Archive for the ‘Pepe The Frog’ Category

Charles Kesler, author of Crisis of the Two Constitutions, on the case for Trump – Vox.com

If Trumpism had an intellectual home, it would be the Claremont Institute.

Claremont is a small but influential conservative think tank, tucked away in Southern California. It publishes the Claremont Review of Books, a leading journal of right-wing intellectuals, particularly those influenced by the 20th-century philosopher Leo Strauss.

You might recall an infamous viral essay from 2016 comparing America to Flight 93, a reference to the hijacked plane on 9/11 in which passengers stormed the cockpit. That piece, published by Claremont, told readers they faced a choice in November 2016: charge the cockpit or you die. In other words, vote for Donald Trump or watch the republic burn.

The Flight 93 essay is the most well-known thing Claremont has published, and probably the most provocative, but its also aligned with the institutions broader mission. Over the past four years, Claremont has tried to put intellectual meat on the bones of Trumpism. They may not like Trump, the guy, but theyve worked hard to provide a theoretical framework for his politics.

The editor of the Claremont Review, and really the face of the institution, is Charles Kesler. A professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College (which is unaffiliated with the Claremont Institute), Kesler is what Id call a measured thinker. He supported Trump but was always very careful about how he expressed it.

Kesler is out with a new book, called Crisis of the Two Constitutions, so I reached out to him to talk about the appeal of Trump. There was nothing mystifying about the popularity of Trump among the conservative base. He was a godsend to anyone who lived to see the libs triggered. But Kesler and the authors at Claremont are different. They saw in Trump an opportunity, perhaps the last opportunity, to turn the country around.

In this conversation, I press Kesler to explain what, exactly, he saw. Does he think the country is in mortal peril? And if so, why was Trump the solution? Kesler is a serious person, and at times, this is a frustrating exchange. But I believe it offers some insight into what the intellectuals who backed Trumpism are thinking, and why the American right is where it is now.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

The tone of your book is not reactionary, but it did strike me as the lament of a reactionary, someone who really does believe that the country is on the brink. Is that how you feel?

I guess it depends on what you mean by on the brink. I dont think were on the brink of anything immediately. The trends are certainly bad, and I dont see a lot of healthy influences. But I dont think anythings inevitable in politics. Im definitely worried about my country, if thats what you mean.

No, thats not really what I mean. Were all worried. But there are many who think were in an actual political emergency.

I wouldnt say were in an emergency now. Were approaching a crisis unless things happen in between. I begin the book by pointing out that our politics could change considerably if some extraneous event happens, if a major war breaks out, or if the little green men land from outer space. There could be a game reset if the conditions really were to change suddenly.

But Covid-19 was a pretty big extraneous factor, and it seemed to make very little difference in our politics. It was easily absorbed into the ongoing disagreements. We just had more things to disagree about. We could argue about masks, and shutdowns, and opening up, and all the things that we have been arguing about in addition to the usual stuff from the past year.

Ill be honest: I think you think were in a political emergency, but you dont seem quite willing to say that at least not in the book.

There are lots of familiar conservative arguments in there about cultural decline, and, frankly, Im sympathetic to some of it, but my sense is that youre hesitant to signal your genuine alarm. And this is most clear when it comes to Trump, whom you never fully endorse but youre obviously not not endorsing him. For someone like you, a serious person with a real grounding in history, even a muted openness to Trump feels like an act of desperation.

An act of desperation?

I mean someone like you understands what Trump is, what he represents, and supporting him suggests you think things are sufficiently bad that the system has to be blown up in order to be saved.

I did, in fact, vote for Trump. And I published Michael Antons infamous Flight 93 essay back in 2016. So I cant be exonerated of Trump. But I honestly dont think theres an emergency.

I wrote my dissertation on Cicero, so I know something about Roman republican politics. And in that case, you had essentially 100 years of civil war, off and on, before what we would now recognize as the end of the republic. And its not clear that at any moment in that process, you couldve said, This is it. This is the last spiral, the last hundred years of republic. Were doomed. I think its very hard to read that. And were far from having pre-civil war conditions.

I dont agree with Ross Douthats account of America as a decadent society, though. His argument is that our decadence is more fundamental than our polarization, and that we could have many more centuries of continued rich decadence, and of being a superpower, without any impending catastrophe to worry about.

