Inside Remilia Corporation, the anti-woke DAO behind the doomed Milady Maker NFT

The Milady Maker NFT line was meant to be something small. Only 10,000 “Miladys” were minted and there are around 3,000 currently owned on OpenSea, all of which depict cutesy anime girls sporting different outfits. By April, when Miladys hit their price ceiling of $6,000, the NFTs could be spotted all over Twitter, where people proudly showcased them as their profile photos. 

According to Milady Maker’s official description, the NFTs were “generative pfpNFT’s in a neochibi aesthetic inspired by street style tribes.” In non-crypto-speak, that means they were intended to be NFT profile pictures modeled after “Chibi”-style anime art, which typically depicts characters as smaller and cuter than they normally look. 

The whole thing was a dizzying swirl of post-4chan internet references filtered through Very Online layers of both irony and earnestness, making it impossible to tell exactly how much of the Miladys project was a joke or not. Each NFT came with a “drip score” rating their rarity and stylishness. There were also “Milady Mixtapes”—with titles like Milady Mixes #1 – Harajuku Dreamin’—that were only available to NFT holders.

In a sense, every line of NFTs is both an art project and a community and the Milady Maker community was no different, except, from the very beginning, it felt like something was off about the people who were buying the Milady Maker NFTs. Holders tended to operate as a swarm on Twitter, dog piling other users, posting outrageous and offensive content. There were also rumors circulating about the project lead and central creator of Milady Maker, the pseudonymous user named “Charlotte Fang.”

Then, finally, in May, the whole thing came crashing down. In a 20-tweet thread, a pseudonymous Twitter user named 0xngmi collected screenshots of racist and extremist content being shared in the Miladys Discord. Further, the Twitter user accused Fang of being connected to an obscure 4chan-based suicide cult, outting her as prolific internet troll. Even more shocking was when, just days later, Fang admitted to most of it and announced she was stepping down as the CEO of Miladys.

The news sent the NFT’s value tumbling, losing 60 percent of their value in a weekend. “Miladys NFT Prices Tumble After Creator Doxxes Self as Person Behind Controversial ‘Miya’,” Coindesk reported. “NFT Project Milady’s Charlotte Fang Accused Of Racism And Homophobia,” declared Bitcoinist.

Since then, other high-level investors in the project have cut ties with it. The Twitter community has gone quiet.

Beyond the Discord drama, But the whole episode is also a fascinating and somewhat maddening look at how confusing things can get in a world where no one wants to use their real identity, has hundreds of thousands of dollars of largely untraceable internet money, and seems unable to coherently explain why being a racist internet troll in 2022 is interesting, let alone a form of artistic expression.

There’s also the fact that Web3 proponents see themselves as a community that’s building a new and better internet, but their projects are just as susceptible to problems that have persisted online since the very beginning. Weaponizing anonymity to recruit other users towards fringe identity movements is nothing new. For as long as there have been message boards, there has been the weird, and oftentimes, violent magical thinking that can permeate in dark online spaces. 

But the story behind the Milady Maker implosion—and the art collective responsible for it—is even weirder than it initially seemed, the bizarre tip of an even more confounding iceberg. To understand what happened requires a journey into the kaleidoscopic heart of New York City’s nascent Gen Z art scene, where shitposting, leftism, crypto, fascist occultism, and cyber-libertarianism all congeal together into an amorphous—and nihilistic—cultural blob.

As one researcher who studied the Milady community said, “I started to feel a bit weirded out.”

“A lot of us are art school graduates or dropouts”

Last year, as pandemic lock downs in New York City lifted, a new generation of writers, artists, and publishers in lower Manhattan started gaining notoriety on platforms like Instagram for somewhat avant-garde zines. Nicknamed Dimes Square, after Dimes NYC, A tiny Chinatown restaurant that these micro-influencers hung out at, this young cohort of tastemakers felt to outsiders like they had suddenly appeared in the city overnight. 

This decidedly politically incorrect “alt-left” art scene, which thumbs its nose against more mainstream Gen Z media, has captured the attention of prominent techno-libertarians such as Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, an infamous blogger who has spent several decades advocating for automation to topple American democracy and replace it with a white nationalist monarchy where poor people live as chattel slaves for tech CEOs, both of whom seem to be funding it. The result is a vague and decentralized cultural movement—often at war with itself—cobbled together across semi-anonymous DM groups, Telegram channels, esoteric podcasts, crypto-flush Discord servers, and impenetrable Substacks. What links these disparate online and offline worlds together is a belief that the American right wing is grotesque but very funny to impersonate, and that progressivism and political correctness is ruining art through censorship. They believe that the kind of incendiary and offensive shitposting that used to be reserved for digital backwaters like 4chan can actually be elevated into a full-on artist movement. (They also believe they originated the concept of the “vibe shift,” before they say it was co-opted by journalists at The Cut.)

It’s within this miasma of leftist theory, digital anarchism, fascist occultism, and pathologically dense irony that Remilia Corporation, a digital art collective of about 70 people that is primarily run via a Twitter group DM, was born. 

“A lot of us are, like, art school graduates or dropouts,” the collective’s founder, Charlotte Fang, said during a phone interview earlier this month. “I’m a dropout.” 

