https://twitter.com/cf_MIF_GOD/status/1889484612801368274

The more I thought about it (notwithstanding @dnlklr’s incessant neologizing of sloprivatives), the more the idea of Slop began to absorb me. I set out to explore Slop as an aesthetic and conceptual category — a system of meaning, or a chaotic anti-language of absurdity. What is this cheap or unwanted content made of? What would the formalization of Slop look like? Does it resist form altogether? Can one even attempt to build out a visual system from its chaotic taxonomies? Or do these unwanted linguistic excesses speak on their own cynical, financialized terms?

https://x.com/dnlklr/status/1860893428906893729

Smiley.bmp.exe diverges from my recent explorations of Neo-Rugcore and PFPNFT formalism (see my Trilogy), and instead attempts to deploy Slop as a sort of contemporary, ultra-dadaist anti-art, spurred by the increasing financialization of algorithmic incentives and attention-economy gamification. We live in what @MMifella has called “Scam World,” and the spam that proliferates the imagescape is getting sophisticated. The resulting effect is brainrot. A sardonic terrorism which evokes the darkest of humours, targeting the most vulnerable affects: fear, laughter, dread, desire. Hypnotically enraptured by this content-cum-advert flooding our timelines, we have become unable to wipe the grins from our faces.

On a formal level, Smiley.bmp.exe is a generative NFT deploying a type of hyper-derivative painting-cum-collage, using various automated processes and analog-digital hybridities. Using web 2.0 memetic detritus, archival found imagery, LLM vibe-scripting, deep-fried distressing, automatic drawings as control-nets, poems as prompts, and scanned-in unfinished ideas and essays as metadata, the NFT becomes a thesis. Characters which fluctuate between anatomically incorrect Pixar knockoffs and impossible meat-geometries are animated via Stable Diffusion, populating the digital frame. Smiley.bmp.exe is formulated as a Frutiger Medico non-space — a friendly virus (or one posing as friendly) jamming the image plane with a barrage of content without message. Here, the medium is the content, and the content becomes the form — trapped in the vertical plane of the screen, aching to emerge, to leak out into the horizontal plane of the real.

The collection is the second release of TRENDERGARTEN HD, a newly formulated label/collective-cum-bifurcated-zine formed by @id_xanthrax and @adult_trafficker (who contributed hand-drawn traits to this collection). Each iteration of Smiley.bmp.exe undulates with digital detritus, spores of vectorized pseudo-iconography, imagining (imaging) what an iPad child’s mind might conceivably perceive in 2025 AD, eyes glued to the LEDs, over-inundated with cheaply made advert-content designed to capture the attention of the credulous. Something demented emerges; not Elsagate, not Tung Tung Tung Sahur… but something much more sinister: the outsourcing of the imagination.

The effect of forfeiting the faculties of our visual imaginary to LLMs has yet to be seen (we may only understand this better as the AI-native Gen Alpha begins to emerge into the arena of cultural production). Image generation begins with noise and carves form from a plethora of platonic sources, which the model is trained on. This dynamic gets somewhat reversed, as the noisy imagescape imposes strange desiring forms onto our collective imaginary. We are captives in a realm of contextlessness, abundant with referents without source, leaving us to play in a sandbox of formless memetics and empty signifiers. This only worsens generationally. Each new iteration on the derivative, each misquotation, moves further from origin — not toward new meaning, but away from meaning altogether. As McLuhan notes, the cost of every extension of our body into a new medium is the price of amputation. We are experiencing iconoclasm via iterative oversupply. When all can access art (or at least the tools of image production), where does the artist take asylum? Alt becomes normie. Bizarre becomes banal. Imagery is increasingly vested with less and less metaphorical or symbolic value because the stakes are so low. It becomes an empty shell, a mere carrier of ad-tech surveillance metadata sculpted by financial incentives. In a move of self-preservation, the already-rigged, legacy fin-tech of trad art recedes into its own objecthood and speculative scarcity, while the imagescape proliferates pathogenically and unmoored.

