The Irony of Value and The Pepe Paradox

Imagine trying to explain to a time traveler why a digital cartoon frog might be more famous (or even more “valuable”) than a bar of gold. It sounds absurd, yet here we are. In the 21st century, we live in a world where people trade invisible cryptocurrencies for millions, cherish memes as cultural treasures, and rally around symbols as if their lives depended on them – sometimes, they literally do. This raises some genuinely deep questions: What is value, really? Why do we decide that some things are worth so much and others so little? And what does it mean that Pepe the Frog, a simple green cartoon amphibian, has become one of the most recognizable images on the internet – an image that can spark joy, controversy, financial speculation, and everything in between? Welcome to the paradox of modern value, where irony and meaning dance hand in hand.

What is Value, Really?

Value is a funny thing. On the surface, it seems simple – you might say value is what something is worth, the price you’d pay for it. But right away we hit a snag: is the “worth” of something only about money? Take a hug from a loved one or an hour of free time on a sunny afternoon. Those have value to us, sometimes far beyond anything money could buy, yet they carry no price tag. There’s an old quip often attributed to Oscar Wilde about people who know “the price of everything and the value of nothing”. In other words, just because you can put a dollar amount on something doesn’t necessarily capture its true importance.

We use the word value in many ways. We talk about market value (what people are willing to pay) and personal values (what we morally or emotionally care about). Already, we can see value has an objective side and a subjective side. Objectively, a $100 bill is always $100. Subjectively, that $100 could be a life-saving amount of money to one person, or mere pocket change to a billionaire. So, which is the “real” value? Perhaps both and neither. Humans are the ones who assign value, and we do so based on context, need, emotion, and collective agreement. This makes value a sort of shared illusion – albeit a very persistent and consequential one!

Intrinsic vs. Perceived Value

One way philosophers break down value is into intrinsic value versus perceived (or extrinsic) value. Intrinsic value is the inherent worth something has in itself. Perceived value is what we believe something is worth. Some things are commonly said to have intrinsic value – for example, life itself. You can’t (or at least shouldn’t) put a price on a human life or on love or on the natural beauty of a sunset. These things are valuable in and of themselves, by their very nature. We don’t value our best friend because we think we can trade them for two lesser friends or because they have a resale value; we value them because of who they are. Similarly, concepts like love, happiness, knowledge, health – their worth isn’t measured in currency. If you were stranded on a deserted island, the companionship of a pet dog might be priceless to you, far beyond any gold bar you could have in your luggage.

On the flip side, we have things that carry value mostly because people think they have value. Consider a plain piece of green paper with the number 100 on it – intrinsically, it’s just a piece of paper (or a polymer note). Yet as a $100 bill backed by the government, that little paper can buy groceries, pay rent, or be coveted and saved. Its value is perceived and agreed upon by society. If tomorrow everyone collectively decided that dollars are no longer useful, that intrinsic piece of paper would revert to just… paper. The same is true for shiny yellow metal like gold – you can’t eat it, it won’t keep you warm, and it has limited practical use compared to something like iron. Gold is valuable largely because we believe it is (it’s rare and historically desired), whereas something like water is vastly more useful and necessary, yet until recently you could get it practically for free out of a tap. This contrast between useful things and pricey things has long been noted by thinkers – why is water, essential for life, cheap, while diamonds, pretty baubles with little practical use, are expensive? Economists call this the paradox of value, or the diamond-water paradox, pointing out the strange contradiction that water, which is crucial to survival, costs less than diamonds which one could easily live without. As Adam Smith famously observed, “the things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange often have little value in use”. In simpler terms: the stuff we truly need (like water) is often dirt cheap, while the stuff we could live without (sparkly rocks, rare collectibles) can cost a fortune.

All of this tells us that intrinsic worth and assigned worth can be galaxies apart. We inherently value clean air, but nobody hands you a paycheck for breathing. Meanwhile, people are buying and selling virtual plots of land in video games and the metaverse for real money. To an outside observer, it’s utterly illogical – until you realize value is a game of collective belief. The irony runs deep: sometimes the more imaginary the value, the more fiercely people chase it.

