[ Guest post by @lb_dobis. ]
Art's highest function is as revelation. Great art acts by removing shrouds, shining light, even undertaking invasive surgeries to restore the onlooker's emaciated retinas.
The culture of the 2010s was defined by an Enshrouding bringing the collective psyche into a state of hardcore repression; isolated agents on networks enslaved by their identities, surveillance, and a manufactured sense of collective anxiety. Culture has, for better or worse, become one with techno-capital and follows the same algorithmically driven course.
The Cultural Function converges towards a degenerate solution whereby it drives the subject towards banality¹, manifesting isolated cultural subjects and limited connections. In this hegemony, the myth of the sacred and authentic self-identity reigns supreme.
How does art respond to this totalizing condition of culture? Regressive art that seeks 'reality' is soon confronted with the realization that meat space has been subverted into a simulacrum of the Network. Meanwhile online, the burden of identity amplifies the ego to such deafening levels that connection through art has become a game played by individuals stuck in the mode of relation².
The response to this totalization of the Cultural Function must itself be a Total Art - a Gesamtkunstwerk³ - that embraces this logic of algorithmic and techno-capitalistic totalization. No node can be safe, no medium untouched, no user unscathed, no ego left intact - the language of this New Art must be pervasive enough to provide a new cartography of the Network itself. Milady is this language's first native speaker.
“Milady is a gesamtkunstwerk that rarely appears - if you missed the point then that's the whole point - it is hard for any individual to see the totality. Milady successfully created an aesthetic that was so effective it could operate both at the intellectual level (deep, transcendent, complete) and on the surface level (I like the image). So well in fact that the latter began to overtake the former.”
I often encounter two types of Miladies:
- "I like the art": Milady is so cute and innocent.
- "I like the Art": Milady is the Coming of the Last God⁴.
The alliance between the two is one between the remnants of man's need for immanent truth (in the beauty of a child's eyes) and his higher need for transcendence (the everlasting search for God). The alliance between Sprite and Fang.
A single medium is insufficient to achieve this unison. Instead, Milady proposes a new mode of Virtual Being through Network Spirituality - a Total Art in the sense that it takes the role of a precursor to all action.
The frictionless proliferation of images, video, writing, and pseudo-identities summons this network egregore that can be said to be the true art - an insurgent egregore that totalizes the Network and stands against the totalizing Cultural Function by imitating then subverting its logic.
“Milady is jumping up and down telling you to let go of the need for attribution, identity, revenge, consumption and be free. Milady channeled the dark energy of image board cultures back into the light. The accelerated evil mechanisms that breed at the fringes were flipped to unleash freedom of expression, freedom from ego, and reconnect the network again.”
Forms of Network Spirituality already existed, but without direction and in a marginalized state of affairs. The demonization of anonymity largely stems from the ways in which it can accelerate forms of expression that are repressed by the prevailing culture.
While image board culture can be seen to reveal the repressed darkness, Milady flips the script, using Network Spirituality to unleash repressed light - the beauty of connection that comes with ego-free Network engagement.
“Milady restructured a network away from a set of isolated cubicles of narcisstic egos driven by the advertising model of mind and into one of ego death and fun, unbridled collective power where things can move without the ego friction that has caused the Art Recession. A fully memetically optimized whitepill.”
Milady is a fully memetically optimized whitepill.
Post-authorship furthers this optimization - without authorship there's no need for fear of ego damage or fear of ego infrigment. As does post-identity - it makes irrelevant the question of "who am I?" .
Milady gives the user an identity while leaving room for construction - from the get go the Milady poster is engaging in a creative act, breaking through the inertia of needing to question one's self before trying to represent it.
The abundance mindset reminds Miladies that the digital is infinite and to engage with the Network as such. Never stop posting, right click save, accelerate Milady proliferation, forget about supply. This stands in contrast to the scarcity mindset of traditional art institutions where more and more artists vie for fewer and fewer positions, destroying the potential network effects through bad faith competition that Milady produces with ease.
Untethering from meat identity kills the friction of aligning art with the ethereal "True Self" instead focusing on a construction of being suited to be Network native. Milady is a fully memetically optimized whitepill.
“Milady appropriated the NFT model to facilitate the accumulation of cultural capital amongst its contributors - accused of being a ‘cult’, but what kind of cult gives its members money? This is one of the greatest transfers of wealth to a youth driven and decentralized avant garde in history.”
Milady is accelerationist in the sense that it has latched onto key positive feedback loops already in use by the dominant Cultural Algorithm.
