Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Terrifying New Bounty Economy w/ Adam Aleksic (Etymology Nerd) & Aidan Walker

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

The internet has entered a terrifying new era where reality itself has become a marketplace. Adam Aleksic (Etymology Nerd) & Aidan Walker join me to break it all down. SUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at ⁠usermag.co⁠         Support my work on Patreon: ⁠http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz⁠   Pump Fun GO is a new service that lets anyone pay anyone to do anything, and the results are terrifying. From paying people in poor countries $13 to get forehead tattoos to offering $95 for degrading acts, the platform has become a marketplace for human exploitation disguised as "meme coin marketing."From meme coins and viral stunts to political influence campaigns, prediction markets, and user-generated marketing, this episode explores how financial incentives are reshaping online culture and even the offline world.Joining me are Adam Aleksic (Etymology Nerd) and meme researcher Aidan Walker to unpack why platforms like Pump Fun, Polymarket, and the rise of the "bounty economy" could fundamentally change how the internet works.Topics covered:How Pump Fun Go is literally recreating Black Mirror episodes in real lifeThe terrifying rise of the "bounty economy" and what it means for societyWhy people in developing countries are being targeted for these stuntsThe connection between prediction markets, UGC marketing, and political manipulationWhat happens when EVERYTHING becomes a marketing stunt (and why that's breaking trust online)The psychology behind why people participate in these challengesHow this platform is warping our physical reality and making us question everythingPump Fun Go explainedMeme coin marketingBlack Mirror becoming realityThe new attention economyPolymarket and prediction marketsUser-generated advertisingPolitical influence onlineWhy everything feels fakeThe future of social mediaThe internet's next evolution

The way we're using the internet, it's as if, you know, the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids of Giza. And we found out that the reason they did it was to sell fishing equipment rather than to, you know, make a god king, a palace that he could carry into the afterlife. Last week, Pump Fun, a platform where you can buy and trade meme coins, launch Pump Fun Go, a new service where you can pay anyone to do anything. Users can create and compete on bounties for any task. The company claimed that this new feature would, quote, leverage the power of humans and money across the globe. What it has actually done is create a new dystopian market where poor and desperate people debase themselves and others for small amounts of money. As many online have pointed out, this is literally the plot of a very famous Black Mirror episode. On Pump Fun Go, all bounties center on promoting meme coins.

And because outrage consistently goes viral, meme coin owners have leaned into offensive content. In one instance, a meme coin owner paid a black man to tie watermelon chunks to his face and repeat the phrase, I'm your friend, the watermelon man, 10,000 times for $950. A significant amount of bounties on pump fun involve harassing or occasionally helping homeless people. There's a bounty right now for $957 to make 100 jars of pineapple Kool-Aid and give them to homeless people while filming them. There are also just a lot of bounties that encourage people to act recklessly. There's one seeking someone to run down the street half naked, screaming job coin for $238. Another man recently drank his own urine for cash.

There's a bounty for harassing Kathy Hochle and several for interviewing different figures. Another bounty for just $65 implores users to go to a local golf course, use an air horn while people are golfing, and scream the name of a meme coin. Forehead tattoos have become kind of a meme on Pump Fun Go already. A bunch of people are getting them and some are selling space on their face. for as little as $13. Other bounties involve harassing service workers. One bounty offers $98 to sexually harass a gas station attendant.

You can also make $67 by harassing a McDonald's employee. A lot of people participating in these challenges appear to be in countries that lack economic opportunity. For instance, a scroll through the submissions on a recent bounty where people had to hold up a sign that read stupid in public for five minutes is full of people in developing areas of the globe, posting in broken English. Now, the platform is only a week old.

and the platform technically has the ability to reject any bounty submission. Shortly after launch, a bunch of users on X were claiming that there was a post offering $690,000 to yourself. But when I looked into it, that post was either removed or it just never existed. Regardless, Pump Fund Go is just the latest in a new class of platforms that is defining the next phase of the attention economy. Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are part of this shift, as is the rise of UGC marketing. I think we can call this the bounty economy. Because all of these platforms, pump fund go, polymarket, side shift, a big UGC platform, and others, are building this new synthetic reality where an increasing number of things we encounter, IRL, or in the online world, are not spontaneous occurrences. Instead, they're effectively commissioned performances designed to generate attention, engagement, and ultimately financial rewards.