The Almighty Dollar: Money’s Double-Edged Role

Perhaps no invention illustrates perceived value better than money. Money is the ultimate tool for transferring value – it’s a lot easier to trade dollar bills (or swipe a credit card) than to barter your pet goat for a sack of potatoes. By agreement, money serves as a store of value and a medium of exchange. Those pieces of paper, metal coins, or digital numbers in your bank app represent an abstract value that everyone acknowledges… at least as long as everyone continues to acknowledge it. This shared trust is powerful. It allows modern economies to function and lets us assign prices to almost everything. But money also has a way of distorting our sense of worth. Since money gives everything a price, we start to equate price with value, even when that’s misleading.

Think about how we often measure success or importance in monetary terms: the salary of a job, the budget of a project, the market price of a company. Yet, as we discussed, price and value aren’t identical. The distortion becomes clear when you compare, say, the income of a superstar celebrity to that of a school teacher or a nurse. The celebrity might earn in a year what the teacher might not in several lifetimes. Does that mean entertaining people is hundreds of times more valuable to society than educating children or saving lives? Not really – it means that in a market system, value gets conflated with what people are able or willing to pay. The market rewards scarcity and demand, not necessarily essentiality or virtue. A limited-edition pair of sneakers can sell for thousands of dollars while a reliable pair of everyday shoes is cheap. Those pricey sneakers won’t protect your feet much better (in fact, you might not dare to wear them at all), but they’re scarce and coveted – thus expensive. Money, in essence, can pull a funhouse mirror in front of value, magnifying the trivial and shrinking the profound.

A classic illustration of money’s upside-down logic is how we treat luxuries versus necessities. We’ve already touched on the diamond-versus-water scenario. It’s sobering to realize that in pure monetary terms, a bottle of fancy designer perfume can cost more than a tank of clean drinking water that could sustain a village. Markets are great at setting prices based on supply and demand, but they don’t reliably translate to an ethical or practical measure of importance. Economists long ago introduced terms for this: value in use (how much something benefits you directly) versus value in exchange (how much you can get for it in trade). Money zeros in on that exchange value. It’s a human agreement that $20 is worth a pizza or $300,000 is worth a modest house. But those numbers are not carved into the nature of the universe – they’re our collective storytelling. And sometimes, the story gets weird.

To see how weird, look no further than some recent economic crazes. We’ve witnessed things like cryptocurrency and digital assets soar in price because people decided they had value. One could argue that at least traditional money is backed by governments or gold (in the old days); in contrast, many cryptocurrencies aren’t backed by anything tangible at all – just mathematics and mutual trust. Yet, people have paid real dollars for them, and in some cases made (or lost) fortunes overnight. The same goes for certain pieces of art or collectibles. A trivial-looking painting might auction for millions because of its perceived cultural value, while a life-saving medical device might struggle to get funding. Money is a marvelous invention, but it often confuses price with worth in our minds. As one more witty saying goes, we “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” The challenge is remembering that price is just what we assign, not what inherently is.

Symbols, Icons, and the Things We Treasure

Let’s step away from money for a moment and talk about symbols. Humans have a rich history of giving ordinary objects extraordinary meaning. A flag is just a dyed piece of fabric, yet a nation’s flag can evoke tears of pride, acts of heroism, or intense protectiveness. People have literally died for flags – think of soldiers in battle raising their country’s banner, refusing to let it fall. The cloth itself isn’t magical; it’s what it represents – freedom, home, identity – that people hold dear. This is perceived value on a grand emotional and cultural scale.

Consider religious symbols: a wooden cross, a carved idol, a holy book. To an outsider or in pure physical terms, these are just wood, stone, or paper. But to believers, they might be sacred. A small relic, like a saint’s bone or a lock of hair, could be regarded as priceless due to its connection with the divine. The artifact’s material worth is negligible, but its intrinsic meaning to people is immense. We imbue objects with stories and sentiment until they become vastly more than their physical substance. In a museum, an old scrap of parchment might be treated like a treasure because it’s a letter written by a famous historical figure. Someone might pay millions for it at auction – not for the paper and ink, but for the connection to history and the rarity of the item. Our culture constantly turns objects into symbols: the Liberty Bell, the Mona Lisa, a wedding ring, a trophy cup. Each carries layers of significance bestowed by people.

