DEGENS: The story of Degens documentary all began about four years ago – which is centuries in the world of crypto – when I worked at a grubby Fleet Street news outlet in London. Someone on the editorial team asked if I knew anything about "this crypto thing," and I started writing a blog for the newspaper.

Then Joe (co-director and co-producer of Degens) and I – we've known each other since we were in short trousers – started chatting about different stories that could be covered for this live crypto blog. Through this, we began dragging the shittiest of the shitcoin groups out of the filthy margins of the internet and giving them headlines on a national publication, which also has quite a decent international readership.

We wrote about things like Amber Turd, Shiba Inu and CumRocket. Then, through Joe, I got word that Dogebonk was sending a satellite to the moon. Well, they didn’t make it to the moon – they only reached low Earth orbit – but that was enough to write a few stories. We published the video of the launch, which showed a small satellite with a placard meme about Dogebonk beating Elon Musk’s plan to launch a Dogecoin into space. Dogebonk got there first.

That got us thinking more about these fringe memecoin groups – communities that usually start (and often end) on Telegram or 4chan. We saw that this was fertile ground for weird stories of desperation among the hopeless. So we decided to collect those stories and tell them in a long-form piece.

That led to me writing a feature-length article for The Independent called Inside the Dog-Eat-Doge World of Memecoin Communities. The piece was very successful, got lots of eyeballs, and covered everything from Dogebonk to the deluded community surrounding Richard Heart.

Then HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu came onto our radar. It seemed like the most refined, purest version of the nihilism many memecoins exhibit (most unconsciously, but some, like Dogebonk and HPOS10i, knew exactly what they were doing). They monetised nihilism and blossomed into self-aware subcultures that got all the ironies about promoting a shitcoin purely because it’s shit.

Joe and I thought, why not make a documentary about these memecoin subcultures? From the unironic Shib Army to the more complex, humor-driven communities like HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu and Dogebonk – there was a rich story to tell.

In our research, we came across one of the most unique characters in the memecoin world – and maybe on the planet: PizzaT. He was a driving force behind the artwork and culture that emerged from the HPOS10i community and was also involved in Dogebonk.

The man must have swallowed a fusion reactor along with a lot of psychedelics, to have the energy and insight to produce so much bizarre, creative content for these subcultures.

We got in touch with PizzaT – or maybe he got in touch with us – and he was completely honest, candid, and unafraid to open up about why he does what he does. When we first contacted him, he was living in a van in a McDonald’s car park, having just been sacked.

It quickly became clear to us that PizzaT is the center of all this madness. The memecoin groups orbit him like satellites spinning out of control.

The executive decision – by us and our backers – was that audiences should experience the world of memecoin subcultures through PizzaT’s eyes. And they should keep their eyes peeled and their ears clean because his artwork looks like it came from somewhere over a rainbow made of pure LSD, and his music has lyrics that are both light and frivolous as a morning latté but also deeply heartfelt.

All of this combined with PizzaT’s hero’s journey – very Joseph Campbell – to make it into a collapsing, late-stage capitalist America (and maybe he even gets the girl). It’s coming together as a cult-classic feature film.

The film is becoming both a time capsule of the madness we’re living through, and a surreal West Coast fever dream where PizzaT’s final throw of the dice never settles, but keeps rolling on, into infinity.

DEGENS: It’s strange how fast crypto has been embraced by the mainstream. Traditional finance incumbents have taken it seriously since early 2024, with the launch of multiple spot Bitcoin ETFs.

It’s insane to think that major fund managers would even consider a 2% portfolio allocation into Bitcoin. And while we haven’t seen it yet, it’s entirely plausible that we’ll get ETFs for things like Dogecoin and Solana – the token of what’s essentially a shitcoin casino.

At one end of the spectrum, you have the big players, capable of manipulating the market by moving a small percentage of their funds. And at the other end, you still have all the desperados clinging to the crypto-beast as it slouches forward – at the time of Trump’s inauguration on January 20th and beyond. Everyone hoping to strike gold, while the crypto exchanges play the role of modern-day Levi’s and pickaxe sellers – profiting no matter who hits the jackpot or loses it all.