But that analysis doesnt recognize that America, as you say, has always been a contentious and fractious polity. Weve had a lot of diversity in American history and American politics. And thats why we should be concerned about challenges to unity, because our unity is a constructed political thing, and it takes more maintenance and inspiration than people may believe.

How could someone worried about American unity look at a guy like Trump and think thats a solution to our problems?

Well, I think he had a chance. His message, his policies, could have been very helpful in carving out a new middle in American politics. The problem was his tone, his affect, his showmanship and egotism, whatever you want to call it exactly, undercut that political attempt, and it left him in the strange position of governing a country in which 60 percent of the people in one poll said that they were better off now than they were four years before, and yet 20 percent of those people voted against him.

So he turned out a lot of pro-Trump voters, but he also turned out a lot of anti-Trump voters. He threw away whatever chance he had to be a unifying figure. And if you look at some of the micro-results, he did better among some Black voters and Hispanic voters in various places. So the simple story of Donald Trump the racist cant be entirely true. Despite his personality, or maybe because of his personality, he gave them some hope. Thats why I think it might have been a winnable election for Trump, if he had just been a little less Trump-like in his personality.

This is where you drive me nuts, Charles. Its true that Trump did surprisingly well among some Black and Hispanic voters, and there are some interesting potential reasons for that, but the idea that Trump was ever going to be a unifying figure is just absurd.

Youre smart enough to recognize the nationalist game Trump was playing. You know the appeals he made to white voters were racially tinged, you know he lunged into national politics by embracing the racist birther conspiracy about Obama, but in your book you talk about Make America Great Again as an innocent slogan from a man who just loves his country like a little boy loves his mommy and that it was the PC liberals who got it all wrong.

Look, you can be a nationalist without being a racist, and plenty of non-racist people voted for Trump, but your account of Trumps naive nationalist pitch is charitable to a degree that is frankly hard to believe.

I mean it sincerely. There are parts of Trump that Ive long disassociated myself from, like the birtherism. I wrote a book about Obama back in 2012, and I made a point in the beginning to say that I dont believe this. I never had any tolerance for this stuff. And there are things Trump said and did that were crude and regrettable and I dont want to hear it again.

But he did stand up for the traditional, patriotic civic culture. And he was one of the very few Republican politicians who had really any interest in tackling political correctness, or the eventual toppling of monuments and statues, which I think was very defensible on civic or nationalist grounds. This is part of what made Trump so attractive to a lot of voters.

Theres a lot there, but Im going to circle back to the point I was driving at earlier. I think there are right-wing intellectuals who have concluded that democracy has produced the wrong outcomes (culturally and politically) and therefore they believe it has to be rejected, or at least no longer considered inherently good.

Do you think thats true?

No, I think youre right. I must say, I read more about them than I read of them. Because a lot of them are on the web. If they remain on the fringe, I dont think its an imminent problem. But it could be a long-term problem on the right among a certain kind of disillusioned young male.

Im not talking about alienated 20-somethings posting Pepe the Frog memes. Im talking about conservative intellectuals, people like Michael Anton, whose Flight 93 essay you published. I mean, that essay told readers that the stakes of the 2016 election were literally existential, that they had to charge the cockpit or you die. I suppose you could argue that Anton thinks hes defending the republic there, but I also think hes saying that democracy has veered so far off the tracks that we need to explode it in order to revive it.

I would say in defense of Michael that the only action hes asking a reader to take is to vote for Trump. The metaphor he uses is histrionic, as he himself has admitted. In fact, I think he admitted that in the original piece itself. But it was designed to shake conservative voters out of a certain kind of lethargy that had come over them because of their discontent with Trump and with the whole process that started with 17 candidates and somehow, in the end, boiled down to Donald Trump. He feared apathy on the right, so he countered that with a dynamic and explosive image.

I think telling people to charge the cockpit or die is doing a little more than saying, Just go out and vote, but Ill leave Anton aside. You refer to something called the Weimar problem in your book that seems relevant here. You write: Every republic eventually faces what might be called the Weimar problem. Has the national culture, popular and elite, deteriorated so much that the virtues necessary to sustain republican government are no longer viable? You hedge on this, but honestly, do you think this is basically where we are?

