i didn’t have anything planned that I wanted to write here, but it feels strange to go through the trouble of creating this without writing something down, so ill just do a little bit of thinkin about milady below.
lately, i’ve been trying to determine what it is that sets milady apart from every other popular nft collection on eth. there are a few obvious answers here: the art is good, the twitter engagement is unparalleled, the derivative ecosystem is, for the most part, lauded by the primary collection and results in a not insubstantial amount of free eth should you choose to sell the free mints that you’re awarded for holding miladys/remilios, but none of these benefits truly answer the question of what makes milady so different, so untouchable, so in a league of its own.
before answering that question, i want to look at some rudimentary statistics.
there are a few conflicting reports on the percentage of americans that have held or do hold cryptocurrency, but high estimates are teetering right around 20%, while low estimates claim that the number is closer to 12%. considering that a vast majority of either percentage likely just held coins on their binance mobile phone app or coinbase pro account, the percentage of americans that have ever used defi or been in a position to purchase nfts is exponentially smaller.
unsurprisingly, there aren’t many new people exploring decentralized finance right now. possibly due to the eternal grift, the same individuals have been dictating taste and the “web3 ethos” for years.
the point i’m trying to make is that the individuals who have been experimenting with defi for years, who are effectively driving the market forward and ultimately dictating what the lowest common denominator finds appealing are, for lack of better phrasing, fucking nerds.
now, nerds don’t have inherently bad taste. some nerds have great taste. the nerds at the forefront of defi and the nft space at large don’t necessarily have bad or good taste, they’ve just been at the helm for too long. (and they have bad taste)
what happens when a large group of individuals who have spent a sizable majority of their lives isolated, online, and detached from modernity are the same individuals dictating taste, using their social media presences to create buzz around projects, and effectively deciding what is “cool”?
the answer is incredibly simple. in fact - i’ll show you what happens when you let a gaggle of nerds dictate taste for a microcosm of other individuals who, realistically, are probably fucken nerds too:
i’d continue posting images but these five carry my point incredibly well.
by now you might be wondering -
well, the answer is simple - look at those five images again and come back to me. nfts aren’t big enough for what’s popular now to mean anything outside of ‘early’ and that’s alright.
well, no.
miladys are miladys. this itself might be the defining factor.
other collections are desperately vying for public approval and the ‘mainstream adoption’ pipedream, founders are racking their brains with ideas for collaborations with 20-year-old brands that were notable in 2002, while remilia and Fang contemplate the future instead of worrying about what the right marketing decision would’ve been at the turn of the 21st century. while the nft ecosystem remains as small as it is, this likely won’t change.
other nft collections will continue fighting for a future that’s impossible to realize while miladys continue posting. when the tide shifts and the lowest-common-denominator-deciders lose their power, everyone will understand what we meant when we said we logged on and won forever.
https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x5Af0D9827E0c53E4799BB226655A1de152A425a5/1549