The existing Internet economy revolves around the logic of turning attention into capital via advertising. While it might seem benign enough on the surface, this logic proves highly pernicious, for it entails the systematic manipulation of the Internet’s attention by a few powerful platforms. In order to optimise advertising returns, the Internet’s current business model depends on the pervasive extraction and sale of behavioural data, what amounts to an egregious violation of one’s right to privacy and, in the end, self-determination. It’s against this backdrop that memecoins have established themselves as one of the emerging cryptoeconomy’s most potent products. Where the advertising model depends on the subtle, top-down coercion of human behaviour, the silent transformation of behavioural insight into someone else’s profit, memecoins represent a voluntary, bottoms-up, wholly transparent variation on the same fundamental principle. That is, the transformation of attention into capital. While advertising attempts to manipulate human behaviour into profit, leveraging intimate insight into one’s digital identity, memecoins leverage the power of speculation, affording people the opportunity to bet on the future value of a given meme (the value of which is inexorably bound to the attention said meme can capture). Memecoins are often derided for their apparent stupidity, their lack of ‘intrinsic value’ or ‘utility’. This criticism is reasonable enough, but only if one draws a very narrow definition of ‘value’ or ‘utility’. Ultimately, memecoins are pure crystallisations of the value of human attention; economic vehicles for the tranformation of the most valuable property / substance in the universe — consciousness itself — into material wealth. They make the intangible tangible and in the process provide a radical alternative to the surveillance economy model.