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What are folks struggling to comprehend the baffling world of cryptocurrencies to make of the rise of Shiba Inu? The Shiba token is modeled on Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency launched as a joke, even claiming as its mascot the same small but well-muscled ancient Japanese breed of canine. But while it would be easy to dismiss Doge and Shiba as gags, their soaring value makes them the talk of the financial world. Fans are joining their “armies” en masse and spending a king’s ransom on their coins. In fact, the combined valuation of the pair, as of 4 p.m. on Oct. 28, stood at $79 billion, exceeding the market caps of Intercontinental Exchange, Micron, and 388 of the S&P 500. One prominent naysayer is Alex de Vries, a Dutch economist whose website Digiconomist follows Bitcoin’s carbon footprint and electricity consumption. “Shiba really doesn’t have anything going for it,” says de Vries. “It’s a strictly a speculative meme coin that’s making some people very rich. It’s Dogecoin, the jest of the crypto world, on steroids.”

Though its fans take Shiba seriously—why else would they anoint it with their savings and adulation—it’s not clear that its developers do. The Shiba creators are too smart to believe rallying their “community” to inflate the prices of fallen stocks to multiples of what any reasonable analysis says they’re worth is the future of fintech. Instead, they just want to have fun sticking it to Wall Street. The declarations of Shiba’s brain trust remind me of the 18th-century British satires I studied as an English major. Among the greatest were Henry Fielding’s hilarious parody of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, the world’s maiden novel, by the way. In Pamela, a servant girl chronicles her efforts to escape the clutches of her lecherous employer, then gets rewarded for her virtue by enticing the beaten aristocrat to marry her. Fielding’s Shamela skewered Richardson for lauding his heroine’s chastity when she was clearly pursuing an amoral stratagem for landing a rich husband, forget how despicable. Another memorable entry was A Modest Proposal, wherein Jonathan Swift suggests in faux-businesslike prose that the Irish could alleviate poverty by selling their children to the rich to be eaten. Swift’s target was the British and Irish authorities’ heartless mistreatment of the Emerald Isle’s impoverished masses.

The Shiba Inu Woof Paper

The Shibu Inu manifesto, issued in the summer of 2020 as the Woof Paper, reads like a burlesque detailing how the crazy world of crypto can only save itself by getting crazier, by cutting all ties with central authority. The authors use at least two of the prime tools of satire. First, they portray their believers and their mission in such surreal hyperbole that you think to yourself, anyone who talks like this is putting you on. They’re really recruiting a band of merry pranksters, not folks looking to lead a true crypto revolution. Science types writing such nonsense have got to be kidding. Consider this excerpt from their mission statement: “In a world ruled by the commodification of time, community run projects are a way to practice radical acceptance of others. The Shibu ecosystem is our way of tearing down a long-established paradigm of formulaic success and building a path to creativity in its place.”

The Shiba developers’ take on the anarchic campaigns that didn’t take hold? The meme stock movement of GameStop, AMC, and WallStreetBets, the creators argue, was “on the verge to disperse control to consumers and inexperienced investors alike, but was throttled by the bureaucracy of our centralized society.” Shiba will make it happen by fielding a fighting force of “holders, HODLers, admins, mods, leaders of international chat rooms, social media influencers, meme makers, shillers, and most of all friends.” Sure sounds like the ultimate big tent for folks looking to lampoon Wall Street pomposity. Their new “paradigm” for the financial world would echo the pandemonium of the mythical country the Marx brothers ran in their 1933 caper Duck Soup. As it turned out, what appears to be absurdist comedy attracted 500,000 investors who stand to lose billions if the Shiba really turns out to be a lark after all. You might reverse the warning from the other Marx, not Groucho but Karl, who warned, “History repeats itself, first as farce, then as tragedy.”

The second literary conceit that Shiba’s high priests share with the 18th-century satirists is the use of amusing metaphors. The Woof Paper gives its ShibArmy and coins a kaleidoscope of doggie personas. “From the tips of their teddy bear noses to the ends of their curbed tails, the Shiba Inus are incredible dogs, equal in propensity for loyalty and mischief, known for their bold, stubborn personality,” goes the Woof Paper, and the ShibArmy is their canine equivalent: “We are the dogs that have gone where no dogs have gone before.” As for the Shiba coin, “It came into the world as a happy puppy.” The Shiba “ecosystem” runs on such gears as “burying bones,” “leash liquidity,” “the ruffmap,” “puppy pools,” “the bone pile,” and the “grrr feature.”

The minds behind Shiba Inu are really working their own mischief. Swift was only joking about the Irish devouring their young. But his argument sounded so sober, so tongue-in-cheek, that many of his contemporaries took it as the great moralist’s true stance, and denounced him as a savage. The Bitcoin creators face the same problem by advancing a ridiculous vision as a gag, and luring people who didn’t get the joke. The collapse of Shiba and Dogecoin could help undermine the crypto movement, and wound the likes of Bitcoin. Shiba’s founders are right about one thing: It really is a dog.