anything/anything memes were solved. so i took a break. but always kept a pulse on the market. robinhood chain + wallet rollout is what first piqued my interest. saw cashcat, bought some but it wasn’t really new. we’ve played this game before. something becomes culturally relevant, someone makes a meme around it, a market forms around the attention. then i kept looking and found something weirder: memes paired with stocks. robinhood, one of the biggest retail trading platforms in the world, had started putting stocks onchain. rwas never made sense to me, btw. i never understood why i should get excited about real estate onchain when i can just… buy real estate. but this clicked. money had already become internet-native. now real assets were becoming internet-native too. which meant they could interact with all the weird things the internet had invented around money. and stocks are a particularly good place for this to start, because stocks are already internet culture. people have relationships with companies, tickers, founders. they argue about them, meme them, build communities around them. now the assets themselves are entering the same environment as the culture that surrounds them. i’ve been calling this culture/capital: serious assets learning to spread like memes, culture becoming a distribution layer for capital. so i started digging into who’s building in this new game. most of what i found were launchpads. you can create memes paired with stocks. at first i thought the interesting thing was simply that you could pair the two. it’s not. the interesting thing is what becomes possible once the relationship exists. a cultural asset can now have a direct economic relationship with a productive one. take carry, one simple consequence. a meme is basically a carryless cultural asset. you hold it and your outcome depends almost entirely on what happens to the meme itself. attach an underlying and suddenly the cultural asset can accumulate something outside itself. meme + underlying introduces carry into an otherwise carryless cultural asset. you could say this is just reflections, or cashback, or dividends, or yield farming reinvented. maybe. finance has been recycling the same primitives since bartering. the interesting part was never the primitive itself. it’s what we’re starting to attach the primitives to. and that’s where it started getting much weirder for me. culture has always produced value. it just couldn’t keep it. we make songs, images, characters, stories, jokes and when they get valuable, something else has always had to keep the proceeds. the creator, the label, the company, the platform, the ip holder. culture spreads, institutions retain. memecoins gave culture a price, but the economic output is still mostly a closed loop of attention into price and back into attention. what happens when the cultural object itself can start keeping some of it? memecoins already made the first jump: a viral thing on the internet could become an asset. now the asset can start owning things. what happens when a meme develops a balance sheet? when something that used to only carry meaning and attention can start owning assets and accumulating value outside itself? that’s already a strange new object. not autonomous necessarily. owning something and being able to act on your own are two different things. but something that used to only be owned is now entering the class of things that can own. things can get absurd really fast. and this is where i think it gets much bigger than memes paired with stocks. creators have always tried to create something valuable. creating something capable of accumulating value is a different project entirely. the question stops being “how do i monetize this thing?” and becomes “what can this thing own? what can it keep? what happens to it after me?” culture always spawns from somewhere, too. someone made the first image, wrote the song, created the character, started the joke. which unfortunately brings me back to nfts. i increasingly think they arrived before a lot of the things they were actually useful for. yes art and collectibles are real. but the internet got incredibly good at copying and distributing things and incredibly bad at remembering where they came from. when culture couldn’t keep anything, forgetting where it came from was mostly a cultural problem. when things can start owning things, “where did this come from?” becomes an economic question too. an internet full of remixable, economically capable objects is going to need a way to remember where things came from. and then a bunch of things we’ve spent years experimenting with started looking different to me. a meta arrives, everyone loses their mind, the trade gets crowded, it dies and we move on. but the capability doesn’t die with the trade. nft mania came and went, provenance remained. defi summer came and went, programmable finance remained. the ai agent trade came and went, but software being able to hold a wallet and act economically remained interesting. memecoin mania will eventually come and go, but culture becoming instantly liquid isn’t going away. rwas might stop being a narrative one day, but the world’s assets being internet-native will remain. the metas die. the capabilities accumulate. eventually the accumulated capabilities start to compose. culture/capital is the version i’ve been chewing on, but the more i look at it, the more it feels like one instance of something larger: anything/anything. once all of this lives in the same environment, arbitrary things can start having economic relationships with other arbitrary things. culture can own capital. capital can distribute through culture. one cultural object can own another. the number of possible relationships explodes. i don’t know what the final object looks like and i think pretending to know would miss the interesting part. we spent the last decade building all these weird toys separately. now they’re starting to compose.