No, but I do fear thats where were headed. Its a more comprehensive list than I gave there. It would also include doubt about the goodness of the republic. And the grounds of the goodness of the republic is a major part of our ambivalence. Its a major part of our moral and psychological disarray right now.

But its also economic dislocations and what has happened to the middle class and to the working class in America. I dont think any of that is irrecoverable, though. And I think we can do better. But I do think that, yeah, in some ways, I fear were hollowing out the republic. You have two adamant parties that increasingly deplore each other, and which of these parties has the time to take up the banner of the original republic? Which party cares about individual rights, about natural rights, about limited government, about a whole set of constitutional ideas that we were once so proud of but which figure only at the margins of our constitutional and political arguments?

Theres some both-sidesism in that answer, but you clearly think the progressive left is the driving force of decay, right?

I do lay a fair amount of blame at the feet of progressives, thats true. I think progressivism imported a whole new conception of political science and human nature, and really a new conception of the purpose of politics, which has turned government into a rights-creation industry. Were not in politics to defend our natural rights, or our God-given moral dignity, or whatever you want to call it. Were in politics to create rights. And the only rights we ever have are those that we humans create for one another.

Now, there are worse ways of looking at politics than that, to be sure. But I think its very demoralizing for a democracy. Although it tries to avoid this, it still undermines the restraint on human will in politics. It opens the vista of very great creativity in the making of rights, which can also mean the unmaking of rights, which can also be done very creatively. And it removes any authority above our will from rights, from the democratic process, from the safety and happiness of the people, all of these notions which were close to the heart of what I call the founders Constitution.

I try to be fair to the progressives in each of their versions as they make history in the 20th century. Theyre really out to save America, as they understand it, from the burden of an antiquated Constitution and the inefficiencies of the machinery of the Constitution, but also what they regard as the immorality of the ideas behind the machinery. I think they sincerely believe that. And they did accomplish some good things in the 20th century, but I think the reasons they give for what they do tend to undermine the goodness of those accomplishments.

This is one place where we just have a philosophical disagreement, because whatever one thinks of God, I do believe that rights only exist because human beings have decided they should, and because weve agreed to continually reaffirm them. But this is a point we cant argue here. Most of your ire in the book is directed at the woke left and what you call its abandonment of truth-seeking. Is relativism really a bigger problem on the left today than it is on the right?

Thats a good question. I think its more of a problem on the left. You could say many of the moral revolutionaries on the left, whether on the gender front or the anti-racist front, a lot of that does seem to be wrapped up with the notion of anti-foundationalism, or the idea that theres no foundation for any of our concepts other than human will. That tendency is more advanced on the left than on the right.

Im not here to defend everything that falls under the banner of wokeness, and Ive been pretty open about my issues with a lot of it, but your book is conspicuously uninterested in the post-truth politics on the right. I mean, the vast majority of the Republican Party believes the 2020 election was fraudulent, a claim without any basis in fact whatsoever.

Does that kind of epistemological pluralism bother you as much as some of the stuff youre seeing on the left?

No, it does concern me, and in the winter issue of the Claremont Review of Books, I ran three pieces that were critical of the hypothesis that the election had been stolen. I think its much more likely the election was won fair and square, or more or less fair and square with some cheating, but not the whole thing being stolen by Joe Biden. I think any political scientist would have to read the evidence that way.

Now, at the same time, there are complicating factors here. One is that the battle over the election came at the end of a series of battles about the truth of things like Russian collusion or Ukrainian intervention. After two or three years of every establishment organ assuring us that there was no doubt that the guy was guilty, it turns out he wasnt. So I think that contributed to the plausibility of Trumps story that this was the latest deception in a series of deceptions.

Okay, thats fine, and while I think thats a simplistic account of the Russia story, Ill avoid debating it and instead push on my previous point a little more. Were not in this situation merely because the left or because the media overplayed its hands on Russia, though Id concede thats part of the story.

A lot of conservatives believe these lies because right-wing commentators and politicians and intellectuals have cynically indulged them. I just heard your colleague Michael Anton on Andrew Sullivans podcast playing this exact game. He wont say outright that the election was stolen, but when pressed for evidence, he says hes just practicing epistemological humility. I mean, come on!

