Eileen Isagon Skyers: From Speculation to Symbolic Release
The Visual and Promotional Culture of Meme Coins
Eileen Isagon Skyers is an artist and curator based in New York.
In an era where internet culture increasingly shapes socioeconomic behavior, meme coins have emerged as a new asset class rooted in virality and participatory spectacle. As a novel form of digital currency, they are easily created and exchanged via blockchain platforms, deriving value largely through speculation. Meme coins use visual and rhetorical cues like humor, irony, and absurdist lore to position themselves as accessible antidotes to traditional financial systems. They commodify our collective desire for economic empowerment, emotional gratification, and social belonging. It could be said that meme coins aestheticize financialization itself, using subversive play and whimsy to normalize speculative risk. Indeed, their increasing exploitation has led to mounting concerns over campaign and market manipulation, exacerbated by regulatory inconsistencies between the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and proposed legislation such as the Modern Emoluments and Malfeasance Enforcement (MEME) Act.
In this essay, I trace how meme coins function as promotional mechanisms and, ultimately, as a form of what Philip Rieff calls “symbolic release.” I examine the visual and promotional strategies of three prominent meme-based cryptocurrencies—Dogecoin, PepeCoin, and $TRUMP—through the lenses of contemporary promotional culture and therapeutic discourse. I argue that meme coins embody a central paradox of contemporary capitalism: they simulate rebellion, while enacting conformity. Marketed as irreverent alternatives to traditional financial systems, they absorb dissent into cycles of promotion, spectacle, and speculative belonging that mirror—and intensify—the very logics they claim to disrupt. Drawing on Andrew Wernick’s theory of promotional culture, Johanna Arnesson’s framing of influencers as ideological figures, and, finally, Philip Rieff’s concept of “controls and releases” outlined in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, I explore how the proliferation of meme coins both reflects and exploits contemporary anxieties around wealth, sovereignty, self-fulfillment, and collective meaning.
The Visual Rhetoric of Meme Coins
Blockchains, first introduced through Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper, were initially conceived as a peer-to-peer network paradigm aimed at reimagining and democratizing financial systems. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum emerged from a broader impulse to create decentralized alternatives to traditional finance and governance institutions. Bitcoin was initially motivated by a distrust in central banks and a desire for systemic reform, while Ethereum proposed a programmable architecture for decentralized applications that go beyond finance. Meme coins are a particular subset of alternative tokens (“alt coins”) that function much like other cryptocurrencies: they are built on blockchain networks (such as Ethereum or Solana), governed by smart contracts, traded across decentralized or centralized exchanges, and cryptographically secured through private keys.
Although they are animated by similar ambitions toward alternative models of value, meme coins mark a significant departure from their predecessors. Rather than advancing financial or technical solutions, meme coins operate primarily through the hyper-visual and social logics of internet culture. They inherit the self-referentiality and sarcasm characteristic of memes more broadly, understood here by Limor Shifman’s definition as “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by internet users, creating a shared cultural experience in the process.”1 Meme coins employ a curious visual rhetoric: they are disarmingly approachable, yet ideologically charged. Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, meme coins have no intrinsic utility and derive their market value almost entirely from collective behavior, making them highly susceptible to volatility.
Among the earliest and most emblematic meme coins is Dogecoin (DOGE), launched in 2013 by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a deliberate joke. Intended as a playful antidote to the self-seriousness of the then-burgeoning cryptocurrency sector, Dogecoin adopted the viral image of a Japanese blogger’s Shiba Inu2 as its mascot. Its visual identity leans heavily into the cutesy charade of the original Doge meme: a sprightly Shiba Inu, emblazoned with cartoonish Comic Sans phrases like “much wow,” or “such currency.” The token’s aesthetic evokes a sense of un-seriousness and approachability, ostensibly leveraging a familiar character to bridge the gap between cultural and financial value. Dogecoin thus appropriates a cycle of subcultural affinity already entrenched within certain digital communities. It reconfigures a pre-existing, popular internet vernacular into an even more popular mechanism for speculative investment.
By 2015, DOGE had become the second-highest searched cryptocurrency on Google after Bitcoin. In 2018, it hit a market capitalization of two billion U.S. Dollars before spiking again, in a social media fueled frenzy, to $88 billion in 2021.3 Originally heralded as the “people’s cryptocurrency,” Dogecoin features a fixed addition of 5 billion tokens annually with no maximum supply cap, making it fundamentally inflationary and, subsequently, more accessible. The major successes of Dogecoin codified a visual and cultural template that later meme coins would emulate, demonstrating how familiarity and emotional resonance can substitute for financial or technical innovation in blockchain-enabled economies.