DEGENS: I think the denizen of the crypto casino might chime with the feeling that the populist enthusiasm for Luigi Mangione and the CEO assassination is related. It comes from the same desperation, the feeling of zero security, atomized community, and a lack of long-term employment prospects in a rapidly accelerating hyper-capitalist road to AI-ensured-21st century-serfdom. The USA is definitely at the forefront of all things crypto related, having a new president who is the king of the shitcoin casino, launches his own shitcoins the weekend before he gets inaugurated. A leading kingpin of memecoin culture is the president, and there is also Trump's Grima Wormtongue, in the form of the dogecoin-promoting Elon Musk. The U.S.A. is definitely at the center of this new phenomenon. Places like Dubai have crypto people living there, but only for the tax dodge reasons, they don't originate any cultural waves. Maybe the far east has some, but mostly copies of what originated in the U.S.A.

DEGENS: I don't think it ever did work for the rabble. Look at Trump's memecoin launch before he got inaugurated. The desperadoes that bought in got rug pulled by those that were in the know and bought early: most of those people are informed and rich anyway. 

Crypto money and working on the internet pushing around digits on a screen, and never meeting people face-to-face… Marx would see this as the ultimate in alienation. Who wants to build a chair physically out of real wood when you can AI-generate online chairs and make them into NFTs and get your crypto friends to buy them in the speculation that they'll appreciate, then sell to the greater mug that comes along. 

Everyone is trying to play the crypto casino as a means to an end, but the means always becomes the end, and the means is a life of losing hours upon hours watching a lonely screen and moving supposed value from one token to the next in the hope that one day you'll get into one early enough to escape this maze of torment. But it rarely happens. And people that do make it big… well, they want more and they plough it all back into the casino again, the means becomes the end...

DEGENS: Yes, people that were involved in the early days of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations… they thought this would lead to some new version of the corporation that would be much more transparent, accountable and democratic. But in reality these things have turned out much worse. Think of a bag of rats eating each other until there's only one rat left... because these DAOs are inhabited by internet people. No one wants to doxx themselves and no one wants to meet physically. There is no human connection. The anonymity causes people to behave in ways they wouldn’t face to face. I don't know if Network States will have any true fraternity. I'd say John Zerzan would have something to say about those, or Jean Baudrillard, as a true expression of the Simulacrum.

DEGENS: Yes. When you look back, the whole AI wave is incredibly recent. Our research, interviews, and in-depth investigation into the memecoin phenomenon for the Degens documentary actually predate the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT.

Before the mass adoption of large language models, creating memecoins was an arduous task requiring a solid grasp of coding as well as a decent understanding of currencies and economics. You needed enough knowledge to write a Tokenomics Whitepaper for your shitcoin so that potential investors could maintain the illusion that it actually mattered.

But now, in the early light of this strange AI dawn, memecoin developers can simply use large language models to generate the code and launch their tokens – with no coding skills, no graphic design ability, and no creativity whatsoever required. You can even ask an LLM to suggest the best memecoin names, and it will do so instantly. Human agency is no longer needed allowing memecoiners to let their brains atrophy as they drift gently into this long AI-powered goodnight.

Adding to this, we now have AI-generated memecoin platforms like Pump.fun, capable of producing tens of thousands of tokens per day. There are also AI agents tirelessly promoting memecoins on online forums and social media, and recently, we even saw the emergence of ai16z, now rebranded to Eliza OS, a decentralized venture capital DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) run entirely by autonomous AI agents. These AI-driven entities may eventually be able to analyze data, execute trades, and manage investments, offering humans a system to optimize their portfolios and conduct intelligent trades.

DEGENS: The film is truly a passion project and a time capsule of the early days of two groundbreaking technologies – blockchain and AI – and how they are poised to disrupt nearly every aspect of human existence. Our documentary has captured the very beginning of this revolution. We were there when Dogecoin and Dogebonk memecoiners were fringe degenerates, dreaming of life-changing wealth with a dash of idealism about decentralized monetary systems and societies.

Now, as I write this in January 2025, Elon Musk has confirmed his intention to put the U.S. Treasury on a blockchain! Meanwhile, our Dogecoin, Dogebonk, Shiba Inu, HPOS10I, Phriendz, and countless other dreamers are still at it. Down in the trenches, nothing has changed. They’re still chasing life-changing wealth and a way out of the poverty trap that's getting tighter. Their idealism about decentralized monetary systems may have dulled slightly, but their passion remains as strong as ever to throw it all onto the latest shitcoin hyped in a Telegram group.

People can get involved with the documentary. This is most welcomed. Just visit degensfilm.com – we're actively reaching out to anyone interested in joining as an executive producer, co-producer, or production funder. Get in touch!

We're also fortunate to have development funding from Northern Ireland Screen (Game of Thrones), and we qualify for the UK Low Budget Tax Credit, which covers up to 53% of the total budget. Plus, our local funding agency will match up to one-third of direct Northern Ireland spending.