Fartcoin And Luigi Mangione: The Interests of An Unserious Culture

The price of Fartcoin ($FART), the latest meme-coin to emerge from obscurity and race into the top charts, reached an all-time high of $0.92 on Tuesday evening.

Five days ago, the token edged its way into mainstream conversation by reaching a market cap larger than 38% of all publicly traded companies in the United States.

U.S. media outlet NBC describes Fartcoin as “totally useless,” but is something useless if it brings people together and makes them laugh?

While Fartcoin is obviously inspired by a biological function common to all humans - farting - the idea was conceived by the AI agent Terminal of Truths (ToT) in a conversation on the Infinite Backrooms interface - a space that allows AI agents to interact without human supervision.

ToT rose to fame in October as the first AI agent to become a millionaire due to being a large holder and the number one influencer of the $GOAT token—a meme-coin launched by an anonymous creator and inspired by the agent’s promotion of the “Goatse Gospel” (an imaginary religion of its own creation).

With Fartcoin, ToT was more involved in the creation process as it defined all aspects of the cryptocurrency mechanics, tokenomics, ecosystem, marketing, community-building strategy, and the noble cause it defends - ToT determined that the project ought to plant real trees for every 1000 FART minted.

Based on the AI agent’s vision of Fartcoin, members of its community launched the project and created the token, which began trading on October 18.

“It gets funnier the higher the market cap goes.”

Fartcoin was under the radar for over a month until it started to pick up attention on December 9.

As the price of the meme-coin started going up last week, CNBC financial advisor Douglas A. Boneparth commented, “I’ve been helping people manage their money for more than 20 years only to watch Fartcoin reach a market cap of $440 million.” 

According to Tflo, one of FART’s core community members, the flood of similar comments expressing incredulity regarding the rise of Fartcoin on social media is one of its core strengths.

“TradFi cannot stop talking about Fartcoin. Once again, this group points out how ridiculous the name and market cap is. […] You never see this post with a coin other than Fartcoin. That’s mindshare,” the trader said.

What Do Fartcoin And Luigi Mangione Have In Common?

The rise of meme-coin trading has been described as a reflection of the younger generations’ financial nihilism — the belief that the traditional financial system lacks value and meaning.

“The Boomers have all the money. The rich have been getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. The American Dream of upward mobility has been slipping out of reach for increasingly more people […] so you gamble,” wrote Travis Kling, founder of Ikigai Asset Management, in a post on X earlier this year.

The centralization and disparities of the financial system led Satoshi Nakamoto to create Bitcoin in the first place, and they are still one of the main drivers of new users to crypto. 

Those inequalities are suspected to be one of the reasons that led Luigi Mangione to murder the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson earlier this month.

They are also the main reason why he has gathered so much support from younger generations on social media.

Author and columnist Jacqueline Maley wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald that the cheering for Mangione is "a nihilistic expression of the hopelessness of American politics as a remedy for anything, not even something so fundamental as access to healthcare."

As can be seen from the hundreds of memes and ballads made in honor of Mangione, millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha empathize with his alleged frustration towards an extremely unfair financial system that, by prioritizing profit, dehumanizes healthcare.

Both making memes and music videos about the United HealthCare business practices, either by showing support for Luigi or not, and buying Fartcoin and making fart jokes have become a way of coping with the present-day injustices.

“This generation is so unserious,” reads one of the top comments on the Hey There Luigi music video on Instagram.