There is a decades long shift towards decentralized cultural production, catalyzed by the decades long decrease in the cost of computation and communication. What does this mean: because everyone is connected, with open source creative tools, SaaS tools, the iPhone, the internet, Twitter, Discord - more people can create, share, find, trade, and own culture (memes). This is very different from the previous way, where a large centralized organization would choose someone, a small group, a band, and spend a lot of money to create a cultural artifact (a record, a magazine, a movie, a TV show) and spend even more money to generate the “preference” for this cultural artifact from a large, relatively unengaged group of people. Another major difference: the unengaged audience could never economically benefit from any upside.
Internet meme culture is a reaction against this (what Yochia Benkler calls the) industrial information economy. Anyone can create new forms of culture, very cheaply and have a large, relatively engaged community interested. The shift has already been demonstrated - some of the biggest recording artists (Jay Z, Snoop Dogg, and others) are using CryptoPunks as their social avatars, not the other way around. We’re shifting from centralized demand preference to decentralized, networked preference. It’s no surprise that in this “networked information environment”, the preference from the decentralized network is the cultural artifact born of this community, the NFT. NFT memes just take this even one step further.
“The networked information environment offers a more attractive cultural production system in 2 ways: 1) it makes culture more transparent and 2) it makes culture more malleable” The Wealth of Networks - Yochai Benkler
For something written in 2006, this holds up incredibly well. Transparent - immutable, on chain, created by community on Twitter, Discord etc. Malleable - memes, creative commons CC0.
What does this mean: toadz are the new Disney. This is the way.
Read: The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler.