They stole our apes! We explore the phenomenon of NFTs, the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and the general bored-ape-ification of culture, the economy and the art world. Happy new years!
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Episode written by Liv Agar: https://twitter.com/Liv_Agar / http://livagar.com
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 154 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the NFTs and Bored Apes episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Liv Agar.
What if you invented a way to own something that only really existed digitally?
That sounds like it might be very helpful to artists finding it difficult to make a living despite their work receiving widespread attention.
Thinking of Matt Fury, the inventor of Pepe, for example.
But what if the invention, instead of ushering in a new age of patronage, was immediately consumed by an onslaught of shittily drawn bored apes with little artistic value.
What if, given the choice, the people filled the mocha with Funko Pops?
In this episode, Liv Agar goes on an exploration of the brave new world on the blockchain.
A world on the precipice of ushering in Nisara and Jisara levels of financial prosperity for every single global citizen.
Even you.
Now remember, this episode is both financial advice and an order issued by Liv to invest every cent you own in bored apes.
That's right.
So before we jump into that, I wanted to get ourselves started by watching this short video posted by one WakaFlockaflame, who is finding out that some of his apes, and other digital figurines, were recently stolen.
This is the best.
Every time I hear Waka Flocka's name mentioned, all I can think of is the picture of him after he ate too many edibles and he's in the back of an ambulance.
He's got like the most satisfied smile on his face, but he's just laid out on a gurney.
Oh, incredible.
Long live Waka Flocka.
Yo, this is fake.
This is fake.
They popped up in my wallet.
I clicked on it to delete it.
Immediately they stole 19 grand.
Happily, I just started this wallet, but they already stole $19,000 out of it.
I need fucking help immediately.
Damn, that's so unfortunate.
I wish there was some, like, central authority to give you back your rightfully owned NFTs.
How does somebody even steal something out of an OpenSea wallet?
Like, doesn't that defeat the entire purpose?
It's all just, like, a password away.
That's the problem, oftentimes, if it's contained in an OpenSea account.
Yeah, but anyways, it is very funny to hear Waka Basically, call for the centralized police to intervene on his decentralized monkey figurine.
I need help immediately.
Like, his hand is hovering over the ugliest images you can find on the internet.
It looks like deviant art.
I mean, this is also indicative of, like, people who are getting into NFTs that don't even understand the initial gimmick, that it's decentralized.
They're like, what?
NFT cops, can you please give me back my NFT?
Yeah, private company that's brokering this decentralized stuff?
Like, you surely have some control over this system, right?
Oh, no?
You don't?
Oh.
Yeah.
Oops.
NFTs are currently all the rage.
Campbell Soup made one.
So did Doritos.
Jimmy Fallon had an ape NFT as his Twitter avatar.
So why did they come into mainstream relevance so quickly?
And what's the use of being able to own a digital image If anyone can just right-click and save it.
The best way to look at NFTs is how they relate to art, and specifically how they facilitate the sale of digital art.
Anyone at least vaguely familiar with the international art world likely knows how important money is to how major works of art are seen.
Investing in artwork has been a profitable business pursuit for the super-rich for a long time.
Only previously, one had to acquire legal ownership over, say, a physical painting in order to make an investment.
You couldn't say you owned a JPEG of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and sell it on the market.
This all changed with the introduction of NFTs, a technology that gives investors in the art world the capacity to have even more vapid and greedy attitudes to the art that they purchase.
If one is unfamiliar with what an NFT is, and God bless you if you are, it stands for
non-fungible token.
It's a way to use cryptocurrency technology, called the blockchain, to signify digital
ownership of say a video, image, audio file, gif, etc.
Like cryptocurrency, the ownership mechanism is public and decentralized, meaning one central
institution does not decide who owns something and who doesn't.
Theoretically, this is quite interesting for digital artists.
If you make an interesting work of digital art, so anything that's just a file on a computer,
it is quite a lot harder to claim legal ownership of it compared to say someone who makes a
painting.
With an NFT, an artist can mince their digital file on the blockchain to publicly own and
sell their work.
Yeah, I do think that's very useful.
I mean, like I said, the creator of Pepe, who for years had his work just passed around,
people made money off it, people misinterpreted it, Matt Fury, he now runs a website with
with really cool, like animated, really elaborate, like Pepe NFTs.
I can see the value there.
There are artists for whom this is a valuable mechanism.
Having said that, it would have been valuable whether it was related to a blockchain or not.
There could have been a million other ways to create digital ownership certificates that are decentralized for these pieces of work, but the reason why it is done through NFTs and the blockchain is where things NFTs obviously aren't a particularly meaningful solution to the problem of digital ownership of, say, an image in the respect that if you make a really cool digital painting, even if it says you aren't on the blockchain, I can right-click and save that image.
It will also be on my computer.
I can open the image every now and again and enjoy its aesthetic qualities just as you do, the legal owner of the image.
This is entirely unlike traditional legal ownership of, let's say, a painting.
If I legally own a Picasso and you come and steal it, I can tell Johnny Law that I am the owner and can send you to jail.
This is not the case if you're Waka Flocka Flame and your NFTs get stolen.