This is why I think people in your camp, sometimes called West Coast Straussians, are doing something very deliberate. One of the ideas of Strauss is that the philosopher, especially in times of crisis, may have to be a little deceptive, or tell lies in service of some higher goal, like saving the republic.

Honestly, is that part of whats going on here?

No, not at all. I would consider intentional deception about the election an especially despicable use of the noble lie excuse. As I say, I think that Trump lost. Ive published two essays on that very question, and my own, in the last issue, which more or less assumed the truth of that. I think Trump won a close election in 2016, and he lost a fairly close election in 2020. And theres nothing that really ought to be surprising about that.

But its true that Trump took advantage of what might have been, among reasonable people, some doubt about particular elections, and blew it up into a whole theory, a whole excuse, for losing the election. That is regrettable, and it is damaging.

Youre very careful in the book to say we havent reached the point of no return, so Ill ask you here: Wheres that line? And what happens when we cross it?

Its hard to say exactly. But it could be the result of a Supreme Court decision that a majority of the states refuse to enforce. It could be an abortion ruling or a guns ruling. But it could be sufficiently polarizing that people essentially say, I dont want to be in the same community with the people on the other side of this issue. And that would start by saying, Were not going to allow federal marshals to enforce the law in our state. But of course, for reasons that are familiar in history, that can escalate into something much bigger than anyone anticipated. I dont think that is necessarily going to happen, and, of course, Im hopeful that it doesnt happen.

But thats a mechanical answer to your question. I think a more philosophical answer would be that weve crossed that line when its clear that we really dont understand All men are created equal in the same way, or when we understand it in incompatible and even mutually impossible ways. If that happens, weve reached the limits of moral community, which helped to set the limits of political community. And thats when you have a real problem.

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Charles Kesler, author of Crisis of the Two Constitutions, on the case for Trump - Vox.com

Pepe The Frog | Derp Cat Wiki | Fandom

*Pepe The Frog is a meme frog. He is the mortal form of Lord Kek and the leader of Kekistan. PepeAllies

The Kekistanti people

Enemies of Kekistan

Upon the rise of his followers to form a nation, Lord Kek decided he should directly influence his followers, help them grow and flourish. As such, he took on a mortal form. A frog known as Pepe, the undying King of Kekistan. He led his people through numerous battles and wars, helping them through hardship with his divine powers. However, Pepe was an unstable entity. Like the Kekistani bordered the line of dank and cringe, Pepe bordered Meme God and Devil Entity. Pepe/Kek remains sane for the moment, though those who know his secret are wary he could snap. Regardless, Pepe is an influential meme leader and not to be underestimated. He is Kekistan's representative at the United Memes, and seems to truly care for his people. Crazed God or not, there is some aspect of Pepe that can be....respected.

During the Great Mongo-Kekistan War, Pepe led a massive force to attempt to retake parts of the Mongoose Empire, but was beaten back by the combined forces of Megarton and High God King Overlord Sashank. Since then, he has not ventured out of his lair, except to attend meetings of the United Memes or meet with his generals.

Since you found this

Link:
Pepe The Frog | Derp Cat Wiki | Fandom

NFT goldrush: A roundup of the strangest nonfungible tokens – CNET

A .gif of Nyan Cat sold for lots and lots (and lots) of money as an NFT.

NFTs have temporarily taken the reins from cryptocurrency as the strangest online trend. Nonfungible tokens have become a sensation, or scandal, thanks to the headline-grabbing insanity of it all: Memes being sold for the cost of a Tesla, tweets fetching seven-figure bids and digital art selling for $69 million.

A quick catchup: Nonfungible assets are those that aren't interchangeable with one another. Every $100 bill holds the same value as any other $100 bill, therefore they are fungible. Houses, cars and collectables are nonfungible: Houses of the same size on the same street will sell for different prices, and the same model of the same car can similarly vary in cost.

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Which takes us to nonfungible tokens. They're essentially certifications of ownership recorded on a blockchain. Nonfungible tokens put the ownership of a digital product -- be it digital art, a video clip or even just a jpeg or gif -- on that ledger. In the age of NFTs, downloading a picture is like owning a print. Having the NFT is like owning the original painting.