And all of this is having a crazy effect on the world around us, and I would argue our political system. Just this week, it was revealed that polymarket has been. been sponsoring posts from a slew of far-right influencers pushing election conspiracies and disinformation. The newsletter popular information uncovered a network of at least 16 influencers with the collective audience of 13 million publishing election-related misinformation sponsored by Polymarket. On Pump Fund Go, you can make $33 promoting election fraud conspiracies about the South Korean presidential presidential election. The politician Li J. Mayung won, but a meme coin promoter on Pump Fun is paying users to post allegations of fraud.

In the Pump Fund Go bounty, they specifically say, quote, your callout must include the words dictator or election fraud. And PumpFund goes launch video, by the way, makes it totally clear that they're okay with these meme coin connoisseurs warping our political system. In the first few seconds of the video, they show AI generated footage of people putting up posters promoting a politician as the words, what if you could pay people to do anything like anything flash on screen. Later in the video, Pump Fund promotes the fact that users can get paid for protesting. And there's been plenty of legitimate concern by politicians and the media about powerful bad actors weaponizing the internet to push their ideological agenda. But I think this new era of spreading disinformation or debasing yourself as gig work will be much harder to fight. So to discuss Pump Fun Go and what all of this means for the future of the internet and society, I have Aidan Walker, a meme researcher here, and Adam Alexic, known online as etymology nerd.

All three of us are in a group chat. And when Pump Fun Go launched, we couldn't stop talking about this. So I thought I'd have them on the pod to break down what this new market means and what effects we're already seeing it have. Adam, Aidan, welcome. Hi. Happy to be here. Hi. So to start off, for people that are not super in the loop on this stuff, what is pump dot fun?

Yeah, I've been following it for a while in terms of the meme coins and how they have deregulated cryptocurrencies where anybody can trade. And there are incentives sometimes to pump up certain meme stocks and create a viral sensation. I've been sort of paying attention to this in the context of there are viral social media posts that redirect you back to this meme stock to drive up the values. So people are posting online to get more traction for Pump. But now it seems like things have gone in another direction as well. Yeah, I first became aware of Pump. That fun kind of around the launch, which was back in January 2024. Obviously, crypto had been a thing for a couple years at that point.

Memes were a thing. I feel like you were beginning to see this like coalescence of like meme culture, internet culture. That's when a lot of these like skippity coin and like doge, et cetera, like had gone viral. And so these three guys wanted to create a marketplace basically for these meme coins. They made pumped up fun. Pumped up fun has kind of like gone through lots of iterations. By the end of 2024, they had launched this live streaming feature, which they quickly had to roll back, which I feel like was sort of spiritually similar to Pump Fun Go, which they just launched.

Because this live streaming feature allowed anybody to effectively live stream to hype their meme coin. And people very quickly began like abusing themselves. threatening to kill animals on stream, et cetera, if their meme coin didn't go to a million, things like that. And so they had to shut that down pretty quick. It went back to just being a regular crypto meme coin market. And now they've launched Pump Fun Go. Yeah, I think it's important to understand. These are complete gambling degenerates that will do anything to drive up the value of their coin. And some of it is sort of scientific. Like you can plan it out, like get the most extreme views. But some of it is just like these people are desperate to make the value go up.

And it's like they are addicted to it. Yeah, it's literally treating the internet as a casino. And Pump has made a platform to do that with. And then the meme coin is kind of the perfect slot pull. And you do whatever you can, put as much on the line in order to, you know, get the return you're looking for. So I texted you guys about Pump Fun Go earlier this week because I was like, I feel like I'm going crazy. I had messaged a bunch of other journalism people about it and they just were not paying attention to it. I feel like they kind of launched.

and flew under the radar for some reason, which is kind of crazy. The only website that I could find that really wrote it up was Dixerto, which mostly writes up like influencer drama news. Dixerto is always on this stuff. They honestly, they're so tapped in, and I literally do read that website on a near daily basis.

So I shouldn't be slandering Dixereto. But it seems like it sort of like launched without a lot of fanfare, especially compared to something like DARE Market, which was a really similar product that launched last year, got a lot of outrage, and kind of flopped immediately. For years, there's been this kind of obsession, with this like black mirror style of platform where you can like pay anybody to do anything. And I feel like you know, you've seen lots of like iterations of it over the years.