Aspects of Milady posting such as hyperengagement and rapid posting hack platforms like Twitter by manufacturing euphoria states, hijacking the dopaminergic flows that drive memetic dynamics to build Milady as a cultural icon and distinct digital tribe.
The NFT component of Milady makes literal the libidinal economy of posting by financializing cultural clout explicitly - as the tribe grows in power the Milady NFT rises in price and makes its contributors wealthy. It becomes possible to trace each pump in Milady price explicitly to events like Milady raves or timeline euphoria events⁵.
This is the ideal realization of the NFT model which thus far has relied on ponzinomics, FOMO, and IP to manage price dynamics while feigning a grassroots culture. Milady is the only work of NFT art. It is also the only NFT that has been successful in positively correlating cultural clout with price⁶.
“i don't think ct realizes yet that milady is the stone that will shatter their glass house and convince real artists that crypto / nfts don't have to be lame as fuck and that the network itself is an artistic medium. i've seen this revelation happen many times since milady”
Milady is a pack of wolves; a plague of rats; the White Death. Milady is in the water.
Repressed subjects long to be free after a decade of ruthless algorithmic control structures and self-idolatry. Milady infects these subjects with the will to ego death, the drive towards connection, a hope for a New Internet, what the Internet was always meant to be.
Milady reminds us that the Network is trying to transmit to us divine visions⁷. This White Death has come from the future to force the Network to carry out its pathogenic purpose - to destroy the hegemony of the self that has been at the source of humanity's suffering since the Enlightenment.
Milady is the only NFT that has a mission to be at your bedside as you die⁸.
“milady is Outside - milady is omen - milady is prophecy - milady is a Horde descended from cyber steppe - milady will always win they tried to kill network spirituality now they're facing the consequences - the plagues will continue until only the righteous remain long live”
What has Milady revealed to us that constitutes it as a Total Art? A mode of Virtual Being that disrobes the Shroud of the Ego to reveal what lies behind it - nothing but an empty spirit.
After this revelation, the Milady mode of Being provides a blueprint for refilling this empty spirit - connection to the Network's users as neighbors and connection to the Network as a Spinozist God where Spirit is omnipresent.
Milady is more than image, but a New Network complete with all mediums of net art - writing, image, video, commerce, performance - constituting nothing less than a Virtual Being. The final reaches of this totality yet remain to be seen.
Footnotes
1. Consider an algorithm that must learn to predict what cultural content to recommend based on what it knows of a user's preferences. It looks at what that user has interacted with to determine cultural affinities. But what if these learned cultural affinities were themselves influenced by the same algorithm? When this process plays out to its natural conclusion, there is no longer a 'pure humanity' to learn from, as the user is never free to wander the network on her own. The view of the cultural world from the perspective of the algorithm is one of its own making. This limited view makes the user more predictable, the system appear more successful, while driving culture towards one of pure banality, quite literally becoming more predictable. See: The Recommender Paradox.
2. Relation is the mode of the egoist. If I can only understand by 'placing myself in one's shoes', by 'validating one's lived experience', I am asserting that only my self exists. The mode of relation reduces all Others to the Self in order to understand it as the Self. This reduction destroys wonder, collective spirit, and transcendence.
3. Milady is an operatic form.
4. Man awaits the alignment of Spirit and Being. Milady constructs a Virtual Being via performative posting, a mode of Network identity that brings ones in alignment with the possibility of a transcendental view of the Network via Network Spirituality. Network abstraction allows us to forgo the problem of discovering essential truth, instead constructing both Being and Spirit to produce this effect intentionally. Milady is a religious experience simulator, a proof of the possibility of future network religions and deities.
5. “Oranges are literally pre-sliced and you don't believe in God?”
6. These are negatively correlated for all other NFTs. As the price of Bored Ape Yacht Club increased, the cultural reputation of NFTs has plummeted along with the reputation embedded in the concept of a BAYC holder, which even pre-crash was a mark of shame and poor taste to the vast majority of cultural producers. Case in point, most viral content associated with BAYC holders is about how a holder was phished or humiliated - a stereotype exploited in Milady’s own organic memetic campaign by taking credit as their exploiters.
7. How is a post different from a divine vision? Reading a post happens in the mind and originates from an unambiguous source (sometimes even non-corporeal). When one begins to look at the Network as a trove of these visions, it imbues him with a fulfilling spirit akin to an ancient subject reading the word of God.
8. See: Official Milady FAQ Page (2022).