Real digital artists are making real money on NFTs. Take Beeple. He's a digital artist with a huge fanbase, over 1.8 million followers on Instagram. Art he sold as an NFT recently fetched $69 million in a Christie's auction. That's insane to you or me, but not to people who frequent Christie's auctions, who spend $60 million on abstract expressionist paintings.

But even if there is a small percentage of NFT sales you can make sense of, there are many more which are absolutely, positively nuts.

For example...

When COVID-19 lockdown began last March, Brooklyn filmmaker Alex Ramrez-Mallis and four friends did the obvious thing: Started sending audio recordings of their farts to one another through a WhatsApp group chat. One year later, Ramrez-Mallis is auctioning 52 minutes of audio flatulence as an NFT.

The auction's starting price: $85. Would you pay $85 for farts? Would be a solid investment if you did, since someone out there was ultimately willing to pay 0.24 ethereum, or about $420, for the NFT. What's more, in addition to selling the 52-minute recording, he's also selling NFTs for individual farts. Only one has been sold: Fart #420, for about $90.

"If people are selling digital art and GIFs, why not sell farts?" Ramrez-Mallistold the New York Post. Truer words, never spoken.

Bad Luck Brian.

Remember Bad Luck Brian? It was a meme popularized in 2012, when a yearbook photo of high school student Kyle Craven, depicting him with braces and a plaid sweater, was posted to Reddit. People would post the picture with macro captions of unfortunate events, like "Escapes burning building. Gets hit by firetruck." (Most of the good ones are too NSFW for me to post here.)

Kyle Craven has had the last laugh, though, selling the yearbook photo as an NFT for $36,000. It's kind of a beautiful underdog story for the digital age. Kind of.

This art was sold as an NFT in $38,000 in 2018 and flipped three years later for $320,000.

This one is dumb, but also is an illustrative example of why people are buying NFTs: to sell them for more later on.

The above piece of art is like a Pokemon card for a hell-creature merge of Homer Simpson and Pepe the frog. Homer Simpson is, well, Homer Simpson, and Pepe is an internet frog that's popular on 4chan and other areas of the internet. The NFT for this art recently sold for $320,000.

The crazy part? The person who sold it wasn't its creator.He bought it back in 2018 for $38,000. So as preposterous as all of this NFT business is, it's worth noting that some people are actually making a lot of money flipping them.

Now we get into the stupid money.

Nyan Cat was a YouTube sensation nearly 10 years ago. It was a video of a pixelated cat with a Pop-Tart for a torso, along with the tune of a Japanese pop song. It has over 185 million views on YouTube, and has become a ubiquitous gif in the years since.

"The design of Nyan Cat was inspired by my cat Marty, who crossed the Rainbow Bridge but lives on in spirit," wrote its creator on the sales page for the NFT of Nyan Cat. It would end up selling for 300 ethereum -- $531,000.

"Just setting up my twtter," tweeted Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, back in 2006. Turns out that each of those words is worth over $625,000, as the NFT for that tweet is currently at auction, with the top bid sitting at $2.5 million.

Dorsey has said the proceeds will be turned to Bitcoin and donated to GiveDirectly, a charity that helps six African countries with COVID-19 relief.

The philanthropy is nice -- not to be understated, since it'll likely save thousands of lives -- but there's also some clever marketing at play here. NFTs are closely related to cryptocurrency, since both are based on blockchain, to the point where NFTs are almost always bought with Ethereum, the second biggest currency after Bitcoin. So if you're a big investor in cryptocurrency, like Dorsey is, inflating the NFT bubble isn't a bad way to help your cryptoholdings appreciate.

Which is why it's not surprising to see Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweet about NFTs, and tease selling one in the future.

But despite the philanthropy, the guerrilla marketing and the distinct possibility that the buyer will be able to flip the tweet for $10 million in a few years, dropping $2.5 million on a tweet is a sign we've entered a new era of internet insanity.

See also: NFTs explained: These pricey tokens are as weird as you think they are

Now playing: Watch this: Tesla invests $1.5B in Bitcoin, E3 to go digital

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NFT goldrush: A roundup of the strangest nonfungible tokens - CNET

NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money – Fstoppers

Photographers, filmmakers, and digital artists are falling over themselves to mint NFTs in a get-rich-quick scheme that will do little beyond transferring wealth from artists to tech billionaires. Why are so many people buying into the idea that something is rare because everyone says it is?

