Nazi Apes on The Internet!
Get ready to get angry!
Get ready to get angry!
Recently someone sent me this video and asked me for comment:
I watched it.
It’s good.
In summary:
The “Bored Ape Nazi Club” video produced and uploaded to YouTube by Philip Rusnack AKA Philion alleges that the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection is ‘deliberate Nazi, fascist or alt-right messaging’.
Ugh OK.
That’s interesting and all and the video was really good.
But the whole thing fell on its stupid head when I did all of 2.76 seconds of ‘research’.
I found out that the original investigator Ryder Ripps who is featured in the video is also an artist and creative director of OKFocus, a digital marketing and design agency.
Ripps uses a Bored Ape as his Twitter profile image as some kind of gimmick which he calls a protest and amazingly sold out his own version of Bored Apes called RR/BAYC, which features over 6,000 NFTs based on the original collection that he calls racist.
What?
Yeah.
Ripps says on his website the following about his RR/BAYC collection:
appropriation art
Here is a good write-up by Daniel Kuhn from CoinDesk which details how all this started. And here is one by Jesse Coghlan from CoinTelegraph that shows how it’s all going.
This whole thing if you can’t tell by now is completely disingenuous and while some people eat it up, most are just watching these guys get rich off this stunt.
If you go and read the two articles I linked above and follow the thread you will see Ripps first started his campaign against NFTs with the punking of the CryptoPunks NFT series and has since eventually moved on to bigger and better things.
If I had to bet, I’d say Ripps is a spoiled rich kid with far too much time on his hands who doesn’t actually care much for any of this. It's all for shits and gigs.
Ripps is a monetized marketing whiz kid. He is bored and having fun. Pun intended.
Philion on the other hand, who the hell knows, maybe he really is upset by it all. But let’s be honest for a second here, he is monetized too. This BORED APE NAZI CLUB video might not be monetized but I’ll bet you a coffee (or beer) the next video will be.
As always, tell me what you think in the comments.
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