Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs - a racist troll phenomenon?

[mostly harmless]

Nazi trolls, psyop to serve the agenda of internet control?

Whatever it is, it's noteworthy.

[Yarco]

Haven't watched the video yet, ill check it out later. But just scrubbing through the video it looks like schizoposting and linking a bunch of unrelated stuff like 4chan posts and drink menus together in conspiratorial ways.

Looking at the channel this guy's thumbnails and titles seem like they're engineered to generate maximum controversy.

[Yarco]

Okay I watched it. It starts off with some good arguments upfront, but the connections get more hazy as it goes on until they become absurd.

Biggest one is the similarity between their logo and the SS logo which is pretty hard to deny.

Overall the video seems like an interesting lesson in how you can link anything back to nazis if you try hard enough.

Lots of bad info like "4chan has almost no moderation" -- false or it would've been shut down long ago. 4chan users notoriously complain about "jannies" --- slang for janitors, what they call moderators. Eg. "The worst part about jannies is they do it for free." Same issue in the section talking about Kek.

"Why pick apes? Seems kinda racist" -- idk if your mind is automatically going to black people whenever you see monkeys, maybe you're the kinda racist one.

"Why not penguins?" -- there are already Pudgy Penguins NFTs, they have a floor price of like 1.3ETH and worth about $25M in total. Apes are just one of many different animal NFTs.

Linking Kali Yuga to nazis -- I've never seen this connection made or ever seen the phrase "surfing the kali yuga" used by right wing people online. I've only heard bringing about kali yuga linked to the Shiva statue at CERN.

Monkey paw = Congolese hands??? Monkey paws are widely known in occultism and several movie plot lines to be magical wish granting objects.

"Maybe aperol is a metaphor for taking the red pill"
"Times almost up line by monkey movie character = accelerationosm"

OH COME ON LOL. By this point the video creator is hugely stretching.

My final assessment: The BAYC creators probably are crypto-fascists. They could just be terminally online people who got sucked into the memes though. The video provides just enough evidence to make a compelling argument but also discredits itself with about 75% being noise and baseless conjecture. The video creator fell for the alt-right's misdirection and trolling several times over the course of the video.

[mostly harmless]

@Yarco

Some alleged links are more far fetched than others. I agree.

The guy who made the video acknowledged that.

The motivation behind the supposed revelation loses credibility when at the end of the video, an alternative NFT project by the originator of the research, Ryder Ripps, is promoted.

The description of Wittgenstein's work is incorrect. 

Aping in is a crypto term. It means that when the price of a coin is shooting up, you buy with no research because if you spend time researching, you lose out. So you ape in.

Australopithecus as a word in their puzzle: The connection to a member of the Nazi party, Ludwig Kohl-Larsen is not as definite as proposed in the video. There are are species of Australopithecus found by other researchers without the Nazi connection.

Aperol = red pill? That's inconclusive and I don't see what this is supposed to prove.

Jack of spades as reference to Nazis requiring jews to wear the letter J: far-fetched.

 

However, in my estimation, there are too many connections shown that this can not be explained away with coincidence:

The hommage to Suum Cuique Labs and adoption of their terms of service is a reference to Nazi concentration camps.

Name references to a movie with fascist content, anti semitic stereotype (Gargamel), thesis written on a fictional book about a Nazi doctor. 

The banana Swastikas in the BAYC game are a clear reference. One could have chosen single bananas being thrown. The design choice seems likely deliberately similar to the Swastika. Coincidence? Not credible. If it would have been coincidence, someone would have noticed and pointed it out and this would have been changed before releasing the game, unless it was intended.

At 42m into the video, the Boogaloo Boys are discussed. Ape in a Hawaiian shirt like on a photo with a person at a Boogaloo Boys demonstration. Hawaiian shirts fit the brand also with no reference to the Boogaloo Boys and the exactly matching colors could, again, be coincidence. 

42:26: Ape #1488, with prison # that references Rudolf Hess' death year. The numbers 14 and 88 are widely known Nazi cyphers. In a set of 10,000 that are numbered automatically, a number 1488 will occur naturally. The Number 019807 occurs on other prison suits as well (perhaps all of them). One could argue that the combination just occurred randomly. But it could be set up that way if the 019807 is on all prison jump suits. Not definite. Plus many things happened in the year 1987. Non-conclusive, like all these references. 

Kamikaze head band: Fascist Japan alliance with Nazi Germany.

Adolf Hitler's birthday referenced twice? 

 

My take on this with the only input being the video, meaning that I could very well come to a different conclusion after looking at different takes on the thing: 

At this point I doubt that the connections are all coincidence. 

The content, I find disgusting.

The project as a whole as presented and explained here, is masterfully executed work of art. It pokes society in the eye with a stick. 

It's not nice, it's ugly. And it's not the job of art to be pretty. This is nasty. But it's the ugliness of society that it shows. In that sense, it is great art.

Look at what Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and the Fluxus movement did.  

Also John Dewey – art as experience 

Edited June 30, 2022 by mostly harmless

[mostly harmless]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[mostly harmless]