If youve yet not minted your first NFT and youre wondering how it works, heres a quick summary of the process: you create a wallet, buy some Ethereum, and choose a platform. You then pick one of your digital creations and pay around $70-100 to mint this artwork into aNon-Fungible Token. You choose a starting price and wait for the bids to come rolling in. You may even like to build up to a drop to create some hype.

One of the easiest places to get started is Rarible,which is bewildering, thanks to the crypto aesthetic made up of nightmarish visions of randomness and memes. Certain tropes emerge: Pepe the Frog, rhinos, and rainbows proliferate, creating a nonsensical soup of chaos and confusion that feels like a terrifying mash-up of kids cartoons and 4chan.

If youre one of the early adopters or have some friends who were ahead of the curve, you might have landed yourself an invitation to a platform such as Foundation.app. These sites create a degree of exclusivity, as theres a level of filtering to ensure that only a small number get to mint their work. If you dont know anyone with an invite, you can head to a specific channel on Foundations Discord server and ask politely, though such is the FOMO, meaning requests have been piling in at more than one every 30 seconds.

For Foundation.app, you'll need an invitation. For Nifty Gateway, you'll need to upload a video telling them why you're valuable enough to warrant being allowed to sell your art.

Whichever platform you choose, you wont be able to ignore the fact that a lot of people seem to be selling a lot of questionable digital art for ludicrous amounts of money. Thats a very strong nudge for you to get involved.

Incentivization is such a feature of these platforms that many of the artworks being minted and traded reflect it in the aesthetic. Pieces involving the letters FOMO proliferate in a self-referential sea of urgency to buy, sell, and be sold. This sense that youre not on board with the beginnings of something big underpins the entire NFT experience, and its a marketing masterstroke. Almost every tweet telling you about an auction that you should get involved in will remind you that artwork will only be available for a brief window. The FOMO is so powerfulthat you probably feel like you're already losing money by having not signed up yet.

To many, its a means of overthrowing the existing regime; when you look a little closer, you realize that its just an extrememanifestation of neoliberalism. Instead of convincing you to buy stuff that you dont need, theyre convincing you to buy imaginary optimism based on a mass enchantment. In addition, as a generation, we have the fervent belief that every single one of us is special and that therefore our creativity must have innate value; NFTs are our chance to sell it.

The rhetoric is compellingif a little naive at times. I stumbled upon astatement accompanying the forthcoming drop (i.e., the beginning of an auction) of one reasonably well-established digital artist, which, like many NFT artworks, ties the concept of the NFT into the artwork itself. This is how he described his animation of a futuristic character and his flying car: NFTs are a rallying call for creatives, it read. A call to explore, to dream, and to leap into a world where our solitary dreams become a collective reality. He added: Collecting and creating NFTs is not an act of defiance but a tribute to a historical moment of a movement that is changing our lives.

Im not sure anything can be more meta than the simulated ownership of a digital copy of an artwork that describes itself as a tribute to a historical moment of a movement. It also conveniently ignores that these platforms are owned by millionaires such as the Winklevoss twins, who famously sued Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for Facebook.

Buy, sell, and discover rare digital items, reads the strapline on OpenSea.io. If youre wondering how a digital item can be rare, youre asking the right question. Last century, philosopher Walter Benjamin explored how the authenticity of art was tied to its uniquenessand that photography along withmechanical reproduction brought instability. Im not sure what Benjamin would have made of NFTs, but this disconnect between our love of authenticity and the virtual worlds inability to provide an alternative isnt resolved by owning tokens that barely even exist. Digital rarity is a pretense.

Society is becoming less physical and more virtual, and its no coincidence that NFTs have taken hold at a time when our social interactions have never been less tangible. Furthermore, the creative industries now play a significant role in the economies of major nations, and yet despite the supposed value of artists contributions, employment is largely precarious (which itself is made to look appealing) and often supported by mundane jobs. The carrot dangled by the world of NFTs is incredibly alluring: lets all sell something virtually so that we can collectively pretend that it is now owned by someone else.