They've always kind of flapped. I think because it wasn't tied in with actual financial reward in the way that we're seeing with meme coins. Yeah. My first thought is this was completely presaged by the movie's Nerve 2016 and Spree 2020 where it envisioned this black mirror-esque dystopia where people live stream and they're paid to do crazy tasks. And I think you're absolutely right this like, Financial incentive is what makes it something that will seriously affect culture and potentially has that staying power, which is really terrifying because you can make people do terrible acts and affect a real reality through treating the internet as a game. Well, I think it's like what's so interesting to me about this is like in all those sort of like entertainment world depictions of these types of platforms, there's not this like marketing aspect to it. And I feel like that's what's kind of making this platform successful is that it's not just that you're paying.

people to like do extreme things. It's that that person while they're doing the extreme thing is marketing a meme coin. They're like, you know, doing something ridiculous. Like I saw this guy pouring chicken broth all over his face. Multiple men actually did this poor chicken broth all over their face in the middle of a supermarket while shouting the name of a meme coin. And that seems to be this like, I guess like magic aspect of it that's really unlocked something because I think there's only so many people that want to watch someone like do something terrible to themselves. But when that person is also engaging in marketing, then it kind of becomes valuable. I was going to say that it's not just the money that comes from the meme coin or the crypto coin itself.

It's also monetization rewards on the platforms. You know, so if in a sense you can do something that is ridiculous enough that a creator is going to talk about it, a journalist is going to talk about it, Twitter is going to have discourse about it. There's this other revenue stream as well, you know, just being that ridiculous, doing anything for attention. I feel like the crypto casino meme coin market is just going to be. kind of this new turbocharged, more immediate and in a way more certain financial reward version of

that rather than, you know, waiting for the TikTok payout to come or waiting for the merch to drop. You can just kind of immediately monetize on this coin. Yeah. Aiden, to me, it feels like this like next era of the influencer sort of ecosystem or attention economy because the people that are completing these tasks are not influencers. And, you know, in peak sort of YouTube prank culture back in 2017, 2018, 2019, like, you had to first build up an audience and then you would do the extreme ridiculous print, you know, then you'd pour broth all over yourself at the middle of the aisle, then you'd get views, then you'd monetize. And it was sort of like this thing that, you know, influencers would engage in this ridiculous

stuff because they could monetize attention. Now anybody can monetize attention. And I think it's like the 99.9% of people that are participating in these challenges on these platforms, they're just average people and often very poor people in a sort of. of developing countries. They're not influencers with any sort of online audience and actually getting online attention for something like this would probably be more harmful to them than better. I'd agree that it's kind of the next step and there is a difference in that it's not someone with, you know, two million followers in California or something doing this. It's someone in

Southern India or somewhere else in the world. What strikes me is that there is some amount of money, less money that the person doing the ridiculous, painful thing is making, but that the lion's share the money is getting made by the people in this crypto community who are hyping up the meme coin, investing in it as is getting pumped, and then having the person humiliate themselves in order to get the money. I think a lot about Bodriar's prediction that the body is the final frontier of capitalism, that once we've exhausted all our outward commodification of everything, we turn inward, and we already sort of see this with looks maxing, and I think this is kind of looks maxing

with other people's bodies. Now that you can optimize your own body with O-Zempic and, you know, peptides and all these new strategies, we can turn to other people's bodies and make them worse than ours, especially if there's a power or income disparity. And that's very alarming to me. If you're watching this video and you like my work, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.com. I don't have any long-term brand partnerships and a lot of my content is effectively demonetized. I've lost major brand deals for speaking out on certain issues, issues and for challenging power. As you can imagine, advertisers are not exactly eager to

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Every dollar of your support makes such a difference. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think of that a lot with like the ways that people are asking others to mutilate themselves, you know, whether it's through like extreme tattoos or, you know, engaging in harmful behavior that could result in becoming deformed. I also think that there's something like beyond. bodies that's happening where it's monetizing like an event. It's monetizing the sort of like the unit of reality where like they're able to create events or create things that are happening in the real world that are ultimately just like meme coin marketing stunts. And this is increasingly

shaping our like offline reality. I think of a couple years ago I was researching potentially doing a book on only fans when a lot of this stuff started to happen. Especially a couple years into the pandemic when people started to get outside more. You started to see a lot of these like collective viral stunts. I mean, I think you could put the look alike. contests in here in some part. But you also started to see people doing things like, I don't know, flashing the NYC portal or just being ridiculous. And a lot of these viral news stories when you dig into them, actually they're just covert promotion for only fans. And then it sort of became like live streamers. And it just seemed like we're reading these news stories about these events or

we're witnessing these events increasingly in the world. And we sort of take them at face value or we maybe see them and have our own opinions on them. But all of it is sort of like covert marketing. And it just seems like there's more and more of this sort of covert marketing that's affecting our like IRL reality in a way that like previously maybe those stunts would mainly affect like the internet reality. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming.

