As someone who clears out his checking account every month to pay rent, I have been a passive observer of the whole NFT phenomenon. When you can't afford one, it's much more tempting to see the technology as a scam, the scene's adoption of language like "democratization" as half-hearted cosplay for assets available mainly to the very rich, and the whole enterprise as a scam. They look like the kind of thing that might have earned you a small following on DeviantArt, but they are being sold at the auction house.
Rolling Stone collaborated on azine with the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs and advertised one of their creators as being like the Beastie Boys on tour. Curry had one. Another sold for over $2 million. The cheapest one you can buy is for around 50 ether, which is $200,000 dollars.
I read a New Yorker article. I learned that when you buy one of 10,000 available NFTs, an algorithm sorts a bunch of random attributes to create a cartoon of a monkey that is unique to the theme. One is shooting lasers from its eyes while the other is wearing glasses. One person frowns in front of a blue background while the other person grimaces in the background. Membership in theYacht Club makes it valuable because of its unique nature.
The thing that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars is the NFT.
The article did not explain their value. I was reminded of Neopets when I saw the apes aesthetic. The owners of the expensive avatars formed a defacto club that was compelling. I found out that parties were a part of the whole thing when I was doomed to my confusion.
Brooklyn Steel is a mid-size concert venue created and owned by the same people who run Coachella, so it's a warehouse party. That is similar to saying you went to a supper club. I figured if I was ever going to find out what the deal was with this NFT stuff, it was my time as a nightlife journalist. A picture of a defeated looking James Murphy was posted the previous night by an employee of the social media site.
A lot of my college friends went to high school with James Murphy because I went to Princeton on a scholarship. It was amazing to see their hometown hero, a titan of New York nightlife, DJing.
My proximity to that kind of privilege made me think of someone I knew who had a Bored Ape. The blockchain is impregnable and people are using it to open apartment doors. I had been to country clubs before, and this seemed like it would be the same. In college, I always enjoyed watching the wealthy behave when they were out and about.
My first move was to ask my friend's brother-in-law, who has posted on social media, if he was looking at the screens at the desk. The brother-in-law told her not to have one. The asset is depreciating. I went into the tech industry and didn't do anything. People just wondered what I was talking about.
H, a former philosophy major, told me that he is now working for a company that works on the internet of things. He wondered why his boss might have one. I sweated when I explained the situation.
I felt like I was betraying how little I knew about expensive financial assets and web 3.0 technologies when H said he didn't think he'd transfer it to me. I had caveated multiple times with "I know this is weird" and "no worries if not," but H suddenly announced that his boss could verify his ownership online and text him a picture of a QR code. The boss was telecommuting from Puerto Rico. I could tag along with him as his plus-one. What the fuck? Holy shit. Yes, it's fuck. Let's go.
Hype drives value. It was the reason we were standing in line.
I took the B43 bus to Brooklyn Steel many times before. H called me just as I stepped off the bus. He went to the security to inquire about the admission process and was told that they would be checking for yellow wristbands that had been given out at a previous event. What? The thing that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars is the NFT. She was checking for wristbands. That might be a problem, but H and I joined the line at around 7.
I learned about the NFT scene in line. It is not made up of people who work in tech. A guy wearing a blue tracksuit with ape printed all over it said he didn't know anything about the ledger and needed H to explain it to him. He said he was just an investor. The Bored Ape crowd was full of young, eager-eyed bros, happy to strike up conversation about their own pet NFT projects. It was more like a real-life version of those fake accounts on the social media site that promised that a certain coin was going to the moon. Hype drives value. It was the reason we were standing in line.
It also means that the aesthetic are not original. The Bored Apes are a poor imitation of the Japanese brand A Bathing Ape. The Yacht Club members talked about their own limited avatars.
The security guard told us to step out of the line when we were near the front because everyone else had yellow wristbands. We had a QR code that said we had the NFT. She didn't know what we were talking about. I was not sure if I could believe it when I heard that we were not going to be allowed in because of resort rules. We went to the bar Tom and Joan's and had a drink, talking about love.
I joined the longest line I have ever seen.
