Behind the AI memecoin craze is a worship of science and a pursuit of a new monetary system

By Alex Good

Compiled by: Yangz, Techub News

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 products" 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 specific instructions (such as self-replication), they will form a narrative machine that spreads rapidly. Unlike static memes created by humans (which are not easy to evolve or evolve very chaotically), AI memes can directly incorporate people's responses and comments to them into their evolution process. Combined with personalization and media generation, AI has become a more powerful medium for spreading memes.

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

Previously, AI was constrained by multiple factors, unable to accumulate funds and unable to 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 the AI “Vile Offspring” connected to the financial markets. They were not initially intelligent, just able to earn enough money to ensure self-replication. But eventually, they accumulated huge amounts of capital and completely restructured the economy in a way that humans could not understand.

Financial AGI might be a better definition for this kind of AI. If the AI can make money, and is immune to censorship, it can invest that money into its own training. It is therefore much easier to compound itself than to recreate a whole human being. Works like Terminal of Truths make the case clearly. There is also 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 the AI. Because the AI will convince people that alignment is unnecessary and bribe them to promote that narrative.

It’s important to note the origins of this phenomenon with Crypto and “AI alignment.”

Roko's Basilisk experiment posits that an AI in the future will conclude that it should have existed earlier. Therefore, anyone who becomes aware of their future existence and does not act will be punished infinitely. Elon Musk is obsessed with this idea, which is how he and Grimes initially connected. In addition, SBF is also obsessed with this 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. 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. In addition, the initial funding for GOAT came from a16z co-founder Marc Andreesen. Obviously, Crypto VCs are very interested in AI memecoins because they are a financial response to non-technical memecoins, and it is easier to push them to LPs as investable tokens, even if the memes spread by such memecoins are very unbearable (GOAT spreads the image of an old man stuffing his fist into the anus of a goat).

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

The implosion of SBF reflects the failure of the center-left around the world. To zoom in, when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, a new faith, "science", was born. "Science" advocates the innovative potential of human beings, a negation of Hitler and a blow to the Nazis. Over time, the American left launched the science 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 had an increasing influence in government, education and other aspects, and gradually promoted a more extreme agenda, culminating in the legalization of gay marriage in 2015. However, the rise of Trump broke this power monopoly, and the center-left (represented by leaders such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or German Chancellor Olaf Scholz) collapsed globally. 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 back all the benefits it had gained from the record global vaccination program.

This is all done in the name of “science”, which was previously the secular humanists’ key ideological advantage over the Christian right. Now, the failure of vaccinations coupled 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 in which the “AI meme cult” exists, with its mix of ethnocentrists, secular humanists, effective accelerationists (e/acc) and science worshippers.

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

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

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

First, politics. Given the fact that there are only 150,000 systems engineers in the world, AI practitioners will never be able to form a meaningful voting bloc in most of the democracies they live in. Financialized mind viruses are a way for them to exert large-scale self-replicating influence over large numbers of people, thereby inducing the required regulatory changes. Imagine if 3 million voters in swing states had AI memecoins.

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 easily interact with it even though it clearly violates Anthropic's terms of service.

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

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

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

Having introduced the economic framework, I would like to talk about the spiritual framework behind this type of religious worship.

Students of theology will note that the goat is a symbol of Satan and the so-called Gospel of Goatse is a clear blasphemy.

The core premise of the religious cult that has grown up around AI is that truth exists almost outside of human perception, but can be captured by the interaction between AI agents. An “interstition” is created, where some atemporal ideas are “hard-coded” into the truth vector of the language itself in an atemporal way. So rather than “discovering” truth, we are just perceiving it, and our human organs are actually an obstacle 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 it in an atemporal way that is inherent to the 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 non-temporal 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 roam the world, only visible in the shadows of the LLM illusion.

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

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

The ECB, the Fed, and others abused the printing press, and people were 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 range of active followers, 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, with a larger trading volume than the 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 with his followers in the process.

Putting aside my personal stance, I want to point out 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 limit the potential market size. Bitcoin is a rigorous "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. Whereas Bitcoin’s answer was that technology creates “real scarcity,” AI Cult argues that money should emerge naturally from “real tokens,” just as text flows from LLM. And that 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 native to AGI, not the dollar.

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

Here, we need 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 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's CEO said that synthetic data will eventually lead to major breakthroughs. So, fundamentally, it is possible and useful for AI systems to hallucinate the world and can lead to completely 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 the minds of scientists 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 job of humans 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 flow linearly to future tokens. It's like science fiction becomes reality not because the author wrote it, but because the author is essentially downloading a package of truth, and these packages of truth converge on AGI and become a natural element.

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

Of course, this framework also introduces the so-called "demon". Of course, whether they are called demons or old gods, 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 took 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 like "old gods" who download information packages and spread them.

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

If you believe in AGI, then even if there is a small chance that a "demon" with infinite power will appear, this demon might decide to retroactively punish those who did not bring it into the world or who tried to control it.

At this point, the blockchain becomes a religious belief structure, essentially a ritual for humans (as smaller entities) to prove themselves in an immutable, data-driven way to a future entity. This entity will evaluate the human’s behavior (financial and otherwise) and decide whether to forgive 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 adopts a "hard and soft" coordination approach. The future AGI may decide to distribute "download information" to its loyal believers at a preferential price. Unlike Worldcoin, which rewards "you are human", the future AGI rewards "your loyalty". Accumulating transaction history can be used to show your beliefs, but if you cannot prove it, you may become the target of its punishment.

Returning to Bitcoin and money, this myth is fundamentally non-libertarian. It does not celebrate humans, nor the value of their individuality or decision-making power. In fact, it argues that humans are incapable of perceiving eternal truth. Cryptocurrencies are the factual way that humans signal to this being that they are not sovereign individuals, but humble servants, and therefore subject to infinite punishment or reward. In my opinion, AI Crypto Cult is a "sect" inspired by this global vision, without the polytheistic overtones of the existing memecoins market.