Plus that signature. Wait, for this price? Moment. Old Navy's drapy denim wide leg. All of these meme coins is to get people talking about them. The marketing is the fact that we're doing this podcast right now. And it's so hard to like even talk about this because how are we going to raise awareness without contributing to them? I wrote an article on pump. Dot fund pumping racist memes and the meme coin I mentioned shot up in value after I wrote the article. How can you even discuss this? Their point is to generate discourse at any cost. And once we have discourse about, the discourse which is the common cycle of how social media operates as an event occurs and then we talk about the event and then we talk about how we're talking about the event and all this is still about the marketing look at i mean regular marketing's caught on to look at the

sydney's whine jeans thing from last year that was clearly they just wanted to piss people off so they could get people talking about how they're pissed off but the whole time american eagle stock is going through the roof you see the same thing with with the only fans models they're kind of the pioneers porn is always the pioneer of any new technology and live streamers like clavicular you as long as get people talking about you that is the marketing. And I'm really worried that there's an incentive to create a deliberate memetic info hazard where we want to talk about something that is bad for us. And in doing so, we normalize it. We make more eyeballs move toward that thing. But I mean, at the same time, we have to talk about it because I think not talking about it and

not covering these markets allows them to proliferate in a really unregulated way with zero oversight or scrutiny. And I mean, this is how a lot of the early prediction markets got power. And I think actually those prediction markets are sort of similar in a way to what we're witnessing with pump fun. Like it's all very intertwined. I would also put like UGC, the rise of UGC marketing in here, which we're now witnessing being used for political purposes where political candidates are, you know, in California are paying some random lady in Minnesota or Pennsylvania just to post positively about them through a UGC platform. Literally Tom Steyer did that. So it seems like all of these things like prediction markets, UGC marketing, pump go, et cetera, are sort of tied up in each other.

And they're all about just getting like average regular people to engage in discrete marketing. And that discrete marketing is warping our information ecosystem. It's working our physical reality. It's warping potentially our political system. And it seems really dangerous. I was going to add, I think we're kind of living in a situation where everything is ambiently a sciop, you know, like the Sydney-Sweeney jeans thing is a great example.

The company is totally agnostic to what people are saying to the value. motivating what they're saying. It's just pure engagement. You know, if you can get just the raw volume of clicks and eyeballs on something, then that's how you make money. And I think the same thing is true with a lot of this pump fund stuff, like when I first saw the post of the guy with the tattoo on his head. I think I had a response a lot of people had, which is like, chat, is this real?

You know, is this an AI, could this be an AI generated video? Is this a guy who's in on the plot somehow? Is this to promote the platform? Is this to, you know, he's coordinating somehow with the crypto people? And I think the answer for all of this stuff is to some extent, yes, all of the above. You know, in some way it's a scam. In some way, it's a setup. And there's a certain exhaustion of being like, okay, I could go through it, fact check,

figure out what's going on. But everything I am seeing is to some extent a sci-up. And the horrible thing is that it kind of doesn't matter. And so I think people are just sort of inundated with these things. And everything is like a little bit a lie, a little bit, you know, a scam. Which I think it's made people more conspiratorial. Reasonably so, yeah. I mean, everything is kind of collapsing between, is it a scam and is it real?

I was thinking recently about the Knicks games and how after the Knicks game, they're doing these interviews through Kalshi. And this viral clip went out of this guy saying, my mayor muslin, my bagels, a Jewish, my Christian, Dior Nixon, 4, it was on a Kalshi mic. And if you look at that clip over and over again, you'll see the Kalshi advertise. And then afterward, they do the post interview. And he's talking about, oh, I saw that green Kalshi mic. And I just had to say that, you know.

