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Introduction

The 1970s marked the period when the future was dragged into the present with the infiltration of futures markets and hedging into every area of life, making uncertainty tradeable. What once stood as stability and long-term orientations turned into a field of risk and speculation. As the promises of a stable future started to rust, individuals abandoned long-term planning and investment strategies to imagine future loss and gain in the present. The western modernist linear model of time –past, present, and future– blurred, leaving us with no choice but to abandon it for the dominance of the present on both a psychological and societal level. The broad horizon of time shrank, and hyper-volatile markets marked time as simultaneity.

In the last decade, with the introduction of decentralized finance through blockchain technology, and especially meme-coins there was another very significant rupture in how the finance as we know works. Both a rupture, as blockchain technology aimed at democratizing financial systems from traditional finance and government bounding regulations, and a significant case study for observing the core mechanisms of acceleration in the modern age, which are briefly discussed above. Hence, this paper argues that meme coins and blockchain technology represent a significant and contemporary case study, exemplifying the convergence of hyper-capitalism, social acceleration, finance, and culture. It posits them as a crucial phenomenon worthy of in-depth academic examination. Drawing on the theories of modernization, time-space compression and social acceleration in the face of broken hopes under capitalism by David Harvey and Hartmut Rosa, this paper will argue that the operational principles of blockchain technology and the culture of meme coins exhibit a profound parallelism with the conditions created by time-space compression and social acceleration. This parallelism is evident in their inherent volatility, their rapid adaptation to turbo-capitalist markets, and their capacity to generate new forms of community and meaning based on contemporary norms and values, hence serving as a powerful illustration of these theories. First, establishing the contemporary conditions of the era through David Harvey's theory of time-space compression and Hartmut Rosa's social acceleration theory, it will address the phenomenon of  ‘meme-coin trader’ whose profil is carefully curated by and for the continuity of the process. Following a brief explanation of meme coins and decentralized networks, the paper will emphasize the significance of meme coins as a case study, highlighting their inherent volatility and their capacity for meaning-making function as responses to the pressures of navigating and finding agency within the accelerated, uncertain terrain of post-Fordist era.

A Glance Into the World of Blockchain and Meme Coins

Blockchain technology was first introduced in 2009, by a developer under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto as the first decentralized digital ledger that securely holds, records and verifies transactions across a peer-to-peer network. As the name blockchain contains, the chain of blocks each are securely linked to one before it with cryptographic hashes, blockchain technology ensures transparency and immutability, making every data entered irreversible (Built In 2025). When first designed, Bitcoin was imagined to revolutionize and democratize financial systems with its decentralized technology that prevents a single authority to control it. Similarly, Ethereum was introduced in 2013 with a similar mission of decentralizing finance and freeing transactions from intermediaries such as banks, exchanges, or brokers (ESMA 2024). Throughout the years since the development of Bitcoin, various other alternative coins (such as Ethereum, Ripple or Solana) were introduced, all of them with different missions such as ensuring faster or cheaper transactions than the others.

Meme coins, in their simplest definition, are cryptocurrencies inspired by viral internet memes. Unlike functionally differentiated chains such as Solana -which enables high transaction speed- (Phantom 2025) or Ethereum -allows users to build a variety of applications more than other alt-coins- (Coinbase 2025), meme coins hold no inherent functional value nor do they claim to. Instead, their market capitalization depends on speculation, virality, and attention, rendering them extremely unpredictable and highly volatile. One of the first meme-coins, Dogecoin (DOGE), was launched in 2013 after a viral Japanese dog meme. After gaining attraction and forming a community of internet users who helped popularize the meme, its market capitalization reached 88 billion US dollars in 2021 (Nani 2022, 1722). Today, meme coins can be created around virtually any concept. A viral news story, coins launched by celebrities under their own names, or short-lived “scam” coins designed solely for pump-and-dump schemes. What began as entertainment without utility has now become the easiest method for converting virtually any idea into financial value on-chain without restriction.

Pump.fun: Another Revolution in the Acceleration

The development of the launchpad pump.fun made it revolutionarily easy for everyone to launch a coin on the Solana chain. Since its introduction to the crypto market in 2024, more than 6 million coins have been launched through the app. What this development has granted in the end, everyday more than hundred of coins graduating and going from zero to millions. Hence, for users whose period of holding a coin are already short, the development of Pump.fun has made the meme-coin trading ecosystem more volatile than ever. It has accelerated trading habits and introduced meme-coin speculation even to people with no prior interest in finance, primarily through the gamification (and even gamble-ification) of financial practices. Under these conditions, being a meme-coin trader effectively means becoming an extremely online swing trader, seeking to catch and profit from the next viral meta rather than investing for the long term, due to the inherently unpredictable and volatile nature of the medium. 