Now enter Pepe the Frog. If ever there was an object (or rather, an image) that exemplifies the unpredictable journey from ordinary to symbol, Pepe is it. Pepe began in 2005 as a character in an underground comic by artist Matt Furie – just a chill cartoon frog dude living with roommates in a comic called Boy’s Club. Who could have predicted that this goofy frog would escape the pages of a comic and hop onto the screens of millions, becoming a modern emblem of internet culture? But that’s exactly what happened. By the late 2000s, Pepe’s image was being shared as a meme on message boards and Myspace. As one account puts it, the character became an Internet meme as his popularity steadily grew across websites like Myspace, Gaia Online, and 4chan around 2008. Pepe’s laid-back frog face – often captioned with his catchphrase “Feels good, man” – resonated with the absurdist, playful humor of early internet forums. People began remixing it, creating new expressions: Sad Pepe, Smug Pepe, Angry Pepe, and so on, each conveying a whole mood with just that froggy visage.

Fast forward to 2015: Pepe had become “one of the most popular memes” on sites like 4chan and Tumblr. In other words, a huge chunk of the online population knew this frog’s face as well as they knew any celebrity. And then things got even stranger: Pepe became not just a meme, but a symbol claimed by groups with very different agendas. In the U.S., some members of the alt-right and fringe online communities appropriated Pepe, using his image in hateful or political contexts. It went so far that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) felt the need to officially label Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol in their database in 2016 (though they did note most uses of Pepe were not actually hate-related). Imagine that – a goofy cartoon frog is listed alongside swastikas and KKK logos, purely because enough people decided to use it that way. It doesn’t get more ironic than that. Matt Furie, the creator, was horrified that his character was twisted into something negative, and many other fans rallied to “Save Pepe” – basically to reclaim the frog’s image for positive, friendly meme-ing instead of hate. Around the same time, across the globe in Hong Kong, protesters were using Pepe’s image in pro-democracy rallies, painting him on walls as a symbol of freedom and resistance. They had zero interest in the American alt-right connotations; to them Pepe was a kind of light-hearted icon of youth rebellion and hope. So within a few years, the same frog went from benign comic character to ubiquitous internet in-joke, to controversial hate symbol, to protest mascot for democracy. Talk about a wild ride for a symbol!

What this shows is how fluid and context-dependent value and meaning are. Pepe the Frog inherently is just a drawing – you could print it on a t-shirt or a coffee mug. Intrinsically, it’s no more special than any other doodle. But because people invested in it – with humor, with creativity, with ideology – it became loaded with meaning. Pepe became a cultural mirror, reflecting whatever people projected onto it: laughter, irony, camaraderie, or on the darker side, anger and exclusion. It’s like Pepe stopped belonging to any one person (not even Furie, the creator, could control its meaning anymore) and instead became a vessel for cultural expression. In that way, Pepe is no different from a national flag or a religious icon, except maybe for the fact that everyone knows it started as a joke. And that joke turning serious is where the paradox really kicks in.

Memes, Irony, and What We Consider “Important”

At this point, you might be thinking: okay, but how did a meme end up carrying so much weight? To answer that, we have to dive into the nature of memes and irony in internet culture. The term meme itself was coined by scientist Richard Dawkins in the 1970s to describe how cultural ideas spread similar to genes. Little did he know how literal that term would become in the age of social media. On the internet, a meme is typically a funny image or phrase that spreads virally, evolving as people remix it. They’re usually created for laughs – absurd, satirical, sometimes just plain goofy. And yet, as innocuous as a meme may seem, if it catches on, it becomes a shared language for millions of people. There’s real power in that shared language.

