With the look of her adorable neo-chibi eyes, I was blasted into oblivion.
Today, I wrote a post regarding my thoughts regarding Angelicism01 and Milady NFTs.
The post wasn’t necessarily a hit piece or something completely disregarding the Milady NFT as something completely superficial. In fact, in some parts, I spoke with some light-hearted praise toward Angelicism and Miladys as an exercise of Potlach.
If you care to read more about it, please feel free to read the article in full.
Since then, the post has gathered much attention from both “agelicists” and Milady white knights alike. This short post will elaborate on my initial claim and answer, What is a fad, and what do I mean when I say that x is one?
I also want to develop my initial critique of the overall angelicist, post-Tumblr aesthetic, and its connections to Milady.
And finally, I will address the theoretical underpinnings that I’m inclined to or committed to that inform my criticism and disagreements with these movements (although overall, these are limited).
The only thing true about the internet is that Aesthetics reign supreme. There is no message, no concept, no technique; there is only aesthetic. Aesthetics are the primary modality of the internet as everything is flatlined ontologically online. There are no objects that facilitate rituals like rosaries, crosses, or altars. Philosopher Byung Chul Han stated that today’s rosaries are our cellphones, and our public display online is our confessional.
It is with this in mind that the dominating cultural force of this generation is both Angelicism01 Schizz-Gnostic God Posting and Miladys Y2k Aesthetics. Micro-narratives and hyper-self-referential memetic viruses have taken hold of contemporary cyber-culture to replace the desert of Metanarratives left by the current Post-Modernity.
The convergence between Landian satanic Acceleration and Angelic Transcendental Serresian acceleration Is the difference between 1 and 0, being and non-being. The eschatological structure of Christianity has never left, and in a post covidian time signature, what feels like a mass extinction event, as is often coined by Angelicism themselves, can only be palpated via a vibe shift.
A vibe shift, in short, is just the aestheticization of a time signature, as time takes a templexical spiral. Like the hash in a blockchain block, an aesthetic is the timestamp of culture.
In Byung Chul Han’s book “Non-Things,” Han Attributes the disappearance of objects to the disappearance of rituals. As already stated, Religion used to serve this role of creating rhythmic regularity in one’s day. However, the absence of such frequency has fragmented our egos a la Lacanian mirror stage, leaving us with no sense of time for what we lack is ritual.
Crypto communities are attempting to bridge this chasm.
“WAGMI, GM”
The ritual of saying good morning every day on discord fulfills the sense of longing for the ritual that is missing in the modern person’s life. If DAOS are the church, Miladys are our carved icons, and “WAGMI, GM” are our Amens and hallelujah. Angelicism is then the aesthetic presence of the holy spirit; it is the neon-genesis Evangelion; it is the new gospel of our eon.
Where does my primary criticism lie with Angelicism and Milady as I conflate and unify both?
My criticism is a weak one, or better said, a non-existent one in some respect. It appears to me that way, at the very least. Both of these are fads, in the same way, that Phat-farm shoes were a trendy signifier of how cool you were growing up.
“One could make the case that NFTs are propagating memes: the lowest, most contagious form of cultural production. Memes are high information density cultural artifacts that invoke mimesis. One of the CCRU’s most important concepts is that of “hyperstition,” a neologism for the action of “successful ideas in the arena of culture.” Hyperstitions are, in short, ideas that “once ‘downloaded’ into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles.” So, like a virus, ideas infect the nucleus of a socius. Once the meme enters and inhabits the host, it uses its social tools for positive-feedback propagation. Thus is why memes, in the Spinozian sense, are the virus of the attribute of thought; in the same way that real viruses are material contagion for the attribute of extension.” - ASC article.
Indeed, NFTs are not just ontically different than a pair of phat farms, as NFTs are both the tithe you pay the church, the symbol of your faith, and the object of desire. The reason why crypto communities, angelicism, and other factions are all coalescing is a result of the conditions of possibility for cultural production under capitalism. With this Deleuze-Spinozist constraint of “what can a body do?” techno-capitalism constraints our cultural patterns to rhythmically synchronize to the vibe shift to the changing time signatures as alluded to the beginning of this post. The fanged Noumena has us snared in its jaws; we don’t know what it desires; we only know that we are meat puppets to the process.
To say that this is all afad isn’t a disservice or a strong criticism. To escape techno capitalism it’s importatnt to find that which can not be captured by capitalisms hyper-utilitarisanism. This is whay we are seeing a return to “primitive economies” of the gift, of potlach. They are grotesque in the eyes of hyper-utilitarinism.
This is why I finished my last post with this quote:
“If Christianity has taught us anything, is that the true agony of Fads is that all fads either die fast or become iconic.”
The only criticism is the Hubris the Milady project exhibits which is the ultimate humility exemplified by angelicism in recognizing the outside speaking through them. Milady is part of the process, but it should not confuse itself with it.
We call it a fad in so far as it is not by our hands that we produce our saving grace, but we pray for its arrival, for as Simone Weil states, “We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us.” ― Simone Weil, Waiting for God