We were ready to head home by 10PM. Do you want to try again? H asked. Yeah, fuck it. If we persisted, we could annoy people so much that they would call someone who knew the value of the QR code. We were waved in by security without being asked to pull up our sleeves.
The irony was not lost on me that getting the non-fungible token had no bearing on us being denied entry at first or later. I will be chasing the high I felt when we crossed that threshold for the rest of my life.
BrooklynBrooklyn Steel was covered in tropical camouflage, and the bar was glowing with Bored Ape portraits on tile walls.
I couldn't help but think that the Bored Apes didn't look as impressive as the art in a typical Newgrounds flash game. I thought I must be wrong. Art and commerce are not new scandals. Maybe the next great patron of the arts is here tonight. A hundred years from now, scholarship kids at an art school will claw each other's eyes out to take classes in a building with his name on it; tonight, he is doing a backflip in the photo booth, picking up his Stella Artois Cidre, and heading back to
Noupscale is a file onchorusasset.com.
A person is at a photo booth.
Adlan Jackson.
By the way, the Strokes were there. We missed seeing Beck get introduced by Aziz Ansari but got in time to see Chris Rock try to joke about NFTs for 90 seconds and introduce one of the first Strokes shows since their fundraiser for the Democratic Party. This is about art, right? The man pleaded from the stage. NFTs? I don't know what to think. A lot of dudes here tonight. The other members of The Strokes wore stony expressions and gripped their instruments like nervous high school students.
Casablancas was correct about the gender breakdown, and I joined the longest line I have ever seen. The Yacht Club was being run by a skeleton crew because the organizers had neglected to hire anyone to manage the crowd inside the venue. I don't know what I was expecting, but I noticed that the party failed to live up to any of the promises that drive the value of NFTs. It turns out that you can't use theBlockchain to work a door or keep a bathroom clean. You can only do that with labor.
Brooklyn, if you are making more money this year than last year, make some noise!
Peer-to-peer advertising continued inside as well as in the line. It was one of the most memorable lessons I learned, that software engineers need more social engineering to create value in a public marketplace than other tech phenomena. It could mean getting rich if you can make your ape, giraffe, or pizza popular. More people are smoking indoors than I have seen at any punk show, and more stickers were left in the bathroom. Weed, mostly. The crowd in this millionaires' party was noticeably less white than I expected, like the Supreme store line crowd of nerds, hypebeasts, and hustlers.
If the makers of BAYC did a good job, they encouraged all their attendees to buy merchandise, which is where you get the wristband that we don't have. The Yacht Club members wore black and white hoodies and T-shirts that looked like mid-2010s streetwear, just north of minimal, and the crowd was full of them. The energy was sloppy. The partiers did not seem to care about cleaning up their messes. The beer smell was rising from the sticky ground.
I had already broken my pledge not to spend more than $5.50 on a bus fare when I ordered drinks at the bar at the Yacht Club. The open bar was starting to run out after we got in late. The Strokes were gone by then, and a DJ was playing a good hip-hop set, but I got a Stella Artois Cidre. You haven't lived until you hear a crowd of millionaires singing Bobby Shmurda's "Hot Nigga." The DJ knows to play the censored version in this crowd because he ended up being Questlove.
The night's headliners finally took the stage at 1AM. Most people had left. There was a small group of people who were bouncing near the front of the stage, and there was something inspiring about how small the audience had grown and how utterly dry it was. He didn't have any of the cool kid embarrassment or Chris Rock's self-consciousness. He was going to the bag. If you are making more money this year than last year, make some noise! his hype man screamed to the crowd.
I don't think that will be the case for me because I'm a taker and not a maker. I think he has the right idea. I was a little shocked by the diversity of the new class of people, their expensive sneakers, and their knowledge of the lyrics to a song. One of the most valuable lessons I have learned as a scholarship kid is that if you spend a lot of time in the borderlands between rich and poor, you could end up dying as poor as you were when you were born. I thought I might finally be learning to emulate the money moves of the Casablancases and the James Murphies, rather than their subversive poses, because the atmosphere of people trying very hard to make a party cool is strained. I still hadn't learned, whereas they wised up at some point. The Bored Apes were correct to turn culture into a token. I would have bought in sooner.
