The metaverse that crashed into reality: The story of Miya and Milady Maker

As always, it started on Twitter. 

In late May, a pseudonymous user named 0xngmi compiled a trove of evidence — a compilation of screenshots — claiming that someone called Miya had bullied depressed teens on Twitter, private group chats and Instagram. 

In one instance, Miya called someone who said they were recovering from an eating disorder and cancer a “shameless little piggy.” An anonymous source told 0xnmgi that Miya’s abuse drove them to attempt suicide. The evidence also showed that Miya had on countless occasions made anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic, transphobic or pro-Nazi statements. 

Eventually, the person behind the Miya account came forward to reveal their true identity: Charlotte Fang, the founder of a non-fungible token (NFT) project called Milady Maker. 

“OK, full disclosure: I was Miya,” Fang announced on Twitter. “And its toxic baggage that’s hurting the Milady community and poisoning the vibe. I apologize about trying to hide the past account — Miya has nothing to do with Milady Maker and should stay that way so I’ll be stepping down from the team from here.”

Miya is also performance art, according to Fang. “The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood,” she told The Block in a Twitter direct message.

“Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact," she said, referring to a motto frequently passed around on 4Chan, a site that often foments racist, transphobic and other derogatory speech. 

The episode is a perfect encapsulation of Milady Maker, an NFT project that has embraced a bizarre form of chaotic online posting, with examples ranging from stream-of-conscious posting, to edgy memes, to unsavory comments about sensitive topics. 

It shows the kind of eclectic communities — even in alternate digital realities — that can form around NFT art. Now the question is: can Milady’s digital reality keep thriving despite its brush with actual reality?

The Making of a Milady

Milady Maker was launched in August of 2021. It is a collection of 10,000 generatively made avatars of girls and boys in the art style of chibi, a cutesy Japanese art style. 

The project came out of Remilia Corporation, an avant-garde artist collective founded in January 2021 that essentially attempts to elevate posting on the internet as an art form. Milady started out as an extension of that philosophy. 

“A Milady avatar is sort of a mask one can put on to join a collective assemblage of enunciation — or an ‘egregore’ as some put it,” says Reality Gamer, a pseudonymous Milady holder. “Wearing a Milady avatar will change the way most people post on this site. This makes Milady a participatory collective performance art project, which I think is conceptually interesting as an artist.” For instance, posting as a Milady usually involves a mix of high-theoretical concepts and terminology that can, at times, brush against the nonsensical. 

Reality Gamer was also attracted to Remilia Corp’s philosophy of “network spirituality,” which they describe as “a practice where I best try to creatively leverage technology as disembodied aspects of my psyche.” In other words, the digital platform an individual exists on influences how they think and behave. The concept of network spirituality was introduced at a Remilia Collective show earlier in 2022. 

“Milady is the first NFT project to really attract my attention,” Reality Gamer adds. “NFTs are fascinating precisely because they have no purpose or use-value. This craft is like alchemy, turning base matter into gold."

Milady NFTs are “made” differently, Reality Gamer says. “For other projects like BAYC, I suspect they were ‘made’ somehow off of having high-level connections. With Remilia, they're mostly just random internet kids who know the power of Network Spirituality. ”

The common Milady Maker post reads as incoherent psychobabble, or like an AI bot consumed pages of high conceptual theory and randomly spat out the contents. 

“People are so devastated that they can no longer delineate childhood from adulthood,” reads a Tweet by a Milady holder who goes by Yung Calibri. “They say ‘I used to hate eating mustard’ rather than ‘I hated eating mustard as a child,’ with no distinction in their selfhood between then and now. we never grow up, never become responsible.”

This style of creation is not new, says Milady holder Justin Murphy. It harkens back to the stream-of-consciousness style of writing seen in the early 20th century, such as in the 1922 novel Ulysses, he says. 

“It's a relaxation of that critical superego and a willingness to recklessly and carelessly string together impressions and provocative suggestions, basically,” Murphy says.

Milady Maker vs Reality

In short, Milady is an alternate reality defined by its distinctive NFT avatars and an understanding that the content making up this reality is not to be taken seriously. The Miya episode made things serious. 

Fang’s view is that Miya’s posts, like all Milady posts, were meant to be understood as part of this alternate reality. “It was always clear that it was a performative identity that was treated as something beyond myself,” she said on May 25 on the Contain podcast. But while Miya’s posts can often read like typical Milady psychobabble, they’d often veer into real-world abuse.  

When Fang came forward as Miya and stepped away from Milady Maker, the project’s floor price fell 82% from 1.44 ETH to 0.25 ETH, according to the NFT data tracker CryptoSlam. More than 1,000 Milady holders sold off their tokens that week. 

It’s still too early to tell, however if the project suffered permanent damage from the embarrassing episode and Miya's departure. In fact, the number of Milady owners has steadily increased to over 3,300 as of writing — up 33% since the peak of the drama.

“It's possible that all this controversy actually cements Milady as one of the first significant brands in crypto that represent this darker, chaotic, uncontrollable free speech absolutist art practice in crypto culture,” says Murphy.

“I think it's also conceivable that the project just dies because there's too much flak and no one wants to fight through it.”