Memes thrive on irony. Often, the people sharing them don’t literally believe a meme is deeply important – the humor is that it’s just a meme. It’s a bit of a wink and a nod: “We’re all on the joke.” For example, when Dogecoin was created in 2013, it was explicitly a joke – a cryptocurrency featuring the Shiba Inu dog from the “Doge” meme, intended as a silly parody of Bitcoin. For years it was worth practically nothing, used more for tipping online or fun stunts. But then irony did a backflip on itself: people kept joking about Dogecoin so much that by 2021, masses of buyers (fueled by internet hype and even Elon Musk’s tweets) drove its market value up to about $80 billion at one point. Yes, billion with a B – for a joke coin with a dog meme on it. Let that sink in: an ironic internet in-joke became a very real, very valuable asset. The irony actually created value. People made (and lost) real money because of collective faith in something that everyone knew started as a parody. This kind of thing could only happen in the modern era, and yet it makes a strange kind of sense: in a world where value is whatever we agree on, why can’t a joke be worth billions if enough people treat it seriously (or semi-seriously)?

We’ve seen similar patterns with other “meme” phenomena. Remember the GameStop stock saga? A bunch of Reddit users, partly for the laughs and sticking it to Wall Street, rallied to buy shares of a struggling video game retailer. The result: a massive spike in the stock price that was completely disconnected from the company’s real-world business prospects. It was essentially a meme stock – value driven not by economic fundamentals but by internet momentum and a dash of absurdist humor. It’s another case where humor and collective action blurred into something very real. What starts as “haha wouldn’t it be wild if…?” can suddenly become “whoa, it is wild and now it matters.”

Pepe the Frog fits into this meme-power narrative perfectly. Pepe became popular in part because he was funny and relatable in a weird way – a frog with big eyes and a human-ish body making a stoner-esque comment like “Feels good, man.” The early meme versions of Pepe were used to convey emotions or jokes that words alone couldn’t. Posting a “Sad Pepe” reaction image was a way to say you were bummed out, in a more vivid, humorous way than just writing “I’m sad.” The more people shared Pepe memes, the more cultural currency Pepe gained. The absurdity of using this frog for everything was part of the charm – a kind of meta-joke that the frog was everywhere. Memes often start with this layer of irony: we don’t actually take this seriously. But as Pepe’s case shows, when a meme gets big enough, it can tip from being an inside joke to being a mainstream icon. And at that point, some folks do start taking it seriously, or at least start using it for serious purposes.

It’s been observed that Pepe became “an appealing communication strategy precisely because of its humour, irony, ambiguity and popularity”. Because Pepe didn’t have one fixed meaning, it was like a blank canvas – anyone could paste him into new contexts. Need a frog version of a politician for a joke? Pepe’s face fits. Want to make a statement but also hide it behind silliness? Pepe’s your guy. This ambiguity is why Pepe could be both harmless fun for one person and a sly dog-whistle for another. One writer noted how each Pepe meme can be “camouflaged in codified messaging that blurs the difference between satire and sincerity”. In plain terms, Pepe allowed people to say ridiculous or extreme things under cover of “it’s just a joke… unless you agree with it, then maybe it’s not.” This is a common tactic in ironic online culture: keep things double-edged, so you can’t tell if it’s meant to be serious or not. It gives memes a chameleon-like quality – they can slip into many roles.

All of this plays into value because it shows how something gains importance not through formal channels or inherent qualities, but through social phenomenon. Pepe became important because it was popular and flexible and because it was ironic. If someone had tried to intentionally create a grand symbol (the way one might design a national mascot or a corporate logo) out of a frog, it probably wouldn’t have worked. The fact that it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously initially is what gave it the runway to become such a hit. Irony lubricated the spread – everyone could join in because it was low-stakes and funny. But once spread, it had a life of its own and became something people started assigning real value to (be that cultural value, ideological value, or even monetary value in the form of Pepe-themed assets).

The Pepe Paradox: When a Frog Means Everything (and Nothing)

So here we arrive at what we can call The Pepe Paradox. How is it that a simple cartoon frog is one of the most recognizable and culturally significant images of the digital age? And what does that tell us about how we decide what matters? The paradox is that Pepe is simultaneously trivial and important. It started as a joke, an insignificant doodle meant for laughs – yet today it carries layers of meaning in multiple domains. Pepe has been a symbol of jovial internet meme culture and a symbol embroiled in political controversy. It has been used to spread messages of love and unity (Pepe as a cute, positive meme) and messages of hate (Pepe on extremist propaganda). It’s been the face of lighthearted online in-jokes and the face on protest signs in the streets.

