Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is under fire for alleged coded Nazi imagery. Covered: BAYC Founders Respond To Allegations Unraveling The Conspiracy BAYC Founders Respond To Allegations The founders of the NFT collection BAYC released a letter today in response to growing furor over allegedly coding their NFT collection and subsequent spinoffs with Nazi imagery. […] The post BAYC Founders Respond To “Insanely Far-fetched’ Allegations appeared first on CryptosRus.

BAYC Founders Respond To “Insanely Far-fetched’ Allegations

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is under fire for alleged coded Nazi imagery.

Covered:

  • BAYC Founders Respond To Allegations
  • Unraveling The Conspiracy

BAYC Founders Respond To Allegations

The founders of the NFT collection BAYC released a letter today in response to growing furor over allegedly coding their NFT collection and subsequent spinoffs with Nazi imagery.

“We’ve not responded in further detail to these allegations because frankly they are insanely far-fetched. That said, we woke up this morning to a podcaster we respect talking about this conspiracy theory and that was pretty surreal. Made us feel like it was time to come out and put an end to all this,” the BAYC founders said in a joint letter released on Medium.

The BAYC collection is comprised of apes with various attributes that all belong to a “yacht club” for crypto traders who made it big but still succumb to ennui. Despite the publicly known meaning behind BAYC, the Yuga Labs-led project has long been accused of racist tropes, including a fondness for WWII era facism. Yuga Labs CEO even responded to allegations of racism earlier this year. 

A recent documentary from YouTuber Philion has forced the NFT collection to acknowledge more specifically conspiracy theories surrounding use of coded Nazi imagery. The doc, which currently has over 800k views, goes over a preponderance of examples of what appears to be Nazi related imagery found within the BAYC universe. The evidence put forth largely follows the research of artist/raconteur/iconographer Ryder Ripps. Notably, Philion and Ripps have started selling their own derivatives of BAYC.

The founders of BAYC dispute all the allegations. In their letter, they go over the meaning behind the name and art choice (it’s based on the notion of ape-ing in) as well as provide their “inspo” board for their logo. Not to mention, they provided a quote from Mark Pitcavage, a fellow at ADL’s Center on Extremism: “The Nazi Totenkopf is one very specific graphic design of a skull and crossbones, and the monkey skull resembles it in no way except insofar as all skulls resemble each other to a certain degree.”

Recommended: Are Bored Apes Evolving Into Gorillaz?

Unraveling The Conspiracy

The theory advanced by Philion and Ripps hinges on two things: iconography and ciphers. Iconography is the interpretation of art using the signs and symbols found within the piece, while ciphers are a message where the meaning is concealed. The latter of which relies on esotericism, meaning, it can only be understood by a small group of people.

In other words, any claims that BAYC did any of this intentionally can’t be proven — there’s no smoking gun. As far as I know, iconographic analysis isn’t admissible in court. Even if it was, theories like this should never be interpreted with confirmation bias. Obviously, the result of this theory has seen crypto haters get hot and bothered, while Twitter users with BAYC PFPs have given a full-throated defense of the NFT project. Both sides just as uncritical of their own navel as the other.

Truthfully, having watched the documentary, it’s difficult to throw the accusations out of hand, but they are hardly damning. Certainly, it’s perfectly possible that the founders decided to imbue their work with obscure Nazi imagery and elaborate ciphers as some loving tribute to 4chan trolling. It’s also perfectly possible that art school is producing Alex Jones-level thinkers.

Ironically, the documentary proves only one thing: the answer to whether BAYC is guilty is in the eye of the beholder.

Recommended: Immutability, Decentralization, and The Bored Ape Yacht Club

The post BAYC Founders Respond To “Insanely Far-fetched’ Allegations appeared first on CryptosRus.