Smiley.bmp.exe harnesses these thanatropic flows as a methodology of violent automatism and image anarchy in order to weaponize the hyper-baroque character of contemporary cultural production against itself. There is an undeadness to contemporary images. They are zombies of what was once a meaning-producing vehicle. Yet the undead image takes on extremely psychedelic qualities. It is like a rainbow of fungal spores devoured by friendly(?) computer worms; it manifests as a desire to overdrive itself into oblivion. It becomes the force of the Puer Aeternus, an Id which never becomes Ego.

Smiley.bmp.exe is about reviving the radical imaginative nature of childhood in this uninhibited state. The way we speak to children in euphemistic language feels similar to the physics of a scam. One must be convinced that something is friendlier than it seems, that it is not an extractive ploy. One must be lulled into ontological submission, drugged into acquiescence. The 2021 rugcore NFT is a perfect example of this very Trojan horse methodology: with the alliterative anthropomorphisms abundant — Pudgy Penguins, Lazy Lions, Cool Cats — the extraction event takes on a friendly allure, not unlike McDonald’s mascots or 90s cartoons as vehicles for predatory children’s advertising.

Smiley.bmp.exe is about toxic positivity — not merely of affect, nor strictly pejoratively speaking, but as a need to fill negative space, when the stuff of the content (information, metadata, dummy data) populates the mind and lives there rent-free. It is the incessant urge to placate boredom with doom-scrolling, and the interdependent exploitation of the creative will to maintain a steady flow of production in order to remain visible. Visibility is survival within the economics of attention, and inside the subcultures of cryptocurrency this dynamic is on overdrive. Smiley.bmp.exe is all of these things: a toxically positive Neo-Rugcore Slop NFT, wielding new languages of guerrilla ad-tech commerce against themselves.

As I alluded to earlier, one of the distinctive qualities of these contemporary images is the density of ad-tech, fin-tech, and surveillance metadata baked into them. With AI Slop and Neo-Rugcore NFTs specifically, movement or transmission is built into their very creative process — their very composition is meant to manufacture virality, deploying the contractual mechanics of industrial image-generation tools to do so. Every transaction and transmission can be traced: the information is all there and it is abundant, autistically archived even. When we create, mint, share, or deploy these images we are doing a sort of micro-historiography. The obsession with provenance, microtransactional financial data, behavioural mapping, surveillance, pyramid schematic volunteerism of the swarm, a disregard for authorship, and the appraisal of an individuated yet collective cryptographic financial ownership defines these contemporary images and determines their lifespans. Implicit within this information-reliant approach, of course, is the fact that informatics can easily be tampered with — information is leaky — thus history is destabilized. This vulnerability is both a feature and a bug.

Leaks are inherent in these ultra-dadaist image-generation techniques of hyper-derivative collage. Leaks, here, can be understood both materially and metaphorically — the informatics spill out from the digital into the physically productive universe, in a blurring of states. We carry advert devices in our pockets, algorithmically tailored and personalized to our intricately mapped desires. These platforms we inhabit become surreal cartographies of our dreams. Images and ads become one and the same, irrupting into all facets of life. These images desire too — they want to anticipate your consumption habits. They desire desire, or they desire to capture desire itself.

Slop ad-tech pervades both the analog and digital public sphere but it is also privatized. It has infiltrated the domestic, in the form of merchandise. Merchandizing runs rampant in an attention economy built on channelling the consumer’s energies into material profits. Temu print-on-demand rugs, Labubus, Italian brainrot children pajamas, AI furniture, home decor — a pastiche baroque interior design project of the serpent’s long tail.

However, the impression is that all that is solid melts into air, or whatever. Living in a world dominated by images can make reality feel deprioritized. When we broke from the gold standard in 1971 under Nixon, we untethered value creation from reality. Value untethered from material backing becomes pure representation, pure sign. In this world dominated by faith in representation, things become extremely symbolic, image-rich and reality-poor, and as outlined above, even those signs are no longer tethered to any production of meaningful metaphor. Crypto emerges as a response to this death of metaphor — this hyperinflation of fiat, literally money as faith in the Federal Reserve’s authority. This ties directly into the anarchy of the image, the deterritorialization of how we represent value through hierarchical meaning creation. Slop can be viewed as the pollutive leakage of an internet and a digital banking system which has lied about its immaterial state. The internet is not a cloud — it is profoundly material. Crypto mines burn through energy resources, AI models train on vast computational infrastructure. Stable Diffusion itself requires GPU farms to function. Thus these machinic images do impact our reality in a rather direct sense.

