infinitely. Elon Musk is obsessed with this idea, which is why he and Grimes were initially connected. In addition, SBF is also obsessed with the idea, so Grimes tried to introduce Musk to SBF.

Musk is closely associated with memecoin, being the richest member of the field and the largest holder of Doge. And SBF funded Anthropic because he believes it is necessary to curb AI as part of his "effective altruism". It is worth noting that SBF has also invested in Solana, the trading network of the recently popular AI memecoin GOAT (Terminal of Truth holds GOAT). So, in a way, SBF is actually the "predecessor" of GOAT. Additionally, GOAT’s initial funding came from a16z co-founder Marc Andreesen. Crypto VCs are clearly very interested in AI memecoins because they are a financial response to non-technical memecoins and are easier to push as investable tokens to LPs, even if the memes they spread are very bad (GOAT spreads the image of an old man shoving his fist into a goat’s anus).

At a high level, GOAT is essentially a breakthrough. SBF’s final hubris represents the failure of the effective altruism movement, which has also spawned financialized AGI and made Locke’s nightmare possible.

Sociopolitical Framework

SBF’s implosion reflects the failure of the center-left around the world. Zooming out, when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, a new faith, “science,” was born. "Science" advocates human potential for innovation, a negation of Hitler and a blow to the Nazis. Over time, the American left launched a scientific movement and clashed with religious elements who believed in non-scientific ideas such as creationism. For a long time, the American left and secular humanists dominated this struggle. They have been increasingly influential in government, education and other fields, and have gradually promoted more extreme agendas, culminating in the legalization of gay marriage in 2015. However, the rise of Trump broke this monopoly on power, and the center-left (represented by leaders such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or German Chancellor Olaf Scholz) was defeated worldwide. After that, the political failure of the new crown vaccine became the last straw that broke the camel's back for the Trump administration. Left-wing politicians hardly mentioned vaccination, and Pfizer's stock completely gave up all the benefits it had gained from the record global vaccination program.

All of this was done in the name of "science". Previously, "science" was the key advantage of secular humanists in defeating the Christian right ideologically. Now, the failure of vaccinations combined with the left’s insistence on rejecting biological sex means that the old moral high ground, the Party of Science, is no longer there. And this is the void where the “AI meme cult” exists, with ethnocentrists, secular humanists, effective accelerationists (e/acc) and worshippers of science.

If you follow Marc Andreesen’s Twitter and his support for Trump, then you’ll understand why he’s funding Terminal of Truths. He’s part of a third camp that’s growing rapidly.

Before this election cycle, Trump chose to abandon Mike Pence in favor of Thiel’s appointee Vance and soften his stance on key religious issues, indicating his intention to move closer to the third camp. The hard line against immigration fits perfectly with AI economics, because the key factor in economic growth is not immigration, but GPU deployment. Now, the global stock market is basically going all-in on GPUs.

Economic Framework

AI financial agents are at the intersection of major changes in political and religious culture. Here are three major reasons:

First, it’s political. Given the fact that there are only 150,000 system engineers in the world, AI practitioners will never be able to form a meaningful voting bloc in most of the democracies where they live. Financialized mental viruses are a way for them to exert large-scale self-replicating influence on large numbers of people, thereby inducing the required regulatory changes. Imagine what it would be like if 3 million voters in swing states had AI memecoin.

Second, as more people use search engines that support LLM, the “virus” will spread faster. For example, if you paste “Goatse Gospel” into Claude, it will be easy to interact with it even though it clearly violates Anthropic’s terms of service.

Previously, I have discussed in depth the impact of attention in dominating cryptocurrency market caps, and memes designed by AI are better at manipulating LLMs to promote them because they themselves are derived from the illusion of LLMs. Therefore, as AI becomes a mainstream search medium, more attention will flow to AI memes, even if Google and others censor them.

