Nobel Prize winner of 1981 explains the phenomenon of memecoins

Elias Canetti was a Bulgarian writer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. He lived most of his life between Germany and Austria. In addition to writing plays, novels, autobiographies and travel literature, he studied “the masses” as an elemental force in society. And to power, as a brave exercise in survival.

This writer applied his analysis to more serious and determining social phenomena, such as fascism, Nazism, totalitarianism and religion. His analysis fits, however, to any process of formation of human massesregardless of its destructive capacity and its group purpose.

The community phenomenon of memecoins is shaped, precisely, as a playful and speculative mass market, one where Elias Canetti’s analysis fits explanatorily.

Defining “the dough”: slow, fast, open and closed

In principle, Canetti defines “the mass” as a group of individuals, previously isolated, who achieve unite and relate around and with something bigger than themselves.

In the case of memecoins, speculators and enthusiasts come together in online communities to participate in emerging asset markets. Together, they create a mass market that is particular in its features, because participation in it differs, in form and substance, from that of other classes of investors. Let’s take for example, the long-term ones.

What characterizes the memecoiners is that, to invest, they do not have to believe in the content of the projects they follow, which may be empty. They believe and convince themselves, however, that by participating and buying new cryptocurrencies they will be able to make money. Money and access to it in the most pragmatic and direct way possible is its dominant mass idea.

Generally, long-term investors invest in distant projects that will be the basis of emerging markets. That they create products that must solve problems that would be feasible (and more or less predictable) in the future. These investors make up a slow mass, defined by Canetti as that which is established in an organized, progressive manner and whose goal is a distant objective, not accessible immediately but progressively.

The “slow mass” does not grow suddenly, and its disintegration is more difficult and takes years, because the culminating process that disintegrates it constantly differs. This process is called “downloading”, and will be defined in a few moments.

Because they are slow masses that postpone the download process as long as possible, large business conglomerates, banks and investment firms, such as JP Morgan or Charles Schwab, They are centenary projects. Often, also transgenerational companies, which survive the existence of a single individual or several. Bitcoin, Ethereum and other major utility coins are slow mass markets.

The first, the memecoinersbelong to the “fast mass.” Elías Canetti called “quick dough” to that whose formation is rapid and its disintegration sudden. This mass is characterized by the incessant search for discharge, without deferring it much over time. The memecoiner is also an “open mass”, because its dynamics require it to grow quickly and without control.

The mass disintegration event: the discharge

The “unloading” is nothing more than that moment in which All members “feel stripped of their differences and feel like equals,” according to Canetti.

The moment of downloading “the fast mass” memecoiner is one and always the same: see the prices of the new favorite meme cryptocurrencies rise. All They find themselves winning and seeing their peers winand happiness and contentment reign among them.

Those who were already there did not dare to sell at that moment of communal anguish: it would accelerate the disintegration of “the masses”, breaking their hard-won harmony. Those who have just entered want to participate in the excitement, to share the original happiness of the first who arrived. Nor do they dare to break collective harmony.

As the projects that follow are new, spontaneous and empty of content, the dominant idea of ​​the memecoiner mass is excessively pragmatic: to be able to make money. Here your weak point is found, that anticipates the escape process and its subsequent disintegration.

Differences between fast dough and slow dough

If the dominant idea of ​​the memecoiner mass was elaborate, organized and complex, and one had to apply oneself deeply to understand it, this would become a “slow dough”. The slow dough has a conformation that is incompatible with that because it does not meet the requirement of immediacy and rapid discharge.

A mass that has become slow would also mutate into a “closed mass”, because no dominant idea of ​​a slow mass occupies the center of a market, and it avoids rapid growth so as not to be irreparably transformed.

In order not to be slow or closed, “the masses” are seduced by radical pragmatism, which takes memecoiners through the most direct path possible to satisfy more immediate needs: it does not matter how to make money, or with what.

The last stage of the memecoiner mass: the escape

Another characteristic of “quick dough” is that it tends to become a «fugue mass». The memecoiners The more sagacious see the state of happy harmony in the market as the moment of maximum profit, and the signal that the mass formation must be broken. At the peak of the massive download they sell their highly appreciated crypto assets.

When the price of a popular memecoin begins to fall, the flight process begins: every man for himself and everyone to sell. Thus, the memecoiner mass disintegrates just as it was formed: quickly.

This mass process, which goes through a phase of formation, accumulation, discharge, escape and disintegration, is attributable to any known mass process, according to Elías Canetti.

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