Remilia is technically a DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization, in the sense that they create crypto-backed projects and organize primarily within remote group chats. (The group’s name comes from the character Remilia Scarlet from the Japanese video game Touhou Project.)

Remilia also created Milady Maker, the idea being to sell the NFTs as themed profile pictures that people can use as Twitter avatars. It’s a fairly retro concept, harking back to the days of custom message board avatars and banners for online guilds and cliques, only now it was powered by blockchain technology and had some real money behind it. Much of what Remilia does has that same retro internet feel, complete with a website that looks like it was made in 2004 and which offers almost no details about the group.

Many of Remilia’s members operate out of various screen names and handles, oftentimes never revealing their actual real-life identities’ not even to each other. Fang said that the point of the collective was to create outsider digital art, with a serious focus on deeply transgressive online performance. She compared Remilia’s content to William S. Burroughs’ once-banned novel Naked Lunch. Fang claims Remilia’s interest in the NFTs has as much, if not more, to do with crypto evangelists’ disregard for political correctness. 

“In the crypto space, people going into any group chat, you’ll find people that are racist, homophobic, transphobic. And they don’t bat an eye because they’re just, you know, they’re gamers, they’re 4channers,” Fang said. “These are the people that entered crypto early and now they’re the guys—the whales—that have all the money.”

Fang said she was consulted on the widely-derided Spice DAO, which was a crypto project centered around the purchase of a story bible containing a screenplay and illustrations for an unproduced 1976 film adaptation of Dune by director Alejandro Jodorowsky. Spice DAO purchased the story bible for $3 million but, since that purchase didn’t actually include the adaptation or intellectual property rights, the group has spent months desperately trying to figure out what exactly to do with it.

Though most Remilia collaborators are pseudonymous, one former Remilia member, who went by “Soph,” " target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">went on a podcast last August and, during the interview, Vanderbilt joked about making a lot of money off Milady Maker, but wouldn’t disclose how much. She also used her real name during the interview: Sophia Vanderbilt.

Fang said that Remilia parted ways with Vanderbilt last November. Regarding any financial relationship the group had with Vanderbilt, Fang confirmed that she was given free Miladys NFTs, but was unclear if she sold them. (Vanderbilt did not respond to requests for comment.)

Vanderbilt’s podcast interview was part of a series on Urbit, a decentralized server platform, that was initially developed by Yarvin. He has since taken a backseat publicly with regards to representing Urbit, but the project is also funded in part by Thiel. 

Urbit has begun hosting events in New York City that have quickly become a physical epicenter for the “Weird Theory” crowd, as Vanderbilt put it. And Remilia’s ties to that world of scandal-ridden  technologists, artists, and bloggers have made things complicated for the group as they’ve risen in prominence within the world of Web3.

Vanderbilt, in that same interview, brought up what she called a “cancellation” incident involving Miladys, which was perhaps the first sign that something was off about the whole project. A Milady-spinoff NFT called “Milady, that B.I.T.C.H.,” was launched shortly after the main collection and featured the cartoon avatars wearing shirts that referenced the Treblinka concentration camp. Some investors took to Twitter at the time to express outrage over the Holocaust-themed NFT, but other Milady community members turned it into a meme. 

Vanderbilt claims the Treblinka avatar was created by accident by the algorithm they were using, which was pulling text from an obscure, but influential pseudonymous Substack called Angelicism01. The Substsck writer publishes an extremely dense and nihilistic combination of Manhattan art scene gossip, edgy Web3 memes, and outright fascist accelerationist philosophy. 

Fang confirmed Vanderbilt’s account of the incident and said that Remilia had an “intimate” relationship with Angelicism01. “I consider him the only real art critic operating in the space, covering the younger generation of artists,” she said. To give you an idea of what that means in practice, one of Angelicism01’s top posts, written after The Cut‘s article about the “vibe shift,” was titled, “Somebody Please Columbine The Entire The Cut Editorial Staff“.

Like the rest of projects coming out of the transgressive art scene from which Remilia emerged, it’s impossible to understand what is meant to be understood as an inside joke and what is genuine. Fang, though, has been pretty consistent in her beliefs. One day in late April, right before the Milady Maker controversy kicked off in earnest, Fang wrote two posts on blockchain-based publishing Mirror, outlining something close to a central philosophy for Remilia.

In one post, titled, “Network Spirituality, Collected Commentaries,” Fang wrote that “network spirituality,” is a concept promoted by Remilia Corporation that involves “performative identity,” “transcendental posting,” and is meant to be a contrarian ideology, using memes and shitposts as a way to create a collective consciousness online. In the second post, titled, “Cancel Miya to me or I’ll fucking kill you,” Fang claimed that she had been one of the people posting as a troll account called Miya on Twitter from 2019 to 2020, which she said was meant to be an art project, “diving head-first into the dark and absurd cultural wells of the internet.” 

But as Remilia’s profile began rising earlier this year, thanks in large part to notoriety of the Spice DAO and Milady Maker, outside observers began to question exactly how satirical all of this was supposed to be.

In April, Charles Eppley, visiting assistant professor of Media Studies at the University of California, Riverside,