The art market has always been about making enough people believe that something has value. Its also been a shadow banking system that facilitates the movement of large sums of money across borders or hides it from tax inspectors. The value of the artworks that are now being sold as NFTs have acquired value thanks to marketing, FOMO, and a massive pile-on of unwitting minters and buyers trailing eagerly after celebrities and huge brands. Money washes through this system, and as a bubble, its unsustainable.

What doesnt get seen among the flashy websites and occasionally beautiful artworks is the huge volume of minted pieces that do not sell. Selling an NFT is not that different from selling a print: its far easier if you have an excitable band of fans keen to part with their cash, and with NFTs,its even simpler if those fans are already tech geeks. If youre a digital artist with a large following, you might do quite well, and it works in your favor if you indulge heavily in the crypto aesthetic. Thats a tiny minority of sellers; the vast majority will only lose money, as minting isnt free, and you can be sure that someone somewhere is making a tidy profit as a result.

Being friendly, supportive people, artists are encouraging fellow artists to buy each others art, salvaging egos, and giving you a sense that the money you spent on gas hasnt been a complete waste. However, gas fees aside, most platforms add a 3% fee to the sum paid by the buyerand then take a 15% cut of that received by the seller: this generous, mutually supportive act of buying each others art is doing little more than line the pockets of the millionaires that set up these platforms in the first place. Artists would be far better off simply sending each other checks, posting a photo of the checks on social media, and then just keeping those checks in a drawer.

What many artists are conveniently ignoring is that NFTs have a vast carbon footprint. To her horror, one environmentally conscious artist calculated that minting her six tokens was the equivalent to running her studio for two years. Theres plenty of discussion about the precise impact of NFTs(though the platforms seem predictably reluctant to get involved), but any conversation about this marketplace that doesnt mention its potential environmental impact is massively irresponsible.

On the surface, the NFT marketplace is made to look like everyone is making money, and while crypto might be rewriting the rules of economics, there is one dictum it cannot escape: for someone to make money, another has to lose money. NFTs do not magically generate wealth from nowhere; theyre taking it from those buying into the idea that everyone whos getting in early is making a killing. As David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchainexplains, NFTs are entirely for the benefit of the crypto grifters. The only purpose the artists serve is as aspiring suckers to pump the concept of crypto and, of course, to buy cryptocurrency to pay for minting NFTs.

Eventually,this pumping will tail off as the number of people willing to keep plowing money into Ethereum and NFTs will begin to ease. Given that this system relies on constant growth, it seems a safe bet that the value of these "rare" items might start to fall, and those countless investors who spent thousands of dollars on low-res pictures of a puppy might want to get their money out before it collapses completely. Otherwise, what are you going to do with that puppy? Print it and hang it above the toilet?

Prices might not even need to stagnate for people to sell. They just need to stop rising as rapidly, and suddenly, it will seem like a safer option to have dollars in your Chase account rather than Ethereum in a wallet where its value has already been seen to fluctuate by 20% in a single day.Once investors confidence is dented, the collapse could happen quite quickly.

Ethereum increases in value when people keep buying Ethereum,and this simulated ownership of supposedly rare digital assets has manufactured demand. Cryptocurrenciesare desperate to find a reason for people to swap their dollars for a slightly more imaginary monetary system, and NFTs are the latest solution. When it reaches saturation point, the market will adjust, and it could be messy.

This bubble will burst; its just a matter of when.

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Myanmar: memes and mantras of a new generation of democracy protesters – The Conversation UK

What do the internet memes Doge and Cheems, the Hollywood film franchise The Hunger Games, and a sachet of instant tea have in common? They are all part of a rich lexicon of protest now being deployed by young activists contesting Myanmars military coup.

The country has been in turmoil since the military seized control on February 1, imprisoning state councillor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and leading NLD party officials, who won another landslide victory in Novembers elections.

But, as a new generation of protesters take to the streets of the countrys towns and cities in growing numbers, they are drawing on a range of internet memes, slogans, cartoons, and cultural symbols to make themselves heard and mobilise support within the country and across the region.

