For six years, "the laptop" was something done to Hunter Biden, an object wielded by congressional investigators, political opponents, and cable news as shorthand for his disgrace. (Although, let’s be honest, the laptop’s sordid contents were mostly things Biden did to himself and others. But let’s not go there.) Eventually, prosecutors used files from the drive as evidence in the 2024 trial that convicted him on federal firearm charges. Now, he has put a dollar sign in front of it in a pitch that makes the reversal explicit, a sort of reclamation of the offending hardware and its political significance.
"They turned laptop into a weapon. I turned it into a token," Biden wrote on X. The $LAPTOP meme coin carries a supply of one billion tokens on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network built by Coinbase.
The symbol used to shame Hunter Biden has become his own product. There should be a name for this phenomenon, because Biden is not the first to do this by a long shot. Perhaps we should call it the "infamy premium," the point at which reputational damage grows intense enough to generate economic value of its own.
In an amoral internet age of crypto and online fundraisers, that feels uniquely digital. America has been buying access, souvenirs, and stories from its notorious for generations. What the digital era has changed is liquidity.
Scandal can now assemble its audience, its distribution network, and its payment system in a single afternoon in front of, well, a laptop, funnily enough. Let’s take a few steps back to a 19th-century farmhouse in Clay County, Missouri. After the notorious outlaw Jesse James was shot dead in 1882, his mother, Zerelda James Samuel, began charging visitors to tour the family home and sold pebbles from her son’s grave for 25 cents, even restocking from a nearby creek when supply ran down.
Frank James, his brother, later took over and was charging 50 cents by 1910. But that’s inflation for you. The economics of that are almost exactly those of a meme coin.
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