Participation in the meme coin ecosystem becomes less a matter of financial literacy than of identification with a circulating visual vernacular. PepeCoin, in particular, intensifies the meme coin’s status as a contested signifier, underscoring the polemical volatility inherent to such an asset. Not unlike DOGE, PepeCoin draws on one of the internet’s most enduring—albeit controversial—symbols: Pepe the Frog. The Pepe meme itself has oscillated between cycles of reinterpretation and reinvention. Originating from artist Matt Furie’s Boy’s Club comic series, Pepe began as a seemingly innocuous, anthropomorphic green frog with bulbous eyes and stark red lips.4 After a meteoric rise to internet stardom, images aligning the character with right-wing White supremacist and Nazi symbolism began to propagate across message boards like 4chan and Reddit. By 2015, Pepe had morphed into a polysemic and politically fraught icon. The frog’s omnipresent image had become a site of contention, often deployed as a harbinger of nihilistic humor and, increasingly, extremist ideologies. But it was Donald Trump’s own embrace of Pepe imagery during his 2016 presidential campaign that cemented the meme’s migration from internet folklore into explicit political symbology.5
After Pepe was classified as an official hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), reclamation efforts such as the Feels Good Man documentary and Furie’s #SavePepe campaign sought to reassert its harmless origins—efforts largely overwhelmed by the meme’s often more offensive use-cases.6 When PepeCoin entered the cryptocurrency market in April 2023, it did so bearing the weight of this loaded symbolic history. That being said, PEPE does not merely capitalize on internet nostalgia; it actively commodifies the chaos, vitriol, and controversy of Pepe the Frog, trading on the tension between irony and extremism. It reaffirms the now-familiar meme coin formula: using hyper-recognizable visual symbols not only to attract speculation, but to generate a shared (if ambivalent) sense of camaraderie and participation.
If PepeCoin embraced the mutability of internet culture, President Trump’s $TRUMP token dispenses with ambiguity altogether to advance a hyperbolic nationalist agenda. Released on Friday, January 17, 2025 amid the feverish political branding machine of his re-election, Trump’s meme coin galvanizes political allegiance and quite literally monetizes it, turning it into a profitable financial instrument. The token’s official website, GetTrumpMemes.com, mobilizes an exaggerated, hyper-masculine visual vocabulary. Promotional images throughout the site feature bold lettering, gilded frames, militant slogans like “FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT,” and highly stylized portraits of Trump raising his fist—a gesture that references the July 2024 assassination attempt against him. Messages like “Join the Trump Community,” “Get your piece of history,” and “Celebrate Our Win & Have Fun!” collapse political affiliation and speculative investment into a singular gesture. The website’s patriotic visual motifs (i.e. bald eagles, American flags) position $TRUMP as both a commemorative digital token and a rallying cry for loyal supporters of the president’s legacy. This rhetoric does not merely amplify populist sentiment; it operates as political propaganda, harnessing emotion and excitement to embolden ideological commitment. The visual and contextual rhetoric employed by $TRUMP suggests that solidarity with a particular nationalist imaginary is no longer enacted through protest or policy, but through a transactional directive—captured most explicitly in the imperative of the site’s bold, red buttons which read: Buy Now. If the visual rhetoric of meme coins trades in irony, nostalgia, and populist spectacle, their deeper logic might reveal an even more profound dynamic: the transformation of speculation itself into a mode of promotional and ideological production.
Meme Coins, Promotional Culture, and Ideological Intermediaries
The shared hyper-visual tactics of $TRUMP, PEPE, and Dogecoin point to a deeper mechanism underpinning the meme coin phenomenon: the entanglement of economic speculation with promotional culture. Meme coins operate at the nexus of two distinct but mutually reinforcing dynamics: what Andrew Wernick calls the rise of “promotional culture,” and what Johanna Arnesson frames as the ascendance of “influencers as ideological intermediaries.” Together, these frameworks reveal how meme coins circulate not only as speculative financial products, but as affective symbols—shaped equally by semiotic power and authoritative influence.
As Wernick argues, “the range of cultural phenomena which…serve to communicate a promotional message has become, today, virtually co-extensive with our produced symbolic world.”7 Promotion, in this expanded sense, is no longer confined to discrete advertising campaigns; rather, it constitutes the dominant mode of cultural production in the era of late capitalism. Wernick suggests that “the rise of promotion as a cultural force signals…an alteration in the very relation between culture and economy.”8 Seen in this context, meme coins are not merely anomalous financial experiments; they are fundamentally promotional artifacts, operating in an attention economy wherein communication itself has become a commodity.