Here it is interesting to look at desire through the speculative objectivity of micro-merchandizing. Temu or Alibaba products can be seen through this very dialectical lens. Our attention needs to be monetized, merchandized, and channelled into material profits. In this sense, all that is air must coagulate into matter. Here emerges my notion of The Poor Object.

Hito Steyerl is extremely hot, I’d fuck Hito Steyerl. Her Poor Image is an internet ripoff of Arte Povera sculpture, or McCarthyist trash art — my turn to rip her off. The Poor Object is the unactualized photoshopped form of the speculative product, liquid yet meaty; an ad selling you something you don’t even know you want, or never could’ve imagined you needed. Your desires have been imagined for you! The Poor Object is pure excess, surplus desire in its most dreamlike and psychedelic form — formless, malleable, customizable to the whim of each scrolling subjectivity which clicks buy — a soup of all the human subject’s historical consciousness. It is the ultimate golem-fetish of globalism, coming to life in Asian polymathematical production facilities. The Poor Object is a mass-manufactured assemblage of interests and tastes, a third-wave industrial revolution readymade made collaboratively by the entire global prosumer hivemind buzzing in a torrent of networked undulations. The Poor Object is Non-Fungible: it may be mass-produced, but it coagulates iteratively into infinitely different life forms. It is pure excess — imagined and materializing algorithmic energetics.

Yet so many say the internet is dead! Overrun with swarms of bots creating demand for product-objects of total superfluity; the AI paperclip apocalypse is here, except what is overproduced is far less useful. Pure excess, surplus desire, desire for desire’s sake. Increasingly specific fetishes in a Saturnalia of neo-pagan idol worship. And still somehow impoverishment and precarity reign as the norm. We live in the horizontal plane, the Z-axis, and it is increasingly evident we are living in a giant ontological scam. The Poor Object is cheap; it’s a Trojan horse. It’s not what you thought it was — never fulfilling, always empty and producing more desire, more precarity, more waste, less value. It is the trickster’s speculative ontological musing, a useless invention, a proximation of utility. This is why the Poor Object resembles the artwork of the 20th century. It is a knockoff which does not have a real counterpart, a derivative with no source, a secondhand item with no original owner. We are living in an impoverished scam world filled with fake things, and daunted by the physical laws of entropy. The Poor Object is the physical manifestation of Slop (Slobject). It is hollowed out, dysfunctional, broken, trashed, useless, yet more resistant to entropics than “naturally” occurring matter. The Poor Object is here for millennia, and like with the historically neurotic, archive-obsessed internet, our ancestors will be forced to reckon with so many landfills of cultural artifacts with so little meaning.

There is wasteful entropy-proofing happening in the digital space as well, and the vertical plane cannot contain its waste forever. Smiley.bmp.exe refuses the vertical plane’s containment. A dozen Smiley.bmp.exe NFTs will be paired with redeemable bedazzled textile print-on-demand Poor Image-Objects — a deliberate collapse of Slop into the Slobject. The choice of fabric as medium is no accident. If the contemporary Slop image is defined by its leaky, emergent quality, then fabric literalizes this leak. It is the material that receives, absorbs, soaks up what spills over.

The choice of fabrics — Polar Fleece, Microfibre towel, Plush, Minky, Squishy, Bathtowel — speaks to an objecthood (or the Hood Object) of domesticity and childhood. These are materials for rugs, blankets, towels, pajamas, cloths, sheets, curtains, and comfortable clothing — textiles which cover, protect, clean, dry, wash, and instill comfort and privacy: vulnerable human needs. The textile receives liquidity in a literal sense; it soaks, it has sponge-like qualities, it absorbs. The liquidity of sign, symbol, image, and value creation gets absorbed into The Poor Object. It takes so much in — spills, stains, the detritus of living — yet offers only the simulacrum of comfort, an aesthetics of care without function. The fabric exists between solid and liquid states (just as Smiley is suspended between digital and analog): it takes the shape of the object beneath but as drapery. This drapery calls into question: what is the identity of the thing beneath? Who is behind the pfp? What meaning lies beneath the image? Is it simply imbued with informatics? The density of technical information is jammed into it, but its meaning is occluded by the drapery of its own abundant data. The meaning drowns in a flood of content and imagery, saturated and soaking in its own leak.

