Dispatches from the intersection of memes, markets, and madness.
On 4 September 2026, something peculiar happened during a public hearing of an Australian Senate committee. Celia Perkins, a deputy secretary at the Department of Defence, ended her opening statement by noting that the officials present…
The Conversion of Viral Aesthetics into Box-Office Clout In February 2026 Amazon MGM opened a documentary about the First Lady in more than fifteen hundred theaters. The rights and the marketing had cost seventy-five million dollars. It…
A new commercial grammar of parenting has emerged where intimacy, irony and automation combine into a market. Momfluencers are packaging AI as a domestic assistant and then selling the method. The content looks like casual sharing. It…
There is a particular species of internet mythology that begins as a pitch image, a manifesto page, a trailer, or an arresting tagline. The community assembles around that fragment, repeats it, memefies it, and through repeated…
Looksmaxxing and the Economics of Self-Memeification This past April a twenty-year-old streamer who goes by Clavicular collapsed during a livestream in Miami and woke up in a hospital bed. He had built his audience by promoting bone…
Elon Musk, always full of surprises, transformed his profile on platform X to ‘Kekius Maximus,’ complete with a Roman-style Pepe the Frog avatar, once again igniting chaos and speculation. His actions mirror the behavior of an…
The “Chill Guy” meme has completely taken over the internet. This illustration of an anthropomorphic dog in relaxed human attire, introduced by artist Phillip Banks, exudes an attitude perfectly captured in a single sentence: “He’s just…
In 2019, Maurizio Cattelan’s The Comedian debuted at Art Basel Miami: a banana duct-taped to a wall. It sounds like a practical joke—and maybe it is—but one that sold for $120,000. Five years later, a copy of the work fetched a…
Where memes shape markets and contradictions fuel the system. Each law reveals how Kekonomics turns the irrational into economic power.
The Institute accepts essays, case studies and short analyses on memes, attention and value, from researchers, artists, writers and practitioners. Send an abstract of no more than 300 words. Accepted contributions are edited and published under the name of the Institute, as part of the collective. Contributors are credited individually, with a link to their own page if they wish.
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