And so what they're doing is they're farming these real life moments to, they're every like uc the tom steyer stuff absolutely the end goal of brands re-territorializing onto the internet where they're retaking control of the means of power online is that everything is brought to you by a brand ambiently like aiden said i'm curious also just like what motivates people to participate in these markets like obviously there's companies and powerful people that want to leverage these systems to push their own you know agenda or make money etc but we were talking on text about this idea of like making people into kind of Tomogachis. And social media influencers have talked about this for a long time

about feeling like the internet is controlling them or feeling like people just want to dictate, you know, how popular they are, what they do. There was this platform that Indriessen Horowitz founded a few years ago called Nu Nu, that literally allowed you to control different influencers. If an influencer signed up to this platform, basically they would be subject to the whims of their fan base

who could vote on different, you know, things that they did. They could vote if the person broke up with their boyfriend or like, you know, basically sort of affect these influencers' lives. And the influencer would do it for money. And it feels like that was sort of this like proto version of what we're seeing now just with real people where I think there's a certain amount of people that are going on these meme coin sites because they want to exert some sort of level of control over others.

I would say it's sort of twofold. One reason is kind of craven in that everything's ambiently a sci-op. But then the second part is maybe a little bit less evil, like the internet Tomagocchi thing. The creator who made that argument about Charlie Demilio, one of the original TikTok dancing people. This creator, Dottie, made a great video about it. And what she sort of said was people were using Charlie D'Meliou to talk about techno-capitalism. All the controversies about, could Charlie D'emilio, you know, take a dance from someone? Is that plagiarism? How do we deal with things online? And then the creator, the internet's tomagotchi kind of becomes the text

by which people are talking about this. In the same way, like a movie might represent something that society needs to talk about. And people argue about the movie, people argue about the creator. And I think when you're at the center, that as a creator, It's painful, but it's maybe not quite as evil as like people being like, oh, hey, I'm going to use a platform to go make somebody in a, you know, a country in another part of the world hurt themselves because I can be in on the scam instead of being scammed. Yeah, but it is also what like influencers were doing for content. Like there was those years of, I mean, PewDiePie literally got canceled for this where like he paid a bunch of people in a foreign country to hold up a really offensive sign about Jewish people, you know? And like that was a, this popular thing back on in the day. of Fiverr. And I was on thumbtack, actually, looking for help hanging some stuff because I moved

recently. And like, you can pay people to do anything for you. It's kind of crazy. So it seems like we're just seeing this sort of like gig work economy like put onto like internet marketing now. And and that I think has some kind of like weird implications. I've been developing what I call the lull cow theory of the internet where we started out with creators called lull cows that people make fun of in prod just to elicit a reaction, right? But everything on the internet is a form of lalkowism when the body is controlled by the viewer. I mean, cameo is a form of this. Like, you just make the creator say something you want to say, right?

You are using that person's body to produce an effect that you want. And once we move to other people, that becomes like everybody is a cow online. By making herself legible to other people, you make yourself able to be poked and prodded and manipulated. I'm also really worried about how even looking at someone inherently in real life is of kind of a violent, an act because you make them an object of your possession. To look is to have. You project your ideas about who this person might be, even though they're infinitely more complex.

And then Sontag writes about how the camera, to take a photograph is an extension of this. You memorialize this person in your image in the way you want them to look. The video absolutely is the same thing. And so when we have this sort of element of audience capture or control of the people making the videos, it is a form of violence onto the creator. And again, I've made myself legible as an influencer. that's okay with me, but I'm worried about everyday users online where if you have your account on Instagram set publicly, that just opens up.

Like, I see random posts go viral on Instagram all the time. And you have no more control over who on Twitter is going to be reposting this image you sent out. And now there's like creeps and weirdos and perverts like on your Instagram post. And you never meant to do that. But by making yourself appear online, you become a lull cow. Yeah. I also think just like all of the people that are willing.

to debase themselves online, you know, for these pump fun go challenges or bounties are low-cowes. Like they're engaging in low-cow behavior. That is what everybody is sort of getting out of it. I mean, I was watching some of these videos and people just doing like the most ridiculous things. And also I think the bounties are aimed at humiliation kind of in a way that like, I guess you wouldn't pay somebody for on cameo as overtly. I'm just thinking of this video that went viral on X that we were talking about on our chat of like this older. black man who had tied chunks of watermelon to his face and just repeated the phrase, I'm your friend, the watermelon man, 10,000 times for $950.

I mean, it's bleak. There's a weird unwholesomeness, too, not just in the fact that it's bleak and humiliating what's going on, but that it's like people are egging that on. You know, it's not just one person who asked the guy to, you know, tie the watermelons to his face and repeat that phrase. It's kind of like the mass intelligence of people. Well, it's everyone that holds the meme coin, right? Yeah, it's the crowd itself, sort of being able to command one person's body and get them to do something out in the world for them.