Meme coins perform what Wernick identifies as the “double function” of contemporary promotional forms: they serve simultaneously as products and as advertisements for themselves.9 Their appeal rests in the affective atmosphere that they generate across Discord servers, forums, and social posts: the promise of sudden wealth, the pleasure of participation, and the allure of belonging to an inside joke turned valuable commodity. They create a recursive loop wherein promotion is no longer supplemental to the asset, but indeed its central purpose. As Wernick notes, promotional forms increasingly rely on “mimetic magic”—the invocation of fantasy selves made manifest through cultural totems.10 Meme coins function precisely within this register—whether the wholesome Shiba Inu of DOGE, the chaotic, re-coded renditions of Pepe the Frog, or the nationalist iconography of $TRUMP. Their promotional logic mirrors Wernick’s broader observation that contemporary culture is marked by “its preoccupation with style; its self-referentialism, its a-historicity, and its vacuous blend of nihilism and good cheer.”11 Indeed, the success of a meme coin depends on its ability to circulate semiotic fragments of itself—images, slogans, icons—that evoke a sense of belonging, rebellion, or humor, however fleeting or contradictory.
Taken together, Dogecoin, PEPE, and $TRUMP closely resemble Wernick’s notion of the “commodity-sign”—a cultural good that not only promotes itself, but also anchors larger circuits of symbolic and economic exchange. The Trump token’s debut might exemplify some of the asymmetries that promotional culture both produces and conceals. Despite its rhetoric of open access and collective celebration, the token’s distribution was indeed highly centralized: within days of its launch, campaign-affiliated entities such as CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC retained control of nearly 80% of the token’s supply, amassing over $41 million in trading fees and more than $312 million in token sales in the first quarter alone.12 Meanwhile, many small-scale investors incurred steep losses. The imbalances surrounding Trump’s meme coin has drawn federal scrutiny, resulting in the 2025 MEME Act’s targeted efforts to bar such conflation of political branding and financial speculation. This kind of asymmetry is endemic to contemporary promotional forms: “commodity signs” that seduce with a promise of inclusion, but operate as mechanisms of symbolic and financial extraction—as Wernick puts it, “forms which continually proffer, and defer, their promised object of desire.”13
Not only do tokens themselves circulate as promotional signs; increasingly, individuals—especially influencers—become the embodied agents of the promotional condition. Johanna Arnesson’s analysis of influencers as “ideological intermediaries” concerns the labor of mediated self-production and recognizes the role of both micro- and macro-celebrities in contemporary capitalism. Influencers, she argues, do not simply advertise products; they perform a deeper ideological labor, personifying aspirational lifestyles and mediating hegemonic values under the guise of personal authenticity.14 Far from operating purely through anonymized market participation, meme coin economies hinge on symbolic affinities, affective labor, and fantasies of success—all of which are heightened by the visibility of these influential agents. Meme coin markets regularly fluctuate in response to the actions of their representatives—often, outspoken individuals who project trustworthiness, relatability, or emotional accessibility. These are precisely characteristics that, Arnesson notes, “can be used by politicians to dismantle a rising political distrust and position populist politicians as authentic outsiders rather than part of the ‘elite.’”15
Few figures better illustrate this dynamic than President Donald Trump, or tech mogul Elon Musk, whose promotional interventions have directly resulted in market shifts. Musk’s very public endorsements of Dogecoin—which include memes, satirical tweets, and pop references to anti-elitism—have historically contributed to the token’s inflation. In February 2021, Musk issued a Dogecoin renaissance by announcing his own $1.5 billion investment in the token, which approximately quintupled its value.16 Musk’s self-fashioning as a relatable technological outsider—playful, irreverent, and anti-establishment—parallels the meme coin’s own positioning as a defiant alternative to traditional finance. His interventions exemplify what Arnesson describes as the influencer’s ability to “promote a lifestyle to be inspired by, and aspire to,” even when that promotion operates through ironic or semi-detached registers.17
Similarly, the promotional strategy surrounding the $TRUMP token leverages the president’s personal brand to inspire political affect and drive financial speculation. By early April 2025—just months after its launch—the price of $TRUMP hovered at $8—less than a quarter of its peak $74 value. President Trump then announced, on April 23, 2025, that the top 220 holders of his meme coin would be welcomed to a private dinner at the Trump National Golf Club near Washington, D.C., with additional exclusive White House events promised for the highest-tier investors.18 The announcement triggered a 70% surge in valuation—and earnings of more than $1 million in trading fees for the Trump family and its partners—demonstrating how political allegiance can be exploited to incite speculative frenzy. As Arnesson observes, the power of influencers often lies in their capacity to “obscure their promotional intentions,” and “seek to commodify audiences.”19 Figures like Musk and Trump do not simply market meme coins; they serve as embodied sites of ideological production. They channel affect and aspiration into capital flows, collapsing identity, loyalty, and economic desire into a singular promotional economy.
