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Bored Ape Yacht Club Is Racist and Started by Neo-Nazis
- uniqueuid 5y agoI thought it was already easy to be skeptical of NFTs. Nazi NFTs make it even easier. Kind of reminds me of that raw meat crypto bro cult I remember existing a few years back!
- sschueller 5y agoThere are a lot of NFTs and most are not controversial. These happen to get popular but not for the reason OP has found but for the fact they are interesting pieces of art which some liked and then it turned into a gold rush. I thought they looked kind of cool and I would have purchased one if I has a chance. I didn't know they has anything to do with Nazis and I think most people don't.
- hammyhavoc 5y agoThe potential for controversy inherent to all NFTs is a matter of perspective.
- ghostbrainalpha 5y agoDo you have any more info on the "raw meat crypto bro cult"?
- cuteboy19 5y ago> All the co-founders are anonymous Oh god I thought they found out who it actually was. Right now it just seems like they are seeing patterns where there are none.
- malermeister 5y agoIf you look at their logo and that of the Totenkopf SS, it's either the worlds biggest coincidence or the worlds loudest dogwhistle.
- weeeee 5y ago[flagged]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mrguyorama 5y agoThe neo-nazi obsession with symbols and dog whistling is so.... stupid. They've got like 37 different stupid ways to say "Heil hitler". The Klan were the same way, with a bunch of code phrases, symbols, and secret handshakes that sound like they were invented at an elementary school birthday party. I know the point is to fly under the radar and gaslight people into second guessing things (They couldn't possibly be using the OK sign as an in-group signal.... right?) but how do you do these things and still think you're the cool kids fighting a big bad evil instead of the obviously pathetic cowards you are?
- ChicagoBoy11 5y agoI think your point about things like this being "invent at an elementary school birthday party" actually points to the solution; the intellectual maturity of the folks involved doesn't usually pass that level, either, so it is unsurprising that their pathetic behavior is not as easily noticed.
- pasabagi 5y agoIt's how insular groups / cults work. The group looks for converts, so people who are normally isolated and rejected feel welcomed, and group members try to be welcoming. Members adopt a progressively more weird lexicon and lifestyle, so they find it harder and harder to make connections outside of the group. These two dynamics lead to a very hardcore membership. It's like why hare krishna have to have funny haircuts. Plus people don't tend to get into radical politics if their life is going great, so a lot of the people predisposed to neo-nazi stuff are also predisposed to be love-bombed by a proselytizing group.
- mrguyorama 5y agoIt just makes it feel like having no "cringe" reflex is a pre-req to being vulnerable to cult things
- ncmncm 5y agoImagining themselves as born elites fighting undeserved oppression is the foundational feature of Nazism, going back all the way back to the myth of Germany's loss in WWI demonstrating such oppression. Everything else depends on it. So, without it, they have nothing. They are not alone in that. Ayn Rand tapped the same well, as did every monarchy-restorationist clique.
- paulpauper 5y agoThis has to be a joke. Cannot tell anymore what is satire or real
- aoeusnth1 5y agoI can’t tell if you can’t tell, or if you just want to pretend it’s ridiculous and therefore don’t need to actually engage with the argument.
- smegsicle 5y agoshockingly, internet cartoon series has edgy jokes- including referring to an iconic japanese symbol as 'sushi chef headband', and using a round SS logo as their round opensea logo- but anyone who doesn't agree with your nazi conspiracy theory is 'pretending' it's ridiculous? half of the argument proposed is that monkeys are involved, because monkeys have also been used in offensive stereotypes- so wouldn't nazis be offended at the monkey skull in the ss logo? joking about taboos has always been a part of any type of underground humor, and idiots freaking out about 'secret nazis' is just playing into the joke
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- marcusverus 5y agoWhat a shocking thing to say. Feigning uncertainty was a favorite tool of the Nazi propagandist Joseph Geobbels, you know.
- tanseydavid 5y agoAre you implying that the poster you are replying to is feigning uncertainty? In other words, lying? I think that is just a bad faith assertion. What evidence do you have for that?
- marcusverus 5y agoIt was sarcasm.
- uejfiweun 5y agoNFTs are a great innovation for the world and possibly the biggest technological revolution since the semiconductor. With the help of this technology, we can solve the problems of climate change, poverty, and racism. It won't be easy, but seeing the utter sheer brilliance of ideas like "Pushy Penguins" and "Bored Apes", I truly look forward to a better tomorrow.
- EvanKnowles 5y agoSuperb application of Poe's law until the end.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jaredcwhite 5y agoI'm pretty sure this is dripping sarcasm, but the scary thing is some people seem to actually believe this stuff.
- weare138 5y ago'For just pennies a day you can buy an NFT of this starving child in an underdeveloped country.'
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- e67f70028a46fba 5y agoArea man completely and totally uninterested in NFTs discovers additional level of uninterest he wasn’t aware he even had.
- bluescrn 5y agoNasty Fascist Tokens?
- sheepybloke 5y agoI swear there was a green text where people on 4-chan wanted to connect Bored Apes with Nazism to get the price down and ruin them because they thought it was stupid. I can't seem to find the text, but it's weird to see it actually happening...