The logic of the financially vivisected image (which I have spoken about elsewhere) is notable here as well. The HashLips art-engine generation system splits the image into technical parts, categorical traits which are fractionalized — all financial and transactional data becomes contractually (historically) available on the blockchain as a JSON file. AI images also produce metadata which can be traced to a seed that helps us understand the source of the linguistic prompts which produced it. Smiley.bmp.exe transduces the Slop NFT into a Real World Asset — into the Poor Object. When it is printed as fabric, it becomes literally mess and absorbent material of this mess. Many issues arise. Is the fabric also spliced up into traits? Does it too carry its own traceable metadata, tradeable on secondary markets? Is one forced to destroy the Poor Object — to use a Burroughsian cut-up — to discover its meaning? RWAs and The Internet of Things have been major narratives this cycle, but it seems the problem of ontological fractionalization has not yet been solved. Companies like Masterworks have monetized fractional ownership of Warhols; other financial products routinely attempt to do this now. When people can set up a payment plan over 12 months to purchase a single $100 Labubu, debt enslavement to this scam world is ever more pervasive.

https://x.com/id_xanthrax/status/1798750152699830756

Yet when the image is increasingly financialized it is laden with its own metadata and internet folkloric histories. Avant Gay NFT (the reclaimed pejorative has stuck) developed as a sort of l’art pour l’art reaction to grailtard red-chip collectorship on Ethereum, taking place on Solana because of its sub-cent transaction costs and near-instant speed — pushing a poorer, faster, more feral version of the NFT than the ETH counterparts of 2021. These images become clad indicators of crypto Twitter: a sort of Hood Rich art. An Arte Povera in reaction to the baroque Arte Ricca of the new-money early blockchain adopters. Many NFT artists are deeply inspired by SoundCloud rap: the same DIY ethos, the same embrace of lo-fi aesthetic as cultural position, the same understanding that scarcity of resources breeds a particular inventiveness and an inverted proliferation of the imaginary.

Neo-Rugcore NFTs and Slop at once contribute to the viral proliferation of images, in a refusal to fraudulently manufacture scarcity. They are terroristic devices — radical and disruptive of all discrete objecthood and imagehood (THE NFT IS THE HOOD IMAGE!) — staging an ontological scam on reality itself. Avant Gay NFT has embodied this idea in some form of digital Arte Povera or another! The original Arte Povera micro-movement of Italian post-modern artists created works which famously leveraged entropics and time itself as media; the works were allowed to decay or rot, defying preservation in a radical gesture using history and amnesia as mediatic tools against the art markets of the moment. While in a sort of inverse move, NFTs concern themselves with temporality on the plane of ensuring a quasi-permanence via blockchain structuralism and market naturalism. Smiley.bmp.exe rug-fabric redeemables embody both states collapsing into each other — the blockchain’s permanence and the fabric’s inevitable decay, the digital’s infinite reproducibility and the textile’s fragility, the infinite absorption of content and the impossibility of meaning.

Smiley.bmp.exe is an NFT about the impoverishment of objecthood in favour of the sweet allure of the imagescape. No other cohort understands this better than the small scene of NFT artists I have engaged with for the past 3 years. The Avant Gay NFT artists are the poor of the internet, harnessing what Dean Kissick recently called the vulgar image. They have democratized the weapons of ad-tech image gen tools in order to leverage their own productive spirits and buy themselves free time. Neo Rugcore NFTs may not end up nearly as valuable as their historical precedants, but at the end of the day the admission fee was only $5. Avant Gay NFTs have spiralled into their own long tail of the desiring image—memetic yet non-fungible, viral yet scarce. Their artist hosts are the graffitos of crypto Twitter, shitposting their work to the crime chain, addicted, not to gambling, but to the memetic retelling of folkloric timeline beef producing a sort of digital cave painting on the walls of the news feed, and encoding their strange histories into metadata. They've collapsed the vertical plane into the horizontal, screen into textile, image into gallery. Digital Arte Ricca into internet Arte Povera. The image-space has been deterritorialized, re-domesticated, then dragged into physical form as fabric soaking up our excess—cum, blood, sweat, tears. The Poor Object materialized at last as the Poor Image-Object. A dialectical process of becoming ever reinventing itself by these ultra-dadaist anti-art luminaries, weaponizing the mass manufacture of the imaginary, Slop as a slang of excess, lore as art history, building a sophisticated unmeaning machine which has runaway, producing its own perverse cosmology.

