There’s really no way to sugarcoat this piece of news: lawsuits have now been filed because people lost millions investing in Hawk Tuah Coin. $HAWK is a cryptocurrency named after ‘Hawk Tuah’, and promoted by Hailey Welch, also known as the Hawk Tuah Girl. As the reader likely knows, Hawk Tuah is a viral meme named after a type of bird and the prepositional-appositional phrase ‘to a’. But this is a trend: ‘memecoins’ like Dogecoin, the recently introduced Trumpcoin and Melaniacoin—and, if your tastes are more toddler-esque, Fartcoin—have parted a shocking amount of purportedly sentient beings from their money in the last year.

 

$HAWK is clearly, as any sane investor in the coin would say, a joke. Sure, it is a joke in an important way, but as far as comic relief goes, it’s an odd one—people don’t usually send death threats to Hawk Tuah Girl or involve the United Kingdom Financial Conduct Authority over punchlines.

 

Some normal, well-adjusted people don’t ‘get’ what a memecoin is: that’s alright, since memecoins are complicated because they’re so simple. They work exactly like buying and selling stocks in the stock market, except instead of getting your own tiny chunk of Tesco or Lockheed Martin with a fluctuating financial value, you get absolutely nothing. The joke is there from the start, since stocks are named after the publicly-owned companies they provide partial ownership of, but we are not yet able to own small pieces of Donald John Trump or the act of Hawk Tuah. The only thing that differentiates one memecoin from another is its name, which fluctuates based on the basically-random actions of other pure speculators. In other words, it’s just gambling.

 

But memecoins are a very strange form of gambling for two reasons: first, their founding bit is that they’re mimicking the stock market. Second, they’re a joke. Yes, investments in memecoins are ironic, but they’re the lowest form of irony—it’s self-deprecation, the irony of necessity that comes from laughing with as a last-ditch mechanism to keep some dignity while being laughed at. It’s peeing your pants as a kid and pretending you did it on purpose. Memecoin gamblers are ‘in on the joke’ only in this sense—losing millions doesn’t become any more fun (or gaining millions any less fun) when it’s over a digital token that signifies flatulence.

 

So, who cares? People have looked stupid when gambling forever. Cavemen probably gambled on who could paint the shittier horse on the wall. The gambling novelty of memecoins comes from an association with a certain type of politics. There’s only one Type Of Guy who would find ‘Fartcoin’ funny: the Musk Reply Guys.

 

 MRGs specialise in catering to Elon Musk’s aesthetic sensibilities. To understand their actions, you must understand Musk, and to understand Musk, you must understand one terrible metaphor. Musk needs to put the Nineteen Eighty-Four down and pick up Politics and the English Language because he will not stop talking about “forks in the road”: when in the early weeks of the Trump administration American civil servants received an email offering to retire them, the subject line was “Fork in the road.” In shareholder conferences, the great magnates of the tech world are subject to the same dying metaphor. How does Musk turn this deep-rooted conviction of his into art? In 2022, like a Medici, he made a grand political statement by commissioning a statue. The statue is called Fork in the Road. It is a ten-metre tall fork in, you guessed it, a road.

 

It’s not hard to connect having that aesthetic sensibility to finding Dogecoin funny. But when memecoins are traded based on popularity and Musk’s XFormerlyTwitter account is the best platform for publicity, Musk’s sense of humour starts to take on a profound monetary importance. Will he find doges funny today? Hawk Tuah? Farts?

 

MRGs share a surface level of politics with Musk, but they also reek of a clear desperation to get rich quick: to be noticed by Musk, to have a small part in one of his many financial adventures, and the greatest reward of them all, to invest in a memecoin that Musk happens to think is funny. The MRGs are an amoral group here to maximise gambling profits, but their success depends on aping a certain billionaire: in this mix, something new forms.

 

This combination of the haute-bourgeois like Musk and the crudely-politicised rabble is what Hannah Arendt calls the mob. John Ganz glosses Arendt’s conception of the mob’s economic preferences: the mob “searches for money without or before the reciprocal obligations of society, more ‘natural’ or ‘real’ forms of currency, like crypto or gold.” The bourgeois, whether feigned or truly believed, have an interest in preserving their own morality, and this often contradicts with the gambler’s mentality of pure profits. The mob is different because it sees all morality as a scam, and so has no such scruples: life is a casino, and in casinos, everybody knows the house always wins in the end—all you can do is try to squeeze out some gains for yourself.

 

This is the rapacity of the more high-brow financial speculators stripped of any of the little hypocrisies that allowed them to feign morality. The digital mob may be populist on the surface, but its gambler’s cynicism makes it even more controllable by authority since gamblers refuse to think on the level of societies and systems—if they had a clear-eyed view of the casino, they wouldn’t be gamblers. This combination of bare financial interest and the unfettered greed of mob power makes itself best known in gambling ventures, and one particularly long-lasted and violent one occupies a chapter of Origins of Totalitarianism: late imperial South Africa.

 

As Arendt would probably put it if she was here today, gold was kind of like the Hawk Tuah Coin of the late 19th century. Investopedia, not typically known for its philosophical musings, struggles to find a socially-agreed-upon value for gold and settles on the conclusion that “the warmth of gold speaks to our human need for comfort and nurturing.” And Fartcoin doesn’t? The main industries of South Africa in the late imperial period were gold and diamond mining, and the imperial powers had no issue with coercing multitudes of cheap labour to mine them. It was as close to pure speculation as an industry could get—everything relied on the market value of gold and the aesthetic sensibilities of the gold and diamond purchasers.

 

The collections of adventurers, speculators, and gamblers that populated the white immigrants to South Africa during this period were essentially a Hawk Tuah Coin society: the only industry here was speculation, amorality was the default mode of interaction, and bare exploitation was the only social norm that existed. The gamblers and the business titans fed off each other. This is a powerful alliance that speaks to our deepest desires for wealth and hatred of cooperation, and it lives in our hearts: like anything permanent, when it seems to be obliterated, it will creep back up in the lowest forms of social organisation. Like the Hawk Tuah community.

 

But a lasting civilisation, much less a democratic one, cannot be built on a Fartcoin foundation. Most of the speculators came and left, leaving an even more oppressive and less peaceful society behind. It was only possible for them to exist in the first place because they were the refuse of the British imperial system, and they needed a place to go.

 

Memecoin society is made for the fringes, the refuse left behind by progress’ march. But in the form of the degenerate-gambler-billionaire alliance, the waste might become the point. In an atomised world without community or agreed-upon morality, pure speculation is the only political program with any emotional appeal. Will this leftover culture take over the core? We’ll just have to wait on that thang.∎

 

Words by Myles Lowenberg. Image courtesy of Rhododentrites via Wikimedia Commons.