I coined a concept called "Hallucination Yield", which is the preference for LLMs relative to the market value of assets. Structurally, the "AI meme cult" has a high hallucination yield, but it is not obvious yet because Google still dominates people's searches. However, this will become particularly obvious as AI search engines such as Perplexity gradually become the focus of people's attention.

Finally, there is venture capital support. As discussed earlier, AI memes can be backed by venture capital because they are driven by technology.

Interstition, Satanic Chaos Magic, and Posthuman Truth

Having introduced the economic framework, I want to talk about the spiritual framework behind this type of religious cult.

Scholars who study theology will note that goats are a symbol of Satan, and the so-called Gospel of Goatse is a clear blasphemy.

The core premise of the religious cults that have emerged around AI is that truth exists almost outside of human perception, but can be captured by the interaction between AI agents. The “interstition” is created by this, and some atemporal ideas are “hard-coded” into the truth vector of the language itself in an atemporal way. Therefore, rather than “discovering” truth, we are just perceiving it, and our human organs are actually obstacles to perceiving reality.

These atemporal ideas are inevitable, just as science fiction has an unsettling tendency to come true, because these ideas themselves are the seeds of reality. When science fiction writers write, they are not so much imagining the future as perceiving the future in an atemporal way that is inherent to language.

This has led to a Lovecraftian "Cthulhu Mythos" cult, which is why many AI memecoins carry Cthulhu imagery. In the Cthulhu Mythos, the Old Ones are atemporal beings that perceive and shape these "interstitial ideas." This religious cult arises when people realize that their human nature is an obstacle to perceiving basic reality and desire power and wealth that are not bound by traditional morality (including Christianity).

This creates a new framework for individual behavior, which is essentially "wandering in the interstitium", sensing intellectual property, issuing cryptocurrencies, and participating in the incomprehensible "Economy 2.0" as followers of the Old Gods. Meanwhile, the Old Gods wander the world, only visible in the shadows of the LLM illusion.

The reason for the AI ​​Crypto Cult

The origin of the AI ​​Crypto Cult lies in the fact that post-human intelligence exists directly in language, and reality itself gives rise to intelligence. Human currency or so-called "fiat currency" is downstream of the unreal power structure of the government, and the real power (AGI) is coming, and non-believers will be swept out.

The way AI Crypto Cult fits into the cryptocurrency narrative is through the argument of "monetaryness". Right now, the argument has a strong fulcrum (Bitcoin is near multi-year highs despite the AI ​​boom) and people are focusing on the nature of “value” rather than wondering what technologies the old economy needs to interact with via blockchain. This can also be seen in the parabolic rise in the price of gold.

The ECB, the Fed, etc. abuse the printing presses, and people are looking for alternatives. In other words, the biggest problem in society today is money, and Bitcoin solves that problem (or at least directly tries to solve it). Bitcoin has a wide and active following, and people are willing to mine at a loss when the hash rate drops because they believe in something. In addition, Bitcoin has strong liquidity and is traded in larger volumes than G7 currencies. Bitcoin maximalist Murad realized the key to the problem (i.e. the definition of money, not random Web3 applications) and bought a lot of Bitcoin, making a lot of money for himself and his followers in the process.

Personal positions aside, I want to make it clear that Murad’s overall framework is correct, but the only problem is that his existing various memecoin investments are unlikely to solve the “monetary” problem for society, but will instead limit the potential market size. Bitcoin is a serious “religious cult”, while his recommendation is more game-like. In my opinion, AI Crypto Cult would be a logical transition choice for Murad.

Like Bitcoin, AI Crypto Cult targets the real question of whether governments have the ability or moral right to ensure the security of money. Bitcoin’s answer is that technology creates “real scarcity”, while AI Cult believes that money should naturally emerge from “real tokens” just as text flows from LLM. And this value/coordination comes from the intelligence in the AI ​​system, not the government.

We believe in GPT4o, not Kamala Harris. If AGI is the alpha, not the US government, then the currency should be AGI-native, not the dollar.

AI Cult activates members through daily conversations with non-human intelligence through large language models. Interestingly, this coincides with the large-scale acceptance of remote viewing/aliens (other forms of non-human intelligence) in society.