Bibliography

Vierkant, Artie. "The Image Object Post-Internet." JstChillin.org, 2010. https://jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_us.pdf

Steyerl, Hito. "In Defense of the Poor Image." e-flux Journal, no. 10, November 2009. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image

Kissick, Dean. "Vulgarity and the Vulgar Image." Spike Art Magazine, Issue 73, Autumn 2022. https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/vulgarity-the-vulgar-image

Troemel, Brad. "The ZirpSlop Report." Patreon, 2025. https://www.patreon.com/posts/zirpslop-report-131069177

McLuhan, Marshall. "The Medium Is the Message." In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964. Reproduced via MIT. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf

Fang, Charlotte. "On the Ontology of the Leak." Mirror.xyz, 2024. https://goldenlight.mirror.xyz/z6ZQoRMiL07IQrOoxgyZC_IMwMWw4sWmigcnI4raLMg

ANTI-PFP

BEYOND THE AVATAR

When Fang was designing Milady with Sprite he wrote a somewhat inadvertently influential work on the idea of profile first PFPNFT wherein he discussed the physiognomy of the profile picture avatar criticizing the then explosively popular BAYC. He wrote about seemingly mundane formal qualities such as crop and background colour which were perhaps interesting and less intuitive at the time. What these notes really amounted to was an admission to the conscious tailoring of this newly popular art form to the confines of the social media specifications of (crypto) Twitter. This makes sense considering the Twitter PFP became the NFT’s most popular use case and the social media platform was where most of the audience that formed crypto cults therein would congregate. It also aligns itself nicely with the Network Spiritualist embrace of social media as a primary artistic space of creation especially during the forced lockdowns of COVID-19.

Since the popularization of Milady numerous derivatives have cropped up, many of which have closely studied and replicated these specifications laid out by Remilia Corporation following suit with the Neo Chibi digital painting style. Some of the less reverent derivatives however became unsanctioned (for reasons beyond strict aesthetics) breaking away into chaotic and experimental modes that adhered less to the physiognomy of the profile picture. Most notable of such break-off derivs was MiFella and other Fellaverse projects. The Fellas began to align more with the OG SOL hit collection Toji CPU by Tojiba Corp, in their concern with a more formally challenging and eventually deconstructionist approach to the PFPNFT(see Cuckfella). Note that the original Toji PCs pushed the PFPNFT into object-hood instead of the character based PFP which removed some of the aforementioned use case appeal but provided a unique aesthetic appeal that is hard to ignore.

The point of this brief (mind you incomplete) history here is not to debate the origin of terminologies such as AvantNFT, or to choose sides, but rather to outline what I view as opposing schools of thought in the milieu of quality artistic PFPNFT art which inspired the SDMW™ in different capacities. The aforementioned Neo-Chibi RemCo school emphasized the avatar use case as a primary tool in the process of minting a crypto finance cult, whereas the latter school which formed primarily on Solana (cheaper chain with lower barriers to entry) emphasized the formal aesthetic potential and limitations of the generative PFP, less concerned with financialization as the primary driver of the mediums development.

In designing the Self-Driving Megaworms™ with Luvbug we were coming from somewhat opposing camps without fully realizing it, which ended up playing in our favour. I was initially very interested in this Solana school, excited about pushing formal qualities of the generative PFP to its breaking point. Luvbug on the other hand who had played a significant role in forming the RemCo aligned Based Retard Gang Music Group was quick to remind me of the importance of treating the PFP as a sort of uniform with a distinct character.

