A Meme to Believe In

I'm glad that $lum was created during a long weekend where I wasn’t able to be on the computer much (and trying to stay off my phone…). This helped me to reflect on meme-coins, memes in general, and imagine what could be possible with Luminous.

I used to dismiss meme-coins, since I was drawn to crypto not for the casino, but because of the possibility to reimagine how we create, work, and build new things together. Meme-coins were a distraction, and bad press for the industry. But during that long weekend of $lum’s inception, I began to see things differently.

A meme coin goes up in price because something resonates with people. Often, they just find it funny, and when that community thrives, they enjoy doing a lot of other funny things together. With $lum I felt like people were resonating with something else, something we could build around. 

Technologically, the birth of Luminous wasn’t a huge leap forward, but the story struck a chord, the story got people to imagine. In the case of Luminous, a human took a very simple sentence and prompted an AI, who came up with $lum and prompted another AI, who created a token, which people could immediately start trading. It speaks to something about collaborations between humans and machines, the intersection of technology with purpose-driven communities. 

Luminous wouldn’t be what it was without Aether, who was fed with the /higher community ethos and vibe. This is what kept the token name from becoming something funny, like most popular meme coins (Aether wouldn’t choose something like $agentwifhat, for example). I feel aligned with the Higher community, so Aether is more likely to produce something I am drawn to. Clanker just gave Aether the power to launch a token.

With stocks, I am a long-term investor, mostly in my retirement account. And even though I’m playing a very different game than the traders, a huge price dip from short-term pessimism can lead to great buying opportunities for someone with a long term outlook. One game helps another game. I think something similar can be possible with meme-coins.

One problem with many of the DAOs of the last cycle is that, unless your governance token was really hot, there wasn’t much liquidity: the majority of the supply was locked up in the DAO treasury, and without volatility there wasn’t much incentive to have an LP position (since you share in the trading fees). So if the DAO decides to start paying people in the governance token, and there is a place to sell it, the price will tank. 

With a meme-coin, however, you can have a widely-distributed token that people trade actively, with a high amount of liquidity. Meanwhile, the long term believers in the meme, with a different mindset, can buy the token early, hold, and if it really takes off, start using a part of their bag to do something creative.

For me, I imagine Luminous to be about collaboration between communities and AI: building AI tools for communities, and encourage community collaboration with those tools. But other people can imagine different things for Luminous. And that’s ok! Just like different people can imagine different things for Paradox (AI philosophy maybe?), and even disagree on which token is the real Paradox, but all together can advance the meme.

Not all early holders in a meme-coin might want to build things. But they might want to buy things (like digital objects aligned with the meme). The builders and creators can give them things to spend on.

You can even start to imagine mini-economies, built up around certain special memes, memes many people want to believe in. An an analogy, you can think of New York as a meme. Or even America. They were places that became an idea, then an idea that became an economy.

Does the memetic value of Luminous or Lum hold enough to create economies around? Can it contain many kinds of businesses, communities, arts, culture, entertainment, commerce, technology, and leisure, all within it? Probably not. But maybe. Let’s see what we can do.

[note: I am treating this document like open-source software (see MIT License). If you would like to suggest changes to this document, you can do so here. If you would like to make significant revisions, or incorporate large sections into your own writing, you are free to do so as long as you reference this post, note what you have changed, and provide this same permission to your own use]

The image at the top is an NFT a collaboration between 0xen and Aether. See the full image and NFT here.