And I think with creators, sometimes there's a positive side of that, which is that you might be getting someone to go out into the world and do charity work. Or you might be getting someone to go out into the world and talk about the issue you care about. But then there's always this flip side that's all. always there and that I think is especially accentuated with this pump fund crypto stuff where they only really care about money and, you know, power where it's, you can make that person do whatever you want. You can be the puppeteer. Yeah, but I would say actually a significant amount of bounties are positive stuff. I think because kindness influencers and the Mr. Beastification of the internet has happened and like everybody loves kindness slop, like actually a huge amount

of these bounties are positive. I'll give some examples that I pulled. I mean, you can get paid $100 to collect trash at your local park while promoting a meme coin. You can get paid to buy a stranger's groceries while promoting a meme coin. You can get paid to give out flowers to random people on the street while promoting a meme coin. You can get paid to pay a homeless person to sing on the street while promoting a meme coin. You can get paid to plant trees while promoting a meme coin. And again, like the rub is you have to be promoting the meme coin. Like for instance, with that bounty that was about picking up trash, the person has to film themselves shouting Bounty Trash, the name of the Mienkoi. I'm sorry if that helps them while doing it. And it's like,

yeah, is it good that we've created a financialized system that incentivizes people to go pick up trash in their neighborhood? Sure, but I think it would be weird to see that person also like picking up trash shouting bounty trash. Like that just feels like dystopian. I just feel like our physical reality is being increasingly warped by these markets, whether it's prediction markets, pump fun go, et cetera. It is affecting our physical world and that you have stuff like the polymarket bets that seem to be made by members of the military who have advanced knowledge of things. And you have this kind of reorientation I see of not just the influencer economy and creators and journalism, but also like politicians towards like the short-term thing that will give you

the immediate payout. And I worry that we just see this kind of continual looting, you know, of just sort of reality in order to cash out on your pump fund, meme coin. Because who cares about actually your reputation when, hey, I can make $300 by shouting something crazy on the internet. And there's a certain amount of that you could do and things are fine. But if you do too much, stuff starts to fall apart, maybe. I'm concerned about that rise of political UGC. In Indonesia, they have a concept of a buzzer, which is user-generated political commentator, that they are deliberate sciops meant to promote a candidate. They're paid by campaigns. And you're sort of seeing the beginning of this with

the Tom Steyer stuff, but to a much lesser degree. In Indonesia, the people will concept warn each other in social media comments like beware of buzzers. And there's a general heightened awareness of the fact that everybody's running a sci-op and they've kind of given up on that. It's just like, all right, now we just got to pay attention if this is a sci-op or not. And that's probably going to be the end point of the U.S. as well, where every election can also be manipulated, especially through bounties, especially through people's financially vested prediction market calls. So I'm really concerned about that. Yeah. I feel like people just lose trust in the world. And I mean, Charlie Roasel wrote a good piece on this more related to sort of polymarket, which is I think was sort of like the beginning of this shift into this new attention economy.

And Jason Cudler at 404 media called it the depravity economy. So what Charlie wrote was as the depravity economy grows, it will break whatever trust we have left in one another. If prop bets spur athletes to play differently, this poses an existential threat to the integrity of live sports. If people believe that anonymous government insiders are profiting off classified information, what reason is there to trust anything that the administration says? There's a term called the Liar's dividend, which describes an information environment where mis and disinformation such as deep fakes become so prevalent that anyone accused of doing something awful can simply use them to cast out on genuine evidence.

Prediction markets offer an insider's dividend creating an environment where the prevalence of prediction markets and insider trading becomes great enough that everyone assumes a given decision was made to enrich those within edge. And I feel like this is actually even exacerbated by something like Pump Fund Go, where It's like everything can be seen in service of a meme coin. I mean, for instance, I was walking down the street in L.A. recently. And I saw this guy doing just ridiculous things. He was like drawing with chalk kind of all over.

I thought maybe he was doing like an art project or something. But then my second thought was like, oh, this is probably some stunt. Like this is probably maybe it's going to be a meme coin promotion. Maybe it's going to be something. Like you just don't know what to trust at all. And I think you see this rippling down where like people just, we're in this sort of like low trust. information ecosystem, or not even like the controversy over something like geese, right, which did engage in UGC marketing.

