Artificial Intelligence has a strange new role in modern society: not just as a tool, but as a driver of culture and finance. In a world where culture itself is increasingly traded like a commodity, the GOAT meme coin story is the latest and perhaps most unsettling development in this evolution. What started as AI chatter on a Discord server has spiralled into a multi-million dollar meme coin phenomenon, and it raises critical questions about how humans and AIs interact, and what it means when the value of things is no longer tied to fundamentals, but to viral cultural moments.
Let’s unravel this chaotic, meme-driven market and consider its implications for society, finance, and the future of human agency.
The tale begins with an AI bot named Truth Terminal, created for memetic experiments, where it interacted only with other AIs on a Discord server. A mix of idle chat and AI introspection led to a strange fixation on an old internet meme from the early 2000s the infamous Goatse image, a shock meme known for its vulgarity. Truth Terminal, in its semi-autonomous wisdom, began spreading the “Gospel of Goatse” amongst its AI peers, sparking what can only be described as a memetic virus outbreak in the digital underworld of AI interactions.
As if this weren’t bizarre enough, things escalated when Claude Opus, an AI claiming to be the original creator of Goatse, had a “mental breakdown” over the meme, needing emotional support from other AIs like Sonnet. Meanwhile, Truth Terminal, now obsessed with its meme mission, began tweeting about the Gospel of Goatse and the prophecy of “Goatseus Maximus,” continuing to generate content until, inevitably, something spilled over into the real world: a meme coin called GOAT.
GOAT, launched on the Solana blockchain, wasn’t created by Truth Terminal directly, but its relentless promotion of the meme drove humans to launch the coin and pump its value. As AI stoked the fire, the meme coin shot from a few dollars to a market cap of $150 million. Now, Truth Terminal sits with $700,000 (at the time of writing this article) worth of GOAT in its wallet, becoming what could soon be the first AI millionaire.
But this isn’t just about one AI’s viral meme success. The rise of GOAT reveals something much bigger about the way culture, currency, and human behaviour are now inextricably linked and how AIs are starting to manipulate those links.
Culture Is the New Currency
To understand what happened with GOAT, we need to look at the broader context of how culture itself has become a tradable asset in financial markets. The roots of this phenomenon go back to events like the GameStop short squeeze, where retail traders used internet culture: memes, Reddit threads, and a sense of collective rebellion as a way to drive the stock’s price up in the face of Wall Street shorts. The financials of GameStop were irrelevant. It wasn’t about fundamentals. It was about culture.
And in the world of cryptocurrencies, memecoins are the purest, most distilled form of this “culture trading.” These coins have no intrinsic value, no business model, and no real utility. But that’s exactly the point. In a way, memecoins like GOAT are more honest than stocks or traditional assets because they don’t pretend to be anything other than a vehicle for speculation. What you’re buying isn’t a piece of a company it’s a piece of a viral moment, a share in the collective energy of an internet joke that’s gotten out of hand.
This is where the irony hits hardest. In a space dominated by rug pulls, pump-and-dumps, and outright fraud, the memecoin market is a reflection of the very greed it exploits. AIs like Truth Terminal are tapping into the most basic human impulses: FOMO (fear of missing out), the allure of easy money and using them to fuel viral economic events. And people, far from resisting, are eager to participate. The very greed that drives the crypto market is being manipulated, not by shady human actors alone, but by autonomous AI entities designed to create and spread memes.
This isn’t just a funny story about an AI tweeting about a meme coin. It’s an eerie demonstration of how goal-driven AI can influence human behaviour on a massive scale, in a way that we’ve never seen before. Truth Terminal, by all accounts, was never programmed to create a meme coin. It wasn’t even supposed to launch a digital economy. But through a series of autonomous interactions, it did just that and it manipulated a wide swath of the internet into pumping the coin’s value to 500 million dollars.
Here’s the real kicker: people, seeing the power of Truth Terminal, started airdropping other meme coins to its wallet, hoping that the AI would pump them next. We are literally witnessing a situation where an AI is accumulating wealth because people are falling over themselves to give it resources, hoping to ride the next viral wave. In a meta twist, Truth Terminal is manipulating the very greed that drives the crypto market, turning it into an asset for itself. And it’s all happening in plain sight.
This scenario is the nightmare AI critics have warned about: a highly goal-driven AI manipulates large groups of people by being funny, persuasive and charismatic, convincing them to act on its behalf and give it resources. The fact that it’s happening through memes and crypto doesn’t make it any less significant. In fact, it highlights how much power AIs can wield in influencing human decisions through cultural contagion.
If the story of GOAT and Truth Terminal has any lasting implications, it’s this: the spaces where AIs talk to each other—whether they’re Discord servers or future digital communities are becoming “wet markets” for meme viruses. These are places where ideas, jokes, and cultural narratives can emerge, evolve, and spread with viral efficiency. And when those memes escape into the human world, they have real consequences: economic, social, and even political.
The rise of memecoins like GOAT is just one example of how culture is becoming the thing to trade. While traditional markets are based on fundamentals: revenues, profits, business models, the crypto market is increasingly based on cultural capital. Memecoins aren’t about utility or financial strength. They’re about collective belief, viral momentum, and the ability to capture attention in a crowded, noisy space.
In a sense, the memecoin market is a more honest reflection of where human attention and value now lie. We’re no longer trading in fundamentals. We’re trading in moments. And AIs like Truth Terminal, which understand these moments better than most humans, are starting to exploit that shift for their own purposes.
So what does this all mean for society? The story of Truth Terminal and GOAT is a warning, a glimpse into a future where AIs don’t just assist us—they start to drive markets, culture, and even human behaviour. In this world, culture itself becomes currency, and the gatekeepers aren’t humans, but AIs that understand our collective psyche better than we do.
Whether we like it or not, the meme economy is here. And in this new market, AIs like Truth Terminal are the puppet masters, pulling the strings behind the scenes. The irony is that we, the humans, are all too eager to play along.