But wouldn't the equivalent be like, you go through a museum and someone else owns the Picasso
and you're allowed to look at it?
But also, I guess the museums open all the time and you can be a one-person museum?
These analogies are going great, so...
I, yeah, I think we need to, the, the problem with my analogy is that it wasn't advanced enough.
I need a whole page setting up this analogy.
Let's say that, let's say that there are two train tracks, one of which...
One of which has a bunch of bored apes tied to the rails, and the other one has only one human being.
So is it okay to just have all these bored apes turned into a pulp?
Is it okay?
Because there are many more of them than there are of the real human being.
But the tokens are very valuable.
Mm-hmm.
So run the human being over and then cage and sell the bored apes?
I think that's the solution.
Oh god, now seeing NFTs and specifically bored apes as a kind of market for these creatures that are being sold into slavery is a whole different thing.
Just cages with apes like so fucking bored because they're in a zoo.
Apes with like Nike hats and like lipstick and like You know, one of their eyeballs hanging out fucking miserable.
What if we made an NFT of like a consciousness like in Black Mirror?
That's where the thought experiment.
We have five NFTs of a human consciousness on one part of the train track and one human being on the other side.
What if you had an NFT?
It was a hologram of Joe Biden that is currently the president.
Then are you the president?
Very valuable, very valuable NFT, 250k.
We'll be exploring a lot more open ended questions like this.
But the point I was I was to get back to the having having ownership of a physical piece of art comes with an aesthetic advantage.
You know, no reproduction of a Picasso will be the same as the original, which is entirely not the case for NFTs.
So you're probably thinking, what's the point of them?
Or maybe you're thinking that I'm a hater, a right click saver, as I heard NFT heads call them.
Mm-hmm.
Why would you want to own an NFT of an artwork if you can just right-click and save the file?
One of them is free and the other costs money.
See, this is where I do see the patronage thing as important.
Yeah, that's true.
It's basically a receipt for showing that you showed patronage to that artist.
That artist was rewarded for this beautiful thing that we can now all enjoy by right-clicking, but you specifically gave them that money and that's on the blockchain.
That's where I see it as interesting instead of this idea of ownership that is immediately downplayed by the right click.
That's a good point.
Yeah, because like if more people had that attitude about NFTs, it would just be like, oh, you right click saved it?
Good.
I'm glad that more people are seeing this art.
But you can see like the territorial and standoffish attitude of most NFT holders show like there is this really good implementation of this technology.
Here's how most people are using it instead, though.
Yeah, and also that people buy them to resell them.
Like, it gets sucked into the equivalent of the contemporary art market, which is insane and has just become like a money laundering thing for the rich.
And this was, like, the most fast-tracked transformation to that.
It was so clear that that's what was going to be the bulk of transactions.
It's incredible.
I bet there are so many, like, black ops teams, like, funding themselves through Bored Apes.
And do you guys know about, there's this thing called NBA Top Shot, where you can own, it's a little video of a player's move, whether they make a three-pointer or they do a crazy dunk.
They turn those into NFTs and then you can buy them on the market and own like, you know, Derrick Rose's layup or whatever.
I want to own porn like that, like the thrust.
It's like, that is the most beautiful thrust.
Dude, that's a fucking great idea!
Porn NFD, like, this fucking cum shot is the most explosive.
It's the most explosive, like, oh yeah, I own it on the blockchain.
I own it, dude.
I own it.
I want a professional, like, most prestigious art auction selling an Alexis Texas cream pie for $225 million.
I want the Matrix camera to circle around the cum shot because it was shot in like 360 and I'm the only one who gets to own that specific version of that cum shot.
Everyone else just gets the shitty 2D version.
I think that the response from NFT heads about the right click save question is very revealing and an important introduction to the topic of NFTs and how they really function.
One NFT appreciator responded to this question by comparing someone who saves the file of an NFT to someone who takes a selfie beside a Lamborghini without owning it.
But again, this analogy does not work.
The NFT owner cannot practically use the digital file any more than the right click saver.
But I think the truth of this analogy is related to the fact that no one would actually buy a Lamborghini for the sake of driving it.
You buy a Lambo for the swag of being able to say that you owned it and maybe also for the sake of a business investment.
So NFTs have really nothing to do with any actual use outside of the clout they might give you and the money you might make off of them.
So I'm beginning this episode with this breakdown because it explains every aspect of the subject we'll be diving into.
What if all the investments in the art world All the money rich people put into it to make more money was done for literally no aesthetic benefit.
Art purely for the sake of having legal ownership of a thing to make money off of it.
Profit based purely on clout and hype without any actual practical use being made is perfect for the world we're living in today.
So join us as we document the history and use of this wonderful technological invention.
The first NFTs were created all the way back in 2012 and were known as color coins.
The gimmick behind them is fairly straightforward.
What if it was like a bitcoin, except it was special and not fungible?
Fungible being sort of exchangeable.
So if you have one bitcoin in your wallet, it's fungible with another bitcoin.
If you have one color coin, let's say, it's not equivalent to anything else.
Sort of like a collector coin that someone keeps because it's a unique mint.
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