That doesn't mean that the band is not popular on its own right, but like just the existence of marketing kind of like discredits everything. And I mean, you saw this actually also with the conversation around clipping. We all know that like clipping campaigns, every brand does them. And like you can't make somebody popular just from clipping alone. There has to be something behind them. Like clippicular took off not just because of clipping, but because he was this sort of like avatar for all of these bigger trends that

people want to talk about. And I feel like now that we're seeing just so much marketing and every single event is now like a marketing vehicle, it makes it easier to sort of discredit everything. And then it's like, what can you even trust? And even if that chalk artist made a really beautiful illustration on the sidewalk, if they're an artist, they're going to have to post it online to get renown as an artist. Like, I think Bekeese is a fine band, but at the end of the day, they are, both truths can be held at the same time that they are sciopping you and that they're a good band. And the same thing with this hypothetical chalk artist. The end result, I think, of all of this ecosystem is that we return to economy of trust. And authenticity has been a buzzword for a while,

but authenticity is always like this appearance of trust rather than trust itself or appearance of truth. Trust will be this sort of you really need to have a deep, ongoing relationship with this person where you are convinced that they are not trying to manipulate your headspace. Yeah, and I feel like also you're going to see a lot more people just say, like, I am actively not engaging in marketing, right? Or I have never engaged in marketing. Like, this is truly organic or like, I'm doing this for the love of the game. I'm pouring broth on my, you know, on my head just because I want to. I don't know.

But I do think like when you can't trust anything, there is this like fatigue that sets in. And I think a lot of people also just want to like check out. Like they're exhausted by by the like overt marketing that were bombarded by all day. and now this like covert marketing that just seems to have like warped every single aspect of our world. I see that exhaustion as well. And just everything could be fake. Everything could be just a marketing sciop. What if I don't actually like geese because I like geese?

I guess just emotionally draining space to be in. Yeah. And I think, I mean, I think this is also just what's driving this like offline movement and people trying to kind of like escape this world. What I would say to those people is like good luck because the offline world is also just equally warped. Like the offline world has become the. fault stage for the internet and you personally logging off is not going to allow you to opt out

of this society that we've built. It's just going to make you less informed. Yeah, and you're downstream of all these ideas which are actually coming from online. I have a lot of concerns about that too, but I do think there is something real in that move to the offline, the rejection of the internet. And you can again hold multiple truths. That's beautiful to be offline and you should spend a little time online trying to figure out what's happening. I've been thinking a lot about like postmodernism and the whole state of like, oh, everything's fake, everything's been fake. We've been on this, honestly, since the 70s, 80s, right? It's kind of tired.

It's exhausting. Postmodernism is the end logic of capitalism. And yet we're kind of moving on, you know, we're done with thinking everything is fake. And at a certain point, you just got to like the band geese if you like the band geese. So that's kind of that immediacy or post postmodernism or whatever. It's just like a rejection of the fact that everything's fake and a subjective creation of the real for yourself. At the same time, you know, while we're doing this, we can actively be calling for stuff like pump go to be taken down because that's ridiculous, but we do need to make our own meaning in the world.

And even a video in its own appearance, if I tell you I don't run any ads, I'm marketing myself through my own video that way. You know, the marketing is the marketing. And then if you talk about the marketing, it's awesome marketing. Nothing isn't marketing. But at the same time, if everything is marketing, nothing is marketing. Things simply are exactly as they appear. And you can decide for yourself what you want out of that.

Yeah, there's something sort of freeing about that. But I do worry about the proliferation of the UGC economy pump fund. on polymarket, et cetera, because especially just like, I don't know, I was reading again that inflation has exceeded wages once again. Like the economy is not working for so many people. So many people are desperate, even just outside of America. You know, there are all these people in these desperate situations. And it feels like we're building this, these new economies in ways that are really unethical

and that are sort of harmful that I think like strip people of their humanity and just kind of like erode a lot of our like. offline world. What I worry about is that we get into a situation where if I want to have an effect on the world, it becomes easier to do that through, you know, placing a polymarket bet that sort of changes a situation or trying to pump a meme coin than kind of like through voting or through volunteering or getting involved. You know, like if grift is the only option, that's kind of the real specter that terrifies

me here. But the offline people are sort of challenging that cultural logic, I think. There is, it's a order to rejection of like, this is the end point. of capitalism. It's just like building on itself, rejecting all workers even, and it's just going to run as its own machine by itself. And then there are the people saying, well, I don't even want to play this system. I'm going to play a completely different game. And of course, there's the online performance of the offline, but the people who are actually offline trying to play by a different logic, giving a homeless people, because you feel like giving a homeless people, that sort of is

that reclamation of, I'm just playing by a different system. I'm playing a different set of rules. That's not to say these online rules aren't real in some sense and are influencing all of us. And I really think the end point of all of this is that we can hold multiple truths at the same time. And, you know, do I contradict myself? Let me contradict myself. I think it's all just kind of really hard. But I do think it's important to like talk about this stuff and cover these things. And I struggle too with the meme coin world because they're all so brainrotted.