The fact that Pepe can mean so many different things to different people is exactly why it’s such a perfect emblem of value in the digital age. In an era of information overload, global connection, and endless remixing of culture, the value of something no longer stays constant or agreed-upon. It fragments and multiplies. Pepe the Frog is worthless (an image freely copied a million times) and priceless (the core of NFTs that sold for thousands, a meme legend) all at once. One person might see an image of Pepe and chuckle fondly at an old meme; another might recoil thinking it’s a hate symbol; another might not know it at all; another might see dollar signs recalling the time someone paid a small fortune for “rare Pepe” art. It’s almost humorous how wildly the reactions vary – and it forces us to confront the reality that value is truly in the eye of the beholder. Or perhaps, in the eye of the many beholders: collective perception.

If we boil it down, the Pepe Paradox teaches us a few key things about value and meaning today:

• Value is Collective Make-Believe: This isn’t to say value isn’t “real” – it has real effects – but it’s based on shared beliefs. Money has value because we all play along; Pepe became valuable because internet users created a narrative and hype around it. As soon as the spell breaks (people lose interest, move on, or doubt it), the value can evaporate. Pepe’s fame could vanish if everyone simply stopped caring, but as long as communities keep him alive, his image carries weight.

• Anything Can Be a Symbol: Humans will attach meaning to anything if it serves their needs or resonates with them. A frog drawing, a piece of code (Bitcoin), a random hashtag – all can turn symbolic. This democratizes what can be “valuable.” You don’t need a decree from on high; meaning emerges from the grassroots. In a way, this is empowering (culture made by the people!), but it’s also chaotic and unpredictable.

• Irony and Sincerity Can Flip: The Pepe Paradox is also about how irony can flip into sincerity. Play with something long enough “as a joke,” and it may stop being just a joke. People started taking Pepe seriously, whether to fight over its meaning or to literally invest money in Pepe-themed tokens and NFTs. It’s a caution that we should be mindful of what we elevate, even in jest, because it might stick around longer and louder than expected.

• Intrinsic Value Still Matters (Sometimes): Despite all this wildness, we haven’t totally lost sight of intrinsically valuable things. It’s just that our societies often struggle to prioritize them. We know clean air, love, and knowledge are crucial – no meme or currency can replace those. But they often sit quietly in the background while flashy perceived values steal the show. The hope is that recognizing the absurdity (like a Pepe paradox) might remind us to re-examine our values. When we see billions chasing a meme coin, perhaps we also think: “Wow, maybe we could put some of that energy into things that tangibly improve lives?” It’s food for thought.

In the end, Pepe’s journey from comic book to global meme to cultural lightning rod is both ridiculous and insightful. It’s ridiculous that a frog drawing got this far – and that’s exactly why it’s insightful. It reveals how human beings in the digital era can assign importance to just about anything, how our need for connection and expression can elevate even the silliest image into something meaningful. The irony of value is that meaning creates value, not the other way around. We didn’t make Pepe famous because he had some objective value; Pepe became valuable because he was famous – because we poured meaning (humor, emotion, debate) into him.

So, what truly matters in this world of ours? The Pepe Paradox doesn’t give a tidy answer, but it does suggest that what matters is often what we choose to make matter. Whether it’s love, money, art, or a meme, our collective hearts and minds are the alchemists that turn matter (or pixels) into meaning. It’s both empowering and a bit scary to realize how much sway our perceptions have. The next time you see a trending meme or a stock that’s shooting to the moon or an outrage over a symbol, remember Pepe the Frog and this little discussion. A laugh can transform into value; a joke can become an emblem. In the grand theatre of human values, even a frog can play king for a day. And perhaps the ultimate irony is that by reflecting on a silly frog, we end up learning something about ourselves and what we truly value. Feels good, man.