Speculators, in turn, look to charismatic leaders as “social proof” that their risk-taking is warranted, and likely to be rewarded. The ritualism of meme coin culture might be described as what Victor Turner called a kind of “communitas”: a social condition in which individuals, connected by a collective suspension of normative hierarchies, adopt new forms of solidarity and symbolic action. Inspired by actors like Musk and Trump, meme coin communities are encouraged to suspend disbelief, embrace vulnerability, and adhere to communal norms like holding onto their investments through market downturns (“HODLing”)—trusting that their perseverance will be financially or socially rewarded. Seen through the lenses of both Wernick and Arnesson, meme coins appear less like clever novelties or financial aberrations, and more like symptomatic expressions of a broader convergence: one where promotional culture and influencer-driven affect have merged into one powerful engine of contemporary ideological reproduction.
Meme Coins as Symbolic Release: Reading Rieff
Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) theorizes how modern societies undergo cultural transformation through moments of “engineered symbolic release”—structured breaks from normative social controls that absorb disruptive impulses rather than confront them. Every culture, Rieff argues, functions by organizing moral demands into symbolic systems, thereby rendering the world intelligible and morally coherent.20 Yet modern Western culture—what he describes as the therapeutic age—is marked by a crisis of symbolic authority. Competing systems like science, psychoanalysis, and consumerism now vie for primacy over religious tradition. Ascetic ideals that once governed social life have given way to privatized hedonism; systems of moral demand no longer hinge on obedience, guilt, or inherited belief—but instead center emotional relief and self-optimization.21 Rieff identifies a profound shift in the symbolic order of the therapeutic age in which “controlling symbols”—those that once upheld communal order—have been displaced by “releasing symbols,” which prioritize affective discharge and personal gratification over normative constraint. “The process by which a culture changes at its profoundest level,” he writes, “may be traced in the shifting balances of controls and releases which constitute a system of moral demands.”22
Meme coins exemplify this symbolic transformation. They function as engineered “releasing symbols”: temporary, affectively charged units of digital ephemera that offer an illusion of resistance while reinforcing the consumerist ethos that sustains them. Dogecoin, PepeCoin, and $TRUMP are visually and culturally presented as these transgressive, decentralized, community-driven alternatives to institutional finance. Nevertheless, they remain fully embedded in the market dynamics that they claim to subvert. The cutesy image of the Shiba Inu, the ambiguous volatility of Pepe the Frog, and the militant bravado of Trump meme coins do not contest economic logics so much as offer a cathartic participation within them. They perform precisely what Rieff recognizes as the function of “releasing symbols”—forms of engagement that facilitate emotional discharge, social belonging, and expressive individualism, but without committing to shared moral bylaws.
Rieff warns that “whenever a releasing symbolic increases its jurisdiction to the point where it no longer serves to support the incumbent moral demands, but rather contradicts them, that culture is in jeopardy.”23 As “symbolic releases,” the function of the meme coin is not to reimagine the ruling symbolic order, but to mollify its discontents. Rieff’s framework helps explain how meme coins absorb and neutralize dissent: they are not cultural ruptures, but redirections. They translate the disintegration of a shared symbolic order—what Rieff called the “symbolic of obedience”—into spectacles of nihilistic humor, gamified risk, and affective self-branding.24 Meme coin slogans, like “to the moon,” “HODL,” or “join the community,” are therapeutic in the Rieffian sense: detached from ethical obligations and aimed instead at momentary psychological satisfaction and social dopamine. In today’s post-therapeutic market, irony, detachment, and self-optimization have become substitutes for justice, truth, morality, or political resolve.
Meme coins aestheticize revolt while containing and domesticating it. The promise of autonomy, wealth, or collective empowerment through speculative finance is not a critique of late capitalism but, perhaps, a crystallization of it. When Trump leverages his meme coin to reward political allegiance, or Musk deploys Dogecoin as a populist mascot, what emerges is not a symbolic disruption, but a feedback loop: a personalized modality of market power operating through coercion.
