Is Bored Apes Yacht Club a Thinly Veiled Racist, Alt Right / Neo-Nazi “Dog Whistle”?

Or is it just a post-ironic hyper-loop?

Bored Apes shills

A fascinating video to watch at the moment is “Bored Ape Nazi Club” on YouTube. The producer, Phililp Rusnack, aka Philion, timed the video perfectly, releasing it at the beginning of NFT NYC, a week of frenzied presentations and vacuous parties, at a time when the crypto and NFT market keep hemorrhaging value. 

For those still unaware, the Bored Ape Yacht Club was a “drop” of 10,000 NFTs that skyrocketed in value last year. One puerile primate JPEG can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in ETH. A product of Yuga Labs, BAYC is the most successful NFT project by far, now represented by Guy Oseary, Madonna’s manager. Before the recent market contraction, BAYC was valued at $5 billion. Paris Hilton displayed her ugly ape on Jimmy Fallon. Snoop Dogg and Eminem embody their animated ape avatars in their latest music video. In Web3.0: A Libertarian Dystopia, the Youtuber münecat describes how celebrities receive free Bored Apes (valued at $500,000+) after signing NDAs where they agree to promote BAYC without revealing the Apes were given to them. 

“Bored Apes Nazi Club” follows the work of Ryder Ripps, a young artist / investigator who researched the subject obsessively. It compiles the impressive amount of evidence gathered by Ripps over the last year. The basic case is also made here: www.gordongoner.com.

Ripps and Rusnack argue that the Bored Apes Yacht Club NFT project is a thinly veiled racist, Alt Right / neo-Nazi “dog whistle.” Assuming this to be the case, then another question would be whether this accurately reflects the values of the creators. They may have designed BAYC as a gratuitous act of post-ironic 4 Chan cynicism, a “hyper-loop,” with a Situationist and Accelerationist edge to it. In any case, BAYC must be among the most successful trolls in Internet history. 

“The arc of history is long, but it bends towards zombie apocalypse.” 

― Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment

Unsurprisingly, there are already articles and videos refuting the allegations made in the video — such as this one by a young black crypto investor / influencer. I find the case convincing that BAYC iconography has a racist, Right Wing slant and encodes references to Naziism and other racist genocides, as well as “traditionalism.” Traditionalism is the occult philosophy of Rene Guenon, a fetishized thinker of the Alt Right / global Fascist resurgence. Guenon helped to popularize the idea that we are in the Kali Yuga, the Hindu “Dark Age” of materialism and spiritual nihilism (I appreciate some of Guenon’s ideas and have written about him). “Surfing the Kali Yuga” has become a popular alt-right phrase. Yuga Labs took its name from this meme. 

In thinking about this phenomenon, I want to avoid being either hystrionic (as the video becomes near the end) or detached. I feel we need to understand various forces at work right now. BAYC is just a small (albeit massively over-hyped) piece of a much bigger puzzle.