- netizen-936824 5y agoI honestly wouldn't be surprised. Or if someone involved wanted to pretend that 4chan is doing such a thing to make people doubt it, its difficult to know the truth with that website
- TMWNN 5y agohttps://np.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/rwpli5/anon_has_an_idea/ https://np.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/rwpli5/anon_has_an_id...
- sheepybloke 5y agoYes! That's the one.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- labrador 5y agoNFTs in general and BAYC in particular make sense to me as a bunch of bored young men with rich fathers who like throwing their allowance around for fun. I see NFTs as a symptom of wealth and income inequality and BAYC is 4chan for rich kids
- tombert 5y agoIs it possible that this was just an elaborate Producers-esque thing where the creators weren't exactly "racist", but more "wouldn't it be funny if could get every TV station to post a bunch of racist stuff?" I realize it's a Poe's Law distinction without a difference, I'm just curious if there was any evidence of that hypothesis.
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago[dead]
- oxymoran 5y agoLet me get this straight: So we have been flailing about for years now over micro aggressions and critical race theory calling everything under the sun “white supremacy” but outright, blatant white supremacy has a market cap of $4 billion dollars. And the people calling everything under the sun “white supremacy”, are likely to be the same people that contributed to the $4 billion market cap of legitimate white supremacists(young people are woke and young people buy NFTs. Both being woke and NFTs are trendy. Hence the groups are likely to overlap). Talk about irony.
- tombert 5y agoIt's almost like a dogwhistle slips under the radar by design. This isn't the own that you think it is; even if a lot of the people talking about CRT are the ones buying Bored Apes (which I am not conceding), this would just be evidence on how easy it is for racism to sneak into the common culture. It proves their point, not negate it.
- steelstraw 5y agoThis is complete conspiracy theory nonsense. It's a hoax generated by 4chan trolls. They crowdsourced conspiracy thinking and collected it into a list. Just like they do with QAnon. No actual proof, just spurious connections. I'm surprised people are taking it seriously (numerology? really??). That's literally what these trolls intended. It's also what they did with the OK hand symbol. They took something benign and sowed chaos with it. See https://www.adl.org/blog/how-the-ok-symbol-became-a-popular-trolling-gesture https://www.adl.org/blog/how-the-ok-symbol-became-a-popular-... The “OK” hand gesture originated as one of these hoaxes in February 2017 when an anonymous 4channer announced “Operation O-KKK,” telling other members that “we must flood Twitter and other social media websites…claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy.” The user even provided a helpful graphic showing how the letters WP (for “white power”) could be traced within an “OK” gesture. The originator and others also suggested useful hashtags to help spread the hoax, such as #PowerHandPrivilege and #NotOkay.
- weare138 5y agoRegardless of how it started a bunch of actual racists took it and ran with it. Now actual racists use that symbol unironically. The KKK was started by a group of hoaxers and pranksters to troll people but I don't think anyone would argue the modern KKK is just a bunch of trolls screwing around and messing with people.
- anthonygd 5y agoAre you sure it's actually been used unironically? I've wondered about that, but don't personally know anyone who's used it in any way. Are you on good enough terms with an actual white supremist who has used it unironically to confirm the intent is racist?
- glial 5y agoThis is an image taken on Jan 6: https://i.insider.com/5ff6467a6d61c10019cce0e6?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/5ff6467a6d61c10019cce0e6?width=1000&fo...
- Bjorkbat 5y agoAs much as I'd like to hear that BAYC is untouchable on account of being founded by Neo-Nazis (I think it's a very dumb project) I honestly can't buy the simianization argument. We've all heard the WallStreetBets crowd call themselves "apes". First thing I thought of when I saw a bunch of NFT apes and heard the name of the project was a bunch of apes holding GameStop. That being said I can actually kind of buy the other arguments. When you put the logo next to the Totenkopf it's pretty hard to deny that they look alike. Add some crossed bones behind the skull and it's almost a spitting image.
- fallingfrog 5y agoSo the real impact of the nft craze was basically to give 4 billion dollars to a neo Nazi group? We live in the stupidest of all possible worlds.
- pseudo0 5y ago> I have dedicated a lot of time to researching this and as an expert in the field of internet culture having been active within it for 25 years, a B.A. in Media Studies, with many credentials, I, and many others, feel very confident these accusations are founded. Is this satire? Something about the whole article seemed off, but this final paragraph takes it over the top.
- benmmurphy 5y agothis website is actually serious and not satire and there seems to be real person behind it: https://twitter.com/ryder_ripps https://twitter.com/ryder_ripps but i feel like: "The probability of picking a name that is also a racist anagram is about 1 in 750 billion" needs some kind of explanation as to how this figure was arrived at. this seems to be quite a difficult value to calculate and seems to require a lot of assumptions that are not necessarily shared. * what is racist anagram? * what is a name? * are names picked uniformly? my prior is a lot of this nazi hunting is similar to numerology. people are just datamining for signals then are surprised when they find them.
- gs17 5y ago> Also embedded is the word "macaque", a known racial slur. It's also the name of a kind of primate, which (although they're not apes) fits the theme. Some things aren't a huge stretch, but this feels like one.
- lamp987 5y agoIts so easy to manipulate HN lol
- 1propionyl 5y agoMost of the other points in the article are something of a stretch. However... ...the BAYC/Totenkopf logo comparison is a dead ringer. That one is a bit hard to ignore.