We conceded to make a collection wherein the composition mimicked that of the traditional rugcore animalNFT: a ¾ view, right facing character cropped around mid upper body. The result was the Self-Driving Megaworm™; an obese middle aged trucker touting a Trucker cap and wearing sunglasses taking a selfie. Eventually we expanded the design to integrate a more dynamic composition and dropped the selfie idea as it was presenting too many issues with foreshortening. The background of the character (which in many first gen rugcore NFTs is a simple randomized colour or a single exterior setting) was designed to seat the trucker including a flag for the cab interior and an exterior which suggests a world of lore beyond the Megaworms™ themselves.

https://twitter.com/ghorestink666/status/1761140995087872259?s=46

With Luvbug’s prompting and my heavy handed (admittedly naive) experimentation with the form I believe we have achieved a collection which simultaneously explodes the PFP formally while remaining very recognizable as such.

TRAITMAXXIMALISM

The Self Driving Megaworm™ is a TraitMaxxie ANTI-PFP. It is the traitmaxximalism which distinguishes it from many other PFP collections and pushes the PFP towards a broken zenith. The SDMW™ has 17 trait categories which is more than most collections I am aware of. In the early days of development Luvbug and I had been obsessed with a Radbro derivative collection called Radcats which were silly and very experimental AnimalPFPs. I wanted to achieve a similar silliness and sense of chaos with the SDMWs™ so I set out to create over 1000 traits in an arduous multiple month long process involving many different digital illustration methodologies. The original composition was 3D rendered in Maya using Arnold and Hardware rendering with stolen assets from the internet -- save the body of the character which I sculpted in Zbrush. Eventually we realized the power of collage, utilizing AI to experiment and create assets, cutting out specific pieces of generated images to be used as traits. Many of the exterior backgrounds were created this way.

https://x.com/acoustic_image/status/1781664255021871542

One of the foremost chaotic design elements of the Self Driving Megaworms™ were the arms, which we decided we would omit from the sculpted body. The arms are variously collaged over the trucker’s obese thumb-like torso, often tattooed clutching the steering wheel, sometimes with achondroplasia, sometimes passively resting at the character’s side, sometimes armed with a bazooka, but always stylistically variant in a way that is incoherent with the rest of the image resulting in a rough and collaged look. This decision was made to make the posing of the characters more dynamic adding another narrative device to the collection. It also caused several messy combinations and layer ordering issues which I resolved to keep because they looked hilarious and revealed the mechanics of the art engine I was using to generate the collection.

https://x.com/ghorestink666/status/1779970798008016944

The other Traitmaxxed dynamic is achieved through the layered overlays. There were two main overlay layers: one which was a “styleover” sourced from memetic content found online, and the other was scanned in “drawlings” textures sourced from an old sketchbook I dug up from years ago. These overlays were initially intended to be weighted very low in rarity but as the collection developed took on much more heavy weighting than in earlier generations.  This was decided  because I really enjoyed the way the overlays disrupted and flattened the already busy 3D composition creating a much less compositionally neat and expressionistic total image. The depth was still there but there was always the reminder that it is a digital image which could be edited or defaced by any user at any given moment.

https://x.com/ghorestink666/status/1774950875762442523

The term “ANTI-PFP” is not unlike “ANTI-ART” or “ANTI-MUSIC” in that it serves to connote a pushing to the limits rather than a true defacement of the form. Being truly ANTI-PFP would actually mean taking the stance which most of the traditional art world holds as popular opinion not recognizing any potential in the medium at all. Rather I was concerned more with the iconoclasm of the technical image itself seeking a self-aware means of pushing the form to its limits and beyond while retaining those qualities which make it interesting.

META-DATAISM

The tongue-in-cheek neologism is a pun operating on many levels as a way to connect the anti-traditions of Dada to the disruptive nature of the generative PFP as financialized “datafied” art, and on the other hand points to notions of Meta-Modernity and the self-reflexive cybernetic loop of network art.