Rieff explains that “a cultural revolution occurs when the releasing…symbolic grows more compelling than the controlling one.”25 But meme coins do not exit the cycle of late capitalism—they reinforce it. They offer a symbolic release while leaving underlying structures of power intact. Meme coins accelerate the conditions of a culture no longer animated by communal ideals, but by what Rieff calls the “algebra of our cultural revolution”—the pursuit of “more of everything—more goods, more leisure; in short, more life.”26 Meme coins distill this ethic into its most literal form: more tokens, more memes, more participation. Within the logic of meme coins, the goal is no longer fulfillment but infinite participation. There is no conclusion—only proliferation, circulation, and recursive release.
Conclusion
Read together, Wernick, Arnesson, and Rieff expose the ideological infrastructure that undergirds the meme coin phenomenon: one in which spectacle, influence, and symbolic release converge. Viewed through Wernick’s lens, meme coins function as commodity-signs par excellence—collapsing product and promotion into a single self-reflexive loop. Arnesson’s theory of influencers as ideological intermediaries highlights how figures like Elon Musk and Donald Trump convert aspiration into speculative behavior, obscuring financial risk beneath a thin veneer of authenticity and access. Finally, Rieff’s notion of “controls and releases” further reveals how meme coins operate not as counter cultural expressions, but as sanctioned mechanisms of affective management and symbolic appeasement.
That meme coins thrive not despite their absurdity, but because of it, is no coincidence. They recast speculative investment as a valorized form of cultural participation—transforming economic risk into a mode of self-expression, and volatility into a kind of gamified solidarity. Their nihilistic disposition, far from undermining market logic, becomes integral to it—they act as an interface that aestheticizes financialization while obscuring structural asymmetries. Meme coins absorb political and social discontent not through collective transformation, but through symbolic release. These digital instruments have also triggered mounting regulatory debate, from the SEC’s warnings to the MEME Act, underscoring their dual status as both symbolic agents and actionable economic instruments. More than just semiotic units of information, meme coins have become embedded within the circuitry of our financial ecosystem, bearing material consequences in electoral politics and market behavior alike. The challenge, then, is not only to decode their visual rhetoric or their semiotics, but to recognize how those semiotics are beginning to interface with real institutional power. Meme coins stand as exemplary artifacts of a promotional culture defined not by coherence—but by contradiction, circulation, and the relentless conversion of dissent into data, critique into spectacle, and identity into capital.
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Limor Shifman, “Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18, no. 3 (2013): 367.
A. Nani, “The Doge Worth 88 Billion Dollars: A Case Study of Dogecoin,” Journal of Digital Culture 11, no. 3 (2022): 1721.
Ibid.
J. Pelletier-Gagnon and A. Pérez Trujillo Diniz, “Colonizing Pepe: Internet Memes as Cyberplaces,” Space and Culture 24, no. 1 (2021): 9–10.
C. W. Anderson and M. Revers, “From Counter-Power to Counter-Pepe: The Vagaries of Participatory Epistemology in a Digital Age,” Media and Communication 6, no. 4 (2018): 31.
Pelletier-Gagnon and Pérez Trujillo Diniz, “Colonizing Pepe: Internet Memes as Cyberplaces,” 10.
Andrew Wernick, “The Promotional Condition of Contemporary Culture,” in Media Studies: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham, Caroline Bassett, and Paul Marris (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 764.
Andrew Wernick, “The Promotional Condition of Contemporary Culture,” 767.
Andrew Wernick, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression (London: SAGE Publications, 1991), 264.
Ibid., 266
Ibid., 261
E. Lipton and D. Yaffe-Bellany, “Trump’s Crypto Token Booms, Raising Ethics Concerns,” The New York Times, February 9, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/09/us/politics/trump-crypto-memecoin.html.
Andrew Wernick, “The Promotional Condition of Contemporary Culture,” 769.
Johanna Arnesson, “Influencers as Ideological Intermediaries: Authenticity, Populism and the Role of Affective Labor,” Information, Communication & Society 26, no. 4 (2023): 528.
Ibid., 529.
A. Nani, “The Doge Worth 88 Billion Dollars: A Case Study of Dogecoin,” 1721.
Johanna Arnesson, “Influencers as Ideological Intermediaries: Authenticity, Populism and the Role of Affective Labor,” 528.
João da Silva, “Trump Crypto Soars as President Offers Dinner to Top Holders,” BBC News, April 24, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8g2kpzx0go.
Johanna Arnesson, “Influencers as Ideological Intermediaries: Authenticity, Populism and the Role of Affective Labor,” 532.
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 232.
Ibid., 245.
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud, 232.
Ibid., 236.
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud, 235.
Ibid., 233.
Ibid., 243.