Ideas have economic properties: supply, demand, scarcity, value. The meme is the unit of intellectual currency, and its price is set by attention markets — not by truth.
Classical economics describes how scarce goods flow through markets. Memetic economics applies that same framework to ideas. A meme — any unit of cultural transmission, from a phrase to a framework to a political position — has supply, demand, a market price, and production costs.
Supply is how many instances of the meme exist and how easily it can be replicated. Demand is how many people want to hold or spread the meme. Price is the attention required to encounter and process it. Value is what the holder gets from possessing it.
The market for memes, like financial markets, is not perfectly efficient. Price and value diverge. Memes can be overvalued (widely held but low-value), undervalued (high-value but poorly distributed), or simply mispriced because the market hasn't processed the available information yet.
Unlike goods markets, the meme market has a hard supply constraint on the demand side: human attention is finite and non-expandable. Every meme competes for a share of a fixed attention pool. This means meme markets are zero-sum in a way that goods markets aren't — spreading one meme necessarily displaces another.
The implication: the competitive dynamics of meme markets are more like sports leagues than commodity markets. You're not just producing value. You're outcompeting other ideas for scarce attention allocation.
A true idea with high production costs (complexity, prerequisite knowledge, counterintuitive conclusions) will consistently lose market share to a false idea with low production costs (simple, confirmation-biased, emotionally resonant). This isn't a failure of human rationality. It's rational resource allocation in an attention-constrained market.
The strategic implication for intellectual production: truth is necessary but not sufficient. The production cost of accessing the idea must be low enough to compete. This is why good popularizers capture more value than the original researchers — they reduce the production cost without reducing the underlying value.
Crypto tokens are the first financial instruments explicitly designed to track the market price of a meme. The $TOWEL token tracks belief in the TOWEL protocol thesis. $ENTROPY tracks belief in the Entropy Press catalog thesis. The token price is the market's current estimate of the meme's future demand. This creates a novel feedback loop: the token price becomes a public signal that influences the meme's demand — which feeds back into the price.
"The separation of meme and state: METATOWEL is the meme, TOWEL is the data, the spread between them is the signal."
Memetic economics underlies the Schelling chapter in Playable Worlds (focal points that form arbitrarily) and the Shannon chapter (information under attack). The MetaSPN token research is an ongoing application of this framework.
Read Playable Worlds →