Image 2: $PWEASE

Meme-coins as a Product of $TIME-$PACE Compression and Virtual Territories

David Harvey identified the standardization of time during the Industrial Revolution as a measure designed to accelerate the circulation of capital.  This process has been theorized as ‘time-space compression’. The annihilation of space through time marks a fundamental dynamic of capitalism, as it gives the advantage of controlling space through decentralization and geographical mobility by eroding unionization, which happens mostly at the site of labor production: the factories. On the other hand, satellite developments in the communication system eliminated the obstacles of distance and cost, enabling companies all over the world to be in the know; hence, ‘the disappearance of time and space was materialized’ (Harvey 1990, 293). 

Meme-coins represent a significant contemporary manifestation of David Harvey's time-space compression. Whereas industrial capitalism sought to enhance control over factories by standardizing time, financial capitalism, through meme coins, has pushed this compression to its absolute limit by rendering geography and physical production entirely obsolete. The launchpad platform Pump.fun has democratized capital accumulation by giving platform to anyone who has internet access, leading to an ecosystem where asset holding periods can be as short as seconds. Mirroring the way a viral video propagates across all geographies in moments, a meme coin can skyrocket to a multi-million dollar valuation and then shed most of its value within hours. 

Image 3: $CHARLIE ‘RIP CHARLIE KIRK. The coin was launched right after the announcement of the far-right political activist’s death, reaching its all time high the first day of launch before losing its volume and market capitalization falling to 418k.

While blockchain technology revolutionarily decentralized finance, similar to internet blogs, meme-coin communities reconstruct multitudes of tightly-knit, self-referential micro-spheres to function on-chain. This kind of a formation of ‘virtual villages’ where the community based online rituals and norms stand in for the erosion of tradition, is a byproduct of post-Fordist annihilation of space by time. 

In meme coins and decentralized finance, the ‘local geographical circumstances’ are no longer bound to national boundaries but online niches and rabbit holes in platforms such as X, Telegram and Discord channels where memes and community interaction are produced as the raw material for the price action. A meme born or popularized somewhere on the internet blogs or social media becomes monetized rapidly on chain by the fast speculators and developers. Without any geographical barriers to block the reach, a coin launched somewhere miles away in the world can reach thousands, millions of market capitalization in an instant, available to everyone with an internet connection simultaneously. While often moving within self-referential, and conservative norms,  meme-coin communities form a kind of online village bound to and socialize around their own rituals and values, despite their decentralized and international mechanics.

Image 4: $MILADY developers addressing its community as ‘Milady Village’

From Technological Acceleration to Social Acceleration in Meme-Coin Frenzi

Changing investment habits in post-modernism can be described as hyper-accelerationist (and consequently hyper-capitalist), which both adapt to and actively transform the era through modern technology, inevitably trigger profound transformations within the social sphere itself. Although groundbreaking technological change is not unique to recent history, its pace has accelerated unprecedentedly since the Industrial Revolution. This acceleration became particularly irregular and intense after the 1970s, driven by the concurrent forces of financialization and rapid technological progress, which together have fundamentally reshaped social life. In the post-Fordist world, all that is known to humanity has changed drastically to become liquid, disintegrated from previous forms; ambiguity over concrete reality. The acceleration of time and the domination of time over space, the high-speed changes in everyday life, gave birth to a world impossible to mediate through pre-modern codes. What the modern condition of time-space brought for the human condition and social sphere was more than just daily tasks squeezed between the clock's hands. The experience of modernization brought about dynamization and transformation, while the culture of modernity brings about the interpretation, leashing, and working out of these experiences, according to Hartmut Rosa (Rosa 2013, 36). The mentality of oversimplification, of either glorifying something or vilifying it, parallel with the simplificationist mindset of modernisation (Rosa 2013, 37) has become the dominant understanding of the zeitgeist, fueled by the accelerating pace of time and the resulting notion that 'there is no time to sit down, think, and understand.' In parallel, due to the highly volatile nature of meme-coins, a common practice when trading called “apeing” has become a popular way to trade. Defined in the website CoinMarketCap, “Apeing is when a cryptocurrency trader buys a token shortly after the token project launch without conducting thorough research, usually because they are fearful of missing out on potential gains that could be lost if they hesitate in order to conduct due diligence.” Since meme-coins possess no inherent use value, but operate through dynamics akin to a Ponzi scheme, reliant on hype, attention, and the commodification of their audience, they are highly unpredictable. Consequently, the dominant sentiment ruling the market resonates as: the fear of missing out and acting faster than other traders.

