I just watched the Stanford Prison Experiment on Netflix, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how much it looks like CT and Pumpfun or other launchpads right now. If you don’t know the story, they took 24 normal college students and put them in a fake prison in a basement. Half were assigned as guards, and the other half as prisoners. Within 36 hours, completely normal students had started behaving like monsters. The guards began humiliating and breaking down the prisoners simply because their uniforms and mirrored sunglasses gave them power without consequences. They had to shut down the entire 2-week experiment after just 6 days. While watching it, I started mapping the exact same roles onto Pumpfun. The guards are the insiders, the cabals, the deployers, and your favourite KOLs selling people dreams. Put someone behind an anon handle, a cartoon avatar, and 40% of the supply bundled into sniper wallets, and it works just like those mirrored sunglasses. Normal morality disappears. Dumping on thousands of retail buyers doesn’t feel like stealing anymore. You just call them exit liquidity and launch the next ticker. The prisoners are the degens in the trenches. Sitting in front of Dexscreener for 16 hours a day, staring at 1-minute candles, getting rugged 9 times out of 10, and still coming back for more. And that’s the craziest part of the psychology. In the Stanford experiment, the prisoners supposedly had the right to walk out whenever they wanted, but they became so trapped in their roles that they stayed. On @Pumpfun, the prisoners don’t leave either. Because every degen secretly believes that one lucky 100x will turn him from a prisoner into a guard. Meanwhile, the warden sits at the top, collecting millions in fees from every trade while the guards and prisoners destroy each other. Sometimes I really wonder whether crypto is building a new financial system or whether it has just built the biggest Stanford Prison Experiment in history. What do you think? Are people on CT just playing a role, or does this market show who they really are?
