To shock puritans:
1970-90s: devil worship, rock, tattoos
2020s: *insert wrongthink heretical belief*
A counterculture is blowback. It's intentionally offensive to establishment beliefs. Find it repellent? Good, it’s meant to gatekeep you.
New movements and ideas are contrarian.
Contrarianism always:
- likes something before it’s cool
- thinks something before it’s ok to think it
Independent minds embrace before it’s acceptable, then others notice it, and begin to like it too.
Something cool must be exclusionary. Cool things aren't cool if they let everyone in. If you want to exclude people, you impose a cost. The cost is either explicit ($) or implicit (reputation). Costly signalling is always the most effective: "skin in the game" admission price.
>”Where’s the roadmap? Who’s the leader? Those miladies are the devil!”
The absence of a roadmap or organization gatekeeps people. Those who need a leader or document to tell them what the cultural movement is are de facto not culturally contrarian.
Normies stay out.
White papers, roadmaps, etc. are how everyone else does NFT projects. Milady ethos is to reject that because it alienates precisely the people it wants to alienate. Disorient those who need familiarity to be oriented. Presenting, the milady whitepaper: iykyk
I’ve been a milady enjoyer since I saw them in the wild. I love their aggressive cultural barriers and antagonism. Militant countercultures are a necessary social process of restoring balance when culture becomes too monolithic. Milady is homeostasis.
Also they’re hilarious
REBELLIONS OVER TIME
We laugh at how rock n’ roll, mohawks, tattoos, etc could be rebellious behavior, because they feel so innocuous or contrived to us now. But way back when, these were seditious acts against normie orthodoxy.
A persistent act of rebellion eventually becomes uninteresting, because it's no longer unorthodox.
No one's outraged by tats, metal, gangster rap, or “flipping the bird” anymore.
Reason: they're not shocking. Normies do it. When normies adopt your counterculture, it just becomes culture (boring).
I wasn’t around to observe things in the 70s-90s, but I don’t recall there being such rigid uniformity in the 90s/2000s around what was acceptable political and personal beliefs. There was palpably less authoritarian-lite establishment orthodoxy and smearing (cancelling) of heretics.
What manifested as mostly outrage for puritans in the 70s-80s has taken on a more nefarious form of public flagellation and hostility for the 2020s puritans. The response is no longer “this is horrible” it’s now “this should be punished, we must get them”.
Milady rejects this.
Pretend you had to pick the worst things you could to make CNN or a corporate HR department upset. If you had to orient your culture around the most revolting things possible, what would you pick?
Racism, nazis, pedophilia, anorexia….
The only way to make this lineup worse would be if you added cannibalism to the mix. Maybe a pro domestic-violence stance? Miladies: you need to be cannibal maxxxing.
Like, these are cartoonishly offensive. So much so you should understand there's embedded communication here that transcends the explicit statement. I’ve discussed embedded messaging before. It's much more illuminating than the explicit communication.
“Boy howdy I’ve seen these miladies and they're actually the worst!”
If you’re saying there are some seedy shitheads in this growing counterculture community, I believe you. Obviously there are. No lectures please, I'm well aware of the background and posts.
But let me disabuse you of this notion of purity: people who harbor these beliefs are in your NFT community too. Any predominately anonymous community will have these types, but they’ll just keep it to themselves. Milady is overt about it because they want to gatekeep you.
Ostentatious, unapologetic rejection of social norms gets noticed. It’s sexy how verboten it is. Your consternation only makes it more seductive to fence-sitters…. the SJW’s Catch 22.
Just like the more MSM tells you how bad Orange Man is, the better his polling. People do not want moralizing lectures, it produces the opposite result. You can't scold the Streisand Effect.
Humans have been seeking out forbidden things since Eve betrayed us all for fruit.
And many are completely done with the dogmatic censorship of viewpoints that don’t align with Netflix’s HR dept. Opinions that Coca Cola officially denounces are becoming increasingly en vogue. I don’t make the rules.
Repudiation of norms isn’t done in a measured way. Humans are not paragons of reason and thoughtful next steps. We take things too far, because 90% of people comply with hivemind social pressure and will support The Current Thing psyop. You don’t have to like Chomsky to admit Manufacturing Consent is obviously right.
So to correct it, we over-correct in the other direction. Blowback. All cultural norms taken too far have blowback. An effective counterculture must be hyper-aggressive and target sacred cows for demolition.
Milady is blowback.
Don’t expect them to sanitize anything, because that’s the point. Milady is a way to organize dissidents and agitators, and is endearing to the very based because of it. To censor is to destroy what made them noticeable; it'd be like Trump taking political advice from Jeb Bush.
Almost every job or product that’s richly valued is fundamentally solving a coordination problem. Milady is valuable because it solves the 4chan coordination problem: a dissident, anonymous gathering needs to be able to organize outside the forum. I expect their floor to rise.
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