 To ensure the continuity of high trading volumes in the chain, sustaining a collective mind-share is crucial. This strategy is sustained by promising participants that the market will rise euphorically and that, should they invest sufficiently, they will ultimately acquire life-changing wealth. The entire ecosystem depends on keeping this overly saturated, rather toxically positive collective belief alive.

Image 5: A motivational tweet by a user.

Whether it is the modern idealization of traditional families, traditional gender roles, or the reconstruction of the American Dream, the newly emerging myth-making processes vary from their traditional ancestors, often fragile narratives to provide a sense of place and identity. As the market under modern capitalism favors short-term adaptability over long-term adjustment to conditions created by ever-accelerating mechanical and financial developments, the postmodern condition needs to find ways to cope with or accept the necessity of synchronizing with the era's essence of extremely rapid change. The shift in the modern world does not need an excuse to validate its own speed. It moves for the movement's sake, accelerates for the love of acceleration, and breaks free from the cumbersome simplicity of the pre-modern lifestyle. What happens, then, is a friction in the human psyche, whose adaptation to accelerating technological advancements is much slower and more painful than machinic adaptation. Unlike the uniquely mechanic evolution cycle of machines per se, the process for the human psyche and the mass adaptation of societies involves different responses to change: blocking out sensory stimuli, denial in the face of rapid changes, a blasé attitude, and developing the muscle of longing for the past and nostalgia, stripping the individuality of continuously evolving conditions through new adjustments. When the security of the extended family's bonds and values gives way to urban individuality, when the preaching of the church no longer resonates, and when the locks of the boxes that both imprisoned and held society together have been opened, society is left face to face with the necessity of constructing a harbor to protect itself from the cold maelstrom of modernity.

Temporal collapse brings about the disposability of old values, stable relationships, attachment to things, and lifestyle in exchange for an accelerative thrust in the larger society (Harvey 1990, 286). What is witnessed in the meme-coin communities, then, anchoring a community sentiment around a new profile of an extremely online trader, who embodies a mixture of societal norms and power structures such as racism, misogyny and toxic masculinity, which ultimately reinforce and reproduce the perfect conditions for the capitalist wheel to spin. Thus, the meme-coin trader embodies the hyper-accelerated, geographically teleportable subject of contemporary financial capital whereas being constantly immersed to certain codes of ‘masculinity’ and doctrines of which they should live their lives by.

Image 7: A Viral account on crypto twitter posting about how a meme-coin trader's routine should be.

Image 8: The same user hyping up the community by contrasting traditional employment and modern living conditions with crypto trading, implying crypto trading as an escape from the instability of life under neoliberal conditions

Most meme-coin traders, are also called “WAGMI (we’re all gonna make it) normies”, or used more commonly outside of the crypto space as ‘Crypto Bros’ form a great example to the meaning making through reconstruction of the conservative social codes. The tweet’s list of rules (Image 5) (“wake at 5 a.m., go to the gym, check charts, take a cold shower, reconnect with God, go outside, take risks”) works as a kind of compass for modern individuals whose hopes are broken in the face of low wages, rising housing prices, job insecurity with highly accelerating technology changing life chances for a constant unknown. Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity explores how the systemic problems of modernity has been individualized and turned into the quest of the individual: “And there is no more 'Big Brother watching you'; it is now your task to watch the swelling ranks of Big Brothers and Big Sisters, and watch them closely and avidly, in the hope of finding something useful for yourself: an example to imitate or a word of advice about how to cope with your problems, which, like their problems, need to be coped with individually and can be coped with only individually.” (Bauman 2000, 30). In parallel, meme coin communities are commonly fueled by the rhetoric of "self-rescue." This hype is presented as the way to be a ‘dominant alpha male’, imposed through cultural norms of the communities and served as the single truth and something solid to hold on to, to individuals who have already lost their sense of solid values to ground themselves within the market driven 'liquid modernity'.  In this environment, ‘hustlers’, the ones who practice self-optimization, and the ones who constantly try to keep up the rhythm of the market are seen as keeping the right mindset. The collective sense of staying ‘bullish’ no matter how bad the market conditions are, becomes the mindset everybody should share, where being ‘bearish’ is condemned and is a reason for being criticized in the community for ‘slowing down’. Hence, meme-coin culture creates new codes that glorify speed, risk taking, and market-driven living while using the cracks left after the broken hopes of modernity.

