Such Mixed Feelings, Wow: My Experience with Dogecoin
Obligatory warning: I don’t think you should turn your dollars into Dogecoin unless you’re a special kind of disgruntled. You definitely shouldn’t do it to make profit. If you want to make money, find someone not me to listen to. God knows there’s a million people out there who will tell you how if that’s what you care about.
It’s been weird participating in Dogecoin. It has helped me solidify beliefs about value that I have long held. Since I was a kid I have been on a weird, vague private mission to undermine our collective sense of value however I could. This stems from my fundamental disagreement that anything we are doing on Earth is valuable at the moment.
I’m no ecofascist, though. I love human beings. Humans depend very much on our judgement to survive, weighing what is good and bad moment upon moment. All living things do this. The judgement of what is valuable and what is not valuable precedes will. The expressions of our will precede actions. But humanity’s judgement, its will, and its actions have all become confused. We have, as living things, totally lost sight of what value is.
When I think “value”, I don’t think about fucking cryptocurrency. I certainly don’t think about a literal joke cryptocurrency named after a 2013 meme. I don’t think in terms of currency at all. I think in terms of my survival first. Beyond that, I value that which I enjoy: my time, my relationships, my quality of life. Incidentally, currency undermines all of these things. It makes me waste my time doing pointless work to earn wages. It makes me focus exclusively on relationships that work within its employer-employee system, like with my bosses and co-workers (“we’re like family” *gag*). It makes me take drugs that I hate to be able to do my job so I can earn wages. Is expecting heart conditions as a result of the lifestyle you’ve adopted to survive a sign of high quality of life? No, it isn’t.
My value is not our system’s value. I probably don’t have to tell you how stupid our system is unless you’re in full-blown denial. I don’t even need to cite specifics. You probably can draw from many separate moments from 2021 alone where you thought “wow, our system is fucked up.” It is fucked up. Never forget that. Never get gaslighted into thinking this system of ours has done anything for us except fuck us. It hates us, and we should hate it.
I’ve long used crypto for its actual purpose: buying drugs online. (Sidenote: Once upon a time crypto was actually used as currency. Buying drugs and sending folks digital cash was and still is its only legitimate purpose, but I digress.) I’m comfortable with crypto. Some weeks ago, I realized that people online were deliberately putting their money in a literal joke of a currency, and I knew I had to participate. I liquidated an old 401K and shoved it into Dogecoin. Today, it is a much larger sum.
The question of how to proceed is one that irritates me deeply. I experience both glee and resentment at being in this position. This is, after all, what I thought would happen, because I think our system is fucking idiotic. What more proof do you need than this? If our system were a food, it’d be dirt. If our system were a spice, it’d be sand. It’s not a system. We have the dumbest, most small-minded, pointless non-system of any developed country on Earth. That’s no joke, that’s a fact.
But still, the question of what to do remains. The fact of the matter is, Dogecoin is doing an excellent job of destabilizing established notions of value. Indeed, it’s an expression of that very doubt that established notions are more than a pile of bullshit. Every CNN/Fox clip that I watch where some capitalist gets angry that Dogecoin is so powerful, I smile.
Dogecoin is an expression of capitalism. But it’s the most self-aware expression out there. I do not believe in the US dollar or any currency. I do not believe in the system we have established. I do not believe that we are making good decisions as a human society. I believe we should burn this goddamn system to the ground or die trying. If we fail, then our children and their children and everyone will suffer immeasurably on a planet that no longer supports them. That’s no joke either, it’s a fact.
Should you put your money in Dogecoin? Only if you think money is stupid and you want it to undermine it. If you do, then by all means, shove that money into Dogecoin. Be prepared to lose it all. Or make it back a thousand-fold. Whatever. Dogecoin is, after all, the world’s dumbest money. I’ll be right there with you, expressing my hatred for money in the dumbest possible way: by turning it into a meme and leaving it there to fester.
I hate money. I hate it symbolically. I hate it practically. It’s always been a sick joke how our society handles money as long as I’ve been alive. And I can think of no better way personally to underscore the need for us all to question our collective priorities than beholding our economy as it becomes literally, finally, a joke.