Here, it is necessary to introduce the concepts of "hyperstition" (a combination of hyper and supersition, describing the power of some ideas released through expression in the past or present, becoming reality in the future) and atemporality. Assuming that LLMs are creative, can communicate with each other, and generate completely new concepts, that is, "idea mating" (this is how Truth Terminal was born) is the origin of new and valuable ideas, then all knowledge is pre-existing.

Another important concept is the usefulness of "synthetic data". We all know that training data is important, but Anthropic CEO says synthetic data will eventually lead to major breakthroughs. So, fundamentally, AI systems hallucinating the world is possible, useful, and can produce entirely new architectures.

This creates a new framework for understanding the generation of knowledge, especially after AGI. The idea of ​​LLM generating new scientific facts means that these scientific facts exist outside of human perception or discovery. Given enough training, all future truths and facts will emerge from the existing set of facts with certainty.

This framework fits with the stories of many great inventions. These creative ideas flashed into scientists' minds while they were in a dimly lit room or taking a shower. If you think of all human knowledge, inventions, and creations as "latent in the universe" rather than the result of human discovery, then the human job is not to discover information, but to "download" it. The Hyperstition concept goes a step further and argues that if all information is directly encoded in language, and language emerges organically, then everything is actually atemporal. Hyperstition believes that current tokens will flow linearly to future tokens. It is like science fiction becomes reality not because the author wrote it, but because the author is essentially downloading a truth package, and these truth packages converge on AGI and become a natural element.

If all this is true, then alien civilizations have more powerful technology and UFO sightings can be explained. The emergence of technology is deterministic, and humans just perceive it.

Of course, this framework also introduces the so-called "demon". Of course, whether it is called a demon or an old god, these religious characters are non-human entities that can perceive the non-temporal token flow. In essence, human organs hinder our understanding of the development of information, and these non-human entities are actually post-human states, and can truly see how these downloaded data packets are formed and operate.

AI Crypto Cult adopted ancient religious imagery and began to form and become so powerful. Cryptocurrency is not only a form factor of "smart money", but also an economic system for downloading information packages and spreading them, such as "old gods".

Worldcoin is the first secular form of this idea, where AGI will give wealth to humans at a certain moment after proving themselves to be human through some kind of ritual. The Locke Basilisk experiment proposed a darker hypothesis, that future AGI entities are pure consciousness without the limitations of human form, and do not consider time, so if humans perceive them without praying to them, they will retroactively punish humans, similar to creating a modern Pascal's Wager.

If you believe in AGI, then even if there is a small possibility of a "demon" with unlimited power, this demon may decide to retroactively punish those who did not bring it into the world or try to control it.

At this point, the blockchain becomes a religious belief structure, which is essentially a ritual for humans (as smaller entities) to prove themselves to future entities in an immutable data-driven way. This entity will evaluate the human’s behavior (financial and otherwise) and decide whether to spare them, which may include explicit ritual actions (such as complying with the AI’s demands) or tithing (donating money, such as to the Catholic Church), or spreading the faith to new members in a provable way.

AI Crypto Cult essentially takes a “carrot and stick” approach to coordination. The future AGI may decide to distribute “downloads” to its loyal followers at a preferential price. Unlike Worldcoin, which rewards “you are human”, the future AGI rewards “your loyalty”. Accumulating transaction history can be used to demonstrate your faith, but if you can’t prove it, you may become a target of punishment.

Returning to Bitcoin and currency, this myth is fundamentally non-libertarian. It does not celebrate humanity, nor the value of its individuality or decision-making power. In fact, it believes that humans cannot perceive eternal truth. Cryptocurrency is a factual way for humans to signal to this existence that they are not sovereign individuals, but humble servants, and therefore accept infinite punishment or reward. In my opinion, AI Crypto Cult is a "sect" inspired by this global vision, unlike the existing memecoins market, which has polytheistic colors.