Bored Ape Yacht Club, Comic Con & Mistaking Identity Expression for Community Formation
NFTs are necessary but not sufficient for community, and the more likely destinies of PFP collections are media companies or fashion brands.
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For those of you not following the Crypto world close enough, profile pic NFT collections are all the rage — Apes, Punks, Kitties and more, these are collections of often around 10,000 images, iterations on various characters that people buy, trade and show off on their profiles. Bored Ape Yacht Club is one of the biggest, and they did more resales recently than the entire movie industry.
Originally, buying one of these NFTs came with a community — if you put a Bored Ape as your profile pic you got a bunch of follows, felt a sense of kinship with all the other crypto enthusiasts, were invited to Discords and parties and made new online friends. All things that you can be forgiven for mistaking as a real community.
But as the hype has grown, this community has started to fade — as Apes and Punks exchanged hands and the new owners didn’t have as much in common with the old owners even the biggest enthusiasts have told me the camaraderie isn’t what it once was. Most will recognize you are not in a “community” with