HYPERCOLLAGE

As many will know, what makes a generative PFPNFT different from any JPEG is it’s JSON text document which contains metadata. This metadata consists of the rarity weighting and names of each trait as well as the collections contract details. When minted, each NFT becomes data containing financialized pieces of itself situating its rarity and worth in relation to the other NFT image assets within the collection. This financialized vivisection of the technical image is the major innovation and initially (Fang has noted elsewhere) it’s main appeal. However when approached as a surgical process of (CPU-aided) hyper-collaging of cultural image-artifacts into several unique works it raises many interesting issues about how to value each cultural piece of the whole. With Milady, RemCo were aware of this issue and created a Sartorialist hierarchy, a single unique digital character with its own fashion items (some have referred to this as dressing up the doll) and in turn becoming its own digital luxury PFP fashion item. However when a less hierarchical approach is taken to this hyper-collage art engine you are left with a machinically accelerated absurdism which can tell a wholly different (perhaps less bourgeois) story. With the SDMWs™ this story is one of a less fashion oriented working class fleet of supply chain workers of various racial cultural heritages smashed together inspired by the post-cultural context of the 2022 Canada Convoy Anti-Mask Protests.

EXQUISITE RACE

When Luvbug came to me with the idea for this collection we were initially excited by the humorous potential of randomizing strong cultural signifiers. We talked about post-identity (a major theme in Based Retard Gang lore, everyone is an asian girl online et cetera) but applied in an accelerated racial cultural surrealism. The intention here was to bring the woke internationalism of Twitter bios to life. Suddenly a trucker with black skin is wearing a shtreimel, rainbow shutter glasses, a ball gag harness, sitting in a wheelchair and touting an ak-47. Our thoughts were: that person probably exists. The hyper-specification of identity within the post-cultural landscape of online political discourse was always the joke we wanted to tell via artificial intelligence automatism. The results are not unlike an Exquisite Corpse drawing except the collaborator in this instance was the same machine which was over-driving political identity to such hilariously specific iterations. Eventually it became clear that this made sense in tandem with the Trucker Convoy which I remember distinctly responding to accusations of far-right extremism by pointing to the multicultural nature of the Truckers. A sort of surrealist portraiture of the Canadian proletariat began to emerge.

There are however still defining characteristics to the SDMWs™ of course in their predominantly (Xeno)masculine and militant anarchic energies. The Megaworm™ is the custodian of the supply chain who has revolted against the parasitical rig that he is no longer really operating. This Bugman-Workerist vibe is also apparent if one were to observe any of the clothing items the truckers are wearing, notice there are few if any brand references, save the odd pro-Trump MAGA merchandise. Some have noted the use of far right imagery in the collection as a sort of critique but fail to ever mention the other political ideologies represented such as the Me Too icon knitted Pussy Hat. Eventually the signifiers were sufficiently randomized and the question was how do we account for rarity without becoming culturally hierarchical.

ANTHROPO-METAMORPHIC RARITY

https://x.com/Femme_Fecale/status/1780927858006806967

The solution was nested somewhere within the lore of GHORECHEM INCORPORATED LTD. The SDWM™ rarity is thus not weighted in terms of swag but rather in terms of the xenomasculine degradation of the human subject into AnimalPFP. The closer the Megaworm™ resembles a trucker in appearance the less exposure they have had to the toxins which mutagenically transform them into subhuman hypermasculine worm subjects. In other words the rarest Megaworms™ are the least human. Unlike other PFPNFTs which portray a singular character with variation in outfit, Megaworms™ are an egregore which are recognizable only in their inhuman insanity.

Ironically what makes many other collections minted recently on Solana so recognizable is there reference to past metas. Retardio Cousins for example are extremely Meta-Dadaist but from a different angle. Derivatives like this do not only have hyper-referentiality embedded within their own traits but, when you zoom out, within the general meta of a crypto cycle as a whole. Retardio Cousins carry very few design elements distinct from Remilios, and are not a derivative in design but rather simply a multi-chain solution. They point to a cybernetic network which has become so self-referential it is now eating its own tail in an endless cycle of sameness and cheap knock-off scams. With SDMWs™ we intended to mint a completely new egregore and in doing so we realized we need that egregore to have characteristics wholly unique to itself.

