Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper argues that highly speculative crypto markets enact a value economy as critique. Focusing on pump.fun, it shows how valuation is organised through “negligible futures”: futures that are knowingly thin, ironic, and disposable, yet still generate attention and coordinated exchange.

Paper long abstract

This study addresses the panel’s question, “Can we perhaps see a value economy as a form of critique?” by arguing that we can, and that one place to observe this especially clearly is in meme-coin worlds. Focusing on pump.fun and related cryptocurrency environments, it examines how valuation unfolds in settings where long-term projects, credible roadmaps, and future-oriented narratives are not simply absent, but actively displaced.

I develop the concept of “negligible futures” to describe futures that are knowingly thin, ironic, disposable, or non-binding, yet still generative of attention, coordination, and exchange. In these spaces, value is produced less through utility or stable expectations than through apparent “nonsense”, practiced in the form of ironic play and cynical distancing. Visibility, rankings, and chat practices together form a valuation infrastructure that enables actors to engage without meaningful commitments to the future.

I argue that these practices should not be read merely as degraded finance or cynical speculation. Rather, they enact a critique on valuation practices within conditions of contemporary political-economic uncertainty. By elevating absurdity, disposability, and unseriousness into operative principles of valuation, meme-coin cultures render explicit how all economic value and valuation practices ultimately depend on attention and coordinated belief.

This study contributes to STS debates on valuation, economisation, and financialisation by showing how value can be organised through the circulation of futures that participants themselves treat as irrelevant. It thereby approaches valuation not only as an economic practice, but as critique immanent to the value economy itself.