The three-finger salute, initially appropriated from the hugely popular The Hunger Games trilogy by young democracy activists protesting the 2014 military coup in neighbouring Thailand, is their shared signal of defiance, enumerating the need for equality, freedom, and solidarity as they find themselves engaged in a similarly dystopian struggle with an unscrupulous tyrant.

They deploy cartoon characters including Pepe the Frog and the internet memes Doge and Cheems to ridicule senior general Min Aung Hlaing and other junta leaders. Their placards are in English as much as Burmese, and they now set the protest songs employed by previous generations of the countrys pro-democracy activists to western rap and hip-hop soundtracks.

Myanmars young protesters epitomise a culture of transnational activism now favoured by a generation of technically savvy and increasingly cosmopolitan young people intent on resisting the imposition of authoritarian agendas.

As the authorities suspend the internet and block social media platforms such as Facebook, many are resorting to VPN access to get their message out on Instagram, TikTok and Discord through an avalanche of rapidly mutating hashtags. Likeminded netizens in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand are working in support through the Milk Tea Alliance, a movement pushing for democratic change across south-east Asia and beyond.

This diffuse, largely online, democratic solidarity movement unites young people confronting riot police in downtown Yangon and Mandalay with Thai youth in Bangkok campaigning for reform of the monarchy, pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong contesting Beijings National Security Law, and young Taiwanese nationalists countering the increased presence of Chinese trolls and bots from the internet cafes of Taipei.

Thai artist Sina Wittayawirojs illustration of a set of fists defiantly holding aloft steaming cups of milk tea fast becoming the unofficial logo of the alliance has now been joined by one bearing the Myanmar flag. Images of Royal Myanmar Teamix sachets, featuring its distinctive milky brew much like Thailands orange-hued and Taiwans boba tea, are being enthusiastically disseminated on social media and emblazoned on street placards.

Like other members of the alliance, they are quick to blame China (where tea is of course traditionally served without milk) as they accuse Beijing of lending the Myanmar military logistic support as well as working to undermine democratic rights and freedoms elsewhere in the region.

Solidarity is being expressed by the alliance in other ways. Some young activists in Myanmar are wearing hard hats like the flashmobs in Hong Kong, and others have created impromptu Lennon Walls on bridges and underpasses redolent of those created by the Umbrella Movement there. These, in turn, were inspired by anti-communist street propaganda in Europes former Eastern bloc shortly after the assassination of the Beatles front man.

Young members of Thailands Progressive Movement and anti-establishment organisation Ratsadon (The People) have organised solidarity protests banging pots and pans as anti-coup demonstrators are doing nightly in Myanmar to drive out evil spirits which have torn down their fledgling democracy.

One young aerobics instructor in the the Myanmar capital Naypyidaw happened to record a video of her regular workout session in front of the Burmese government buildings as armoured personnel carriers moved into the shot. This has subsequently been set to an Indonesian protest anthem which has gone viral.

Art and music are being expertly employed to articulate messages of protest and solidarity that bridge cultural and linguistic divides and unite political interests.

Not for the first time, young people particularly educated young people are playing a decisive role in Myanmars growing civil disobedience movement. Student protests in 1920, 1936, 1962, 1974, 1988, 2007 and 2015 have been part of the long struggle for independence and democracy. They ignited the momentous democratic uprising in 1988, and the so-called Saffron Revolution in 2007, when the countrys monks joined them on the streets in a defiant show of moral support.

For the most part, these popular uprisings were violently crushed. It is estimated that hundreds if not thousands died in the 1988 uprisings alone. How is this latest expression of dissent likely to be any different? Already we hear of police brutality and with the protests gathering momentum it is likely the authorities will respond with increasing force.

Indeed, the stage is set for just such a confrontation as the commitment of young people largely innocent of history but with a brief taste of freedom encounter the dark forces of authoritarian rule that have yet again undermined a democratic future for their beleaguered country.

And yet there is hope that this generation of young activists might succeed where others have failed. They are politically and technically literate. They inhabit a wider world than young pro-democracy activists in Myanmar have done in the past. They have access to new places and spaces of protest thanks to the technological benefits of globalisation. They are actively forging new networks of solidarity and resistance beyond their country and communities. They are, in short, on the right side of history.

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Myanmar: memes and mantras of a new generation of democracy protesters - The Conversation UK