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Meme driven narratives in 2021

Recap of the meme attention economy in 2021

Travis Chan
2 min readJan 15, 2022

2021 was a weird year. One of the emerging narratives that seemed to pop up were power to the people and David vs Goliath like events. All these events had something in common, they were meme driven narratives. Attention is the currency of the internet, and memes are one of the best way to gain attention.

Part 1 — GameStop

The GameStop saga was just the beginning. Redditors vs Hedge funds. A movement that was started by u/DeepFuckingValue posting monthly to daily updates. People joined in, followed by a lot of diamond hands, rocket emojis and apes together strong comments.

Robinhood steps in and restricts buying of GME and SEC investigations follow which can be summed up by the below chart.

Source: CNBC

Part 2 — Constitution Dao

In November, Sotheby’s decided to auction off one of the thirteen official copies of the US Constitution.

People started making jokes about banding together and buying the constitution. What started off as a meme, eventually turned into reality as…

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Travis Chan
Travis Chan

Written by Travis Chan

musings, progressively becoming more unhinged

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