Image 9: A crypto-twitter user criticizing  traders with a negative market sentiment or opinion.

In conclusion, crypto and blockchain should be examined both as a symptom and as a driver of the mechanisms of temporal acceleration. In order to understand how meme-coins form a great example of the post-Fordist conditions he frameworks of Harvey and Rosa, the cultural and social spheres generated by these technologies, the modes of life they promote, and the new forms of subjectivity they will be examined. However, all these values shared are built on highly individualistic values, rather than aiming for the collective ‘acceleration’. Even though users gather around creating posts and contributing to community building (commonly referred to as ‘bag working’) for a specific coin, trading ultimately is the question of ‘who will sell at the top and secure the greatest profit?’. Hence, an act that primarily targets individual gains over collective productivity and growth.

Bibliography 

Built In. 2025. “Blockchain: What It Is, How It Works, Why It Matters.” Built In, August 13, 2025. https://builtin.com/blockchain.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. https://giuseppecapograssi.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/bauman-liquid-modernity.pdf.

Coinbase. 2025. “What Is Ethereum?” Coinbase. Accessed September 30, 2025. https://www.coinbase.com/en-de/learn/crypto-basics/what-is-ethereum.

European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). 2024. Decentralised Finance: A Categorisation of Smart Contracts. ESMA Working Paper ESMA50-43599798-9913. Paris: ESMA. https://www.esma.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2024-08/ESMA50-43599798-9913_Working_Paper_Decentralised_Finance_-_A_Categorisation_of_smart_contracts.pdf.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

Nani, Albi. 2022. “The Doge Worth 88 Billion Dollars: A Case Study of Dogecoin.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 28 (6): 1705–1727. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211070417.

A though piece I wrote for Kıyı Music on the first ever fanzine created in Turkey. 2020 "Recently, before the quarantine period had even started, I had set out on a walk to a bookstore to get the new issue of a fanzine I had been following. On the way, I came across another bookstore that we all know well. Although it's not a place I usually visit, I had plenty of time, so I thought I’d go in and take a look. I started browsing through the new-generation literary magazines lined up next to the comic magazines. As the store was quite crowded that day, the counter was in a bit of disarray. While I was sifting through the shelves, a staff member who seemed more authoritative, as he was giving directions to the others, approached me and asked if I needed help. Although I wasn’t specifically looking for anything at that moment and was quite sure that what I had originally set out for wouldn’t be there, I felt the need to ask him something since he seemed so attentive. I blurted out the question of whether they had any fanzines. Expecting the answer to be a definitive "Unfortunately, no," which I was sure would be the case, I was instead met with the question, "What is that? Is it the name of a magazine?"

I then went on to briefly explain what a fanzine is, and his response was, "I’m not familiar with that, unfortunately." I thanked him and left the bookstore. Even though fanzines are not designed to be read by large audiences by their very nature, I still believed they survived, albeit barely, as a publication medium. Yet, the fact that an employee at perhaps one of Turkey's busiest bookstore branches had never even heard of "fanzine" was not something I expected. Realizing that some people are already unfamiliar with the term made me think again about the possibility of fanzine culture slowly fading away and being replaced entirely by internet blogs.

human condition, 2024

s-tier currency (April 2025)

digital work.

The year is 2025. For an average human living in the territories dressed with internet cables, the day starts by grabbing the smartphone and consuming whatever the algorithm has to offer. From grocery shopping to becoming a millionaire overnight through crypto trades, everything seems possible from behind the screen. Societies are increasingly shaped by the very algorithms that dictate behaviors, tastes, and desires. From the frenzy of aesthetic surgery trends to the instantaneous viral success of products, from the commodification of reality to the proliferation of memes, we have become subjects of a culture where everything is recontextualized, reshaped, and hyper-real. Our daily lives and social habits are shaped by the algorithm we constantly labor to. The lines between the real and the simulated blur further, as Baudrillard whispers from the early days of the internet, "We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning." (Baudrillard 1994:79). Here, meaning becomes a construct of virtuality, a mere image or simulation of the real. As our perception of reality becomes distorted in an AI-mediated fashion, whose pace of progress is beyond our perception of the pace of living, the human condition and social order are caught in a tension between the expectations of a world driven by accelerating technological advancements and the limitations of societies struggling to keep up. The contemporary condition whispers to us to either try and stay relevant or stay out of the picture. But even then, salvation is not guaranteed. In fact, nothing is guaranteed except the increasing quest for the relentless advance of an unchecked, accelerationist future.