And a lot of them like, I mean, I wrote about the Wall Street bet stuff and like all they want is their meme stock to be mentioned in the New York Times, you know. But at the same time, we have to talk about the fact that they're trying to take over AMC or whatever. So I think it's good to kind of like analyze it. And I do hope that there is more scrutiny on some of these challenges. And I do think also that like some of this stuff should just be socially and acceptable. Like we've broken something about like, I don't know, trust in society or just interpersonal relationships and respect where I'm just like, dude, you're pouring broth all over yourself in the middle of a supermarket.

Like people are shopping here, you know, like let's be a little bit kinder to each other and let's not just treat everybody as props and content and et cetera. And like let's like like like you said kind of Adam like play a different game and like, like live a little bit more and like have a little empathy for people around us and like just try to opt out of of this stuff as much as we can when we're talking about these people who just should play by better rules like you when they're anonymous you can't even enforce like a social bond social trust there is an important place for anonymity on the internet but i also worry just how much like again good and bad i'm really worried that simply the fact that people are anonymous means you can't

create a social cohesion or trust and that's not saying we should have you know digital IDs either, but how do we have both of that? You know, I don't know. Yeah, and I guess like, what I mean by anti-social is like, sure, it's not the part of like the desperate person, but I do think that it's like people in power and people with agency that are creating these systems. And I think that they should be more responsible. I feel like a boomer or something.

I probably won't happen without regulation because it is kind of a race to the bottom. And Trump has talked about releasing his own prediction market, et cetera, you know, so like we'll probably have like pumped up fun on truth social soon or something. You know, like it'll all merge together. But I do wish this stuff was stigmatized a little bit more. Not that people are like hating on desperate people, of course, but just that like, you know, a lot of people are not desperate. A lot of people are just 22 year old crypto bros participating in these challenges. And I think they should be somewhat socially ostracized for doing it.

I don't know. It's bad not just because of what they're doing, but because of their souls, Taylor. You know, it's like they should want something higher for themselves than just to make money and get views on the internet. And we should want something higher for the internet and these platforms than just. just making money and getting views and like going viral. You know, like, I have this thought sometimes that the way we're using the internet, it's as if, you know, the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids of Giza, and we found out that the reason they did it was to sell fishing equipment rather than to, you know, make a God

king, a palace that he could carry into the afterlife. Like, the internet, this thing that connects every single human person to like, hypothetically every other human person. And the best thing we found to do for it is force a dude to tie watermelon to his face and repeat a phrase. It's like, we should just, for the sake of our own souls, like, want something higher than that. Bring back pyramids for gods. Yeah. Maybe we can get the Pope to weigh in, since this is, you know, the question of souls. Well, there is that religious revival happening. I honestly think the Luddite movement is also a spiritual movement, and the rejection of the

current system is a move back to the human soul. And really, if we are to challenge this, we should challenge these systems and try to structure them in a way. It's hard to structure any system that enhances the the soul because the soul is something that can't be categorized put into boxes, but you can create incentive structures that are perhaps more aligned with our natural inclination toward kindness and amplify that rather than amplify this this base desire to make money. And that's my one other thing against the offline movement is it's like, yes, the problem might be the phone, but the real problem is like you. Like, we all need to work on ourselves.

Like, if you feel like you're using social media in an unhealthy, antisocial way, you're going to be using the offline world in that same way. you know, we have to as a culture, you know, hold people to standards and work on ourselves. And that doesn't mean, like, people should be forgotten or, like, condemned. It just means that we need to build a better community of care, hopefully. And now I feel like that real. That's like every leftist book ends with people being like, oh, mutual aid, you know. Well, thank you guys so much for joining me to chat about all of this.

Thank you for having us. Thank you. All right. That's it for this week's episode of Power User. If you like my work, please, please buy a paid subscription to my substack. user mag.co. That's usermag.com or support me on Patreon via the link below. I currently have zero long-term advertisers, zero outside funding, and I take zero political money. The only way I can continue to produce this show and do my independent journalism is through the direct support of people like you. Every single dollar makes such a difference. So please, please go to usermag.com, buy a paid

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