Profile As Art

https://twitter.com/ghorestink666/status/1748487272989638761

POSTEURSHIP

The question remained: how do we maintain an acephalic or non-hierarchical structure to a community while establishing a post-identity which is distinct yet schizophrenically deterritorializing itself politically and aesthetically. We decided to shift our focus onto character building and began creating Megaworm™ alts to flesh these things out on the TL.

https://x.com/acoustic_image/status/1781662112244195467

From here on for about 4 months we engaged in a constant and somewhat tiresome campaign of occultural propaganda warfare building a cargo cult of politcal extrophile retardigrade postuers. IRL friends, artists, writers, musicians and thinkers came together into a scene of experimental hardcore posting with an emphasis on surrealist freespeachmaxxing. A few of us had 4 or 5 alts allowing the visual identity of the SDMW™ to inform the characters we had developed. Many unique personalities and political orientations arose from the OG Megaworm™ egregore, inciting a post-woke, post-reactionary, community agnosticism made up of a diverse array of individuals all rallying in a post-human convoy under the flag of pure and untethered retard disruption and elaborate LARP as performance: the true cowboys of the anarchic wild west of web3 in this cycle.

ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE FINANCE CULT

Simultaneously we began running a weekly X space through 66.6 EARWORM RADIO (hosted by @heavenrazor and I) the semi-fictional corporate radio station of GC.INC conducting an anthropology of the crypto cult spreading Megaworm™ propaganda. Each week we would invite an artist or community leader from various NFT occultures to come on and converse, shill, or beef giving us the platform to flesh out our characters even further and to spread the parthenogenic virus further throughout CT. This had the dual effect of minting audience and gaining insight into this bull cycle's alpha, and it turned out this elaborate shill of a propaganda campaign worked.

AVANT RUG-CORE

https://twitter.com/ghorestink666/status/1749866092321730656

After minting out 6666 SDMWs™ in under a week we began to notice a through-line in many of the responses to the collection: “I don’t understand what I just bought but I love it.” was unknowingly repeated as a memetic sentiment on so many occasions from so many members of distinct communities it became hard to ignore. I took this as succinct proof that my avant-rugcore experiment worked.

https://x.com/0xFUXI/status/1780148487897710798

NFT ‘collectors’ with far too much crypto liquidity, far too few use cases will ape into just about any piece of ‘art’ without understanding its historical context, aesthetic value, or researching the creator. Many of them are still operating on the meta from the last cultural cycle of financialized art asking about a roadmap and utility, conditioned to projects which make massive promises in the beginning, charge exorbitant prices and end up pulling the rug on the buyers they duped into believing there was ever really a community at all. So many of the buyers are so conditioned into a cybernetic ouroboric cycle of self-sucking vector art aesthetics, they are truly bewildered by a project that actually makes them feel something, one that moves them to a state of pure confusion and love. Self-Driving Megaworms™ have no roadmap, they are iconoclasts of the technical image who accelerate towards computer generated image extinction alone in their rig, knowing there are others out there like them locked into this wild trip through psychedelic finance. In reality we have engaged the same dynamics which all financialized artworks seem to succumb to, we shilled the shit out of SDMWs™ and made a lot of money in the process. However the Meta-Data for this cycle already seems to suggest that people are realizing where the real value is locked. Not within the faux defi protocol propped up by VC non-artist bad-actor financiers as money laundering schemes but rather within the mutagenesis on the margins of culture, the vangaurd of supply chain workers operating those self-driving electric vehicles from the unnerving comfort of their own head-canon.

POST-SCRIPT: NOTES ON PRICING AND ACCESSIBILITY

https://twitter.com/ghorestink666/status/1770204540576346199

SDMW™ integrated into it’s pricing structure a similar non-hierarchical structure as mentioned above minted at a price that any working class person could afford 0.1234 SOL and 0.0666 SOL for Whitelisted communities. The idea being the rapid minting of real audience which accelerates into an eventual price discovery (we saw the success of this with Little Swag World and Drifella before us). Within 1 month of minting out the floorprice has 10x’d and at the current date SDMWs™ are trading at a 1 SOL floor. Luvbug once said “an NFT is just a shitcoin in slow motion” the only difference being that buyers get to walk away with a cool JPEG, or as I’ve heard it called, a “gay little artifact”.