Bored Apecalypse

"A limited NFT collection where the token itself doubles as your membership to a swamp club for apes. The club is open! Ape in with us." That's the welcome message on the Bored Ape Yacht Club website, and I find this craze a good metaphor for the general and extreme indifference about how crazy our world has become...

Have we all become bored apes? Have we collectively lost sight of what's really important? We're fiercely debating all kinds of crazy things, like what the floor price of a bored ape NFT should be, whether or not "wokeness" is a communist plot to take over our lifes, and why aren't M&Ms sexy anymore? No, really, Tucker Carlson complains new M&M's mascots are 'less sexy'. I guess this shouldn't bother me anymore after all the fake indignation about Dr. Suess, Mr. Potato Head and cancel culture.

Carlson went on to argue this makeover is all part of a woke conspiracy to quench the sexual desire he assumes many of his viewers previously felt for the talking candies: "M&M's will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous. Until the moment you wouldn't want to have a drink with any one of them. That's the goal. When you're totally turned off, we've achieved equity. They've won," Carlson said.
_{source: The Week}

The bored apes, and most NFT projects for that matter, are another clear indication of how delusional a society we've become. These ridiculously overpriced non-fungible tokens are the ultimate tool to sell someone nothing. Well, not exactly nothing; they are a sort of digital receipt that points to a picture somewhere on the internet. With the NFT you haven't bought the image, the copyright, a license or any sort of control over the "artwork" you thought you acquired. The image is a distraction. It's a visual representation of cult-like bragging-rights. NFTs are the true blockchain equivalents of a "greater fool" scam. Bored Ape club-members will defend their precious tokens to the death, of course, and exhibit cult-like behavior. The token itself is literally just a link to an image that's stored somewhere online, and owners are powerless if the server goes down or if the image is removed or replaced.

Fantasizing about "metaverse" games with NFT assets is equally full of wishful thinking as well. It's claimed that it will become possible to buy a weapon in one game and then use it in another game. Why do people just assume this is true? I mean, a sword that does 5 damage points in a game where monsters have 50 hitpoints total is useless in another game where monsters have thousands of hitpoints. And that's without considering the fact that this other game will probably be programmed in another language, other modeling software, different polygon-counts... It's not as if this is easily done. Anyhow, the floor price of a Bored Ape NFT now stands at 93 Ethereum, approximately 225,000 dollars. That's a lot of money for a receipt of a link pointing to an image that's generated by software that randomly combines templates for background-color, basic face, hair and accessories...

The world has gone M.A.D. Yes, we have the pleasure of possibly having to worry about Mutually Assured Destruction once again, now that tensions surrounding the whole Russia versus Ukraine malarkey are reaching new peaks. This is a complicated conflict, one that I don't presume to know everything about. But I do know something about America's history, so I don not trust the propaganda coming from America's or other western mainstream news outlets. And I know that America is supporting far right neo-Nazi insurgents in Ukraine who are fighting against citizens of Russian ethnic background that support Putin. It should be common knowledge by now that the American government has a rich history of supporting and installing autocratic regimes all over the world, most notably in South America and the Middle East, to safeguard their economic and ideological interests.

Our crazy world history used to be divided on the date of Christ's birth, AD and BC, but now we speak of a "post 9/11" world. September 11 2001 was on a Tuesday, but that dividing line could just as well be placed on September 11 1973, which was a Tuesday as well. That was the day of the America-backed Chilean coup against the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende and, after an economic war ordered by U.S. President Richard Nixon, installed military dictator Augusto Pinochet. This date and this coup is now often referred to as "the other 9/11," and is a perfect example of America's foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. They created their own monsters in the Middle East by backing Saddam Hussein in their proxy war against Iran, and they backed Osama Bin Laden in their proxy war against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan. And now they back the Kiev-governed Ukraine since 2014, a regime that supports neo-fascist movements that combats ethnic Russians, Jews and other "not-pure" Ukraine citizens.

No less important, however, is the highly selective nature of the mainstream narrative of the new Cold War, what it chooses to feature and what it virtually omits. Among the omissions, few realities are more important than the role played by neofascist forces in US-backed, Kiev-governed Ukraine since 2014. Not even many Americans who follow international news know the following, for example:

- That the snipers who killed scores of protestors and policemen on Kiev’s Maidan Square in February 2014, thereby triggering a “democratic revolution” that overthrew the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and brought to power a virulent anti-Russian, pro-American regime—it was neither democratic nor a revolution, but a violent coup unfolding in the streets with high-level support—were sent not by Yanukovych, as is still widely reported, but instead almost certainly by the neofascist organization Right Sector and its co-conspirators.

- That the pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and others in Odessa shortly later in 2014 reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during World War II has been all but deleted from the American mainstream narrative even though it remains a painful and revelatory experience for many Ukrainians.

- That the Azov Battalion of some 3,000 well-armed fighters, which has played a major combat role in the Ukrainian civil war and now is an official component of Kiev’s armed forces, is avowedly “partially” pro-Nazi, as evidenced by its regalia, slogans, and programmatic statements, and well-documented as such by several international monitoring organizations. Congressional legislation recently banned Azov from receiving any US military aid, but it is likely to obtain some of the new weapons recently sent to Kiev by the Trump Administration due to the country’s rampant network of corruption and black markets.

- That stormtroop-like assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other “impure” citizens are widespread throughout Kiev-ruled Ukraine, along with torchlight marches reminiscent of those that eventually inflamed Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s. And that the police and official legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these neofascist acts or to prosecute them. On the contrary, Kiev has officially encouraged them by systematically rehabilitating and even memorializing Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German extermination pogroms and their leaders during World War II, renaming streets in their honor, building monuments to them, rewriting history to glorify them, and more.
_{source: The Nation, May 2, 2018}

And the list goes on; read the entire article for more. And if the new Cold War, the pandemic, climate change and stupid culture wars weren't enough, we have to ask ourselves which apocalyptic scenario will reach us sooner; World War 3 or the next complete economic crash? In the last linked video, Kyle Kulinsky discusses an article about "superbubbles" (I believe the Bored Ape NFT's qualify) that are about to burst, taking the economy down with them.

Over the last 100 years, the U.S. has experienced three previous superbubbles, according to Grantham: The crash of 1929, which triggered the Great Depression; the dotcom meltdown that began in 2000; and the housing bust that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis (Japan also had two superbubbles in the 1980s when the country's inflated stock and real estate markets crashed, he said.)
_{source: CBS News}

I apologize for mixing several topics together in this one post, but it just struck me how the world might end while we're still bickering about M&Ms and their perceived gender... Point is that we're being conned by the billions. Markets are artificially inflated for the benefit of the few, and when they come crashing down we'll all be hurt. Privatizing the profits and socializing the losses, that's how it always goes. We're being kept in the dark about what's going on in the Ukraine, just like we were kept in the dark for all other foreign policy disasters in the past, and America is now backing most of the world's known dictators and fascists. It's in crazy times like these when fascism gains a foothold and extremists reign free. And said extremism is deliberately cultivated, for example through the fake culture wars with fake cancel culture. I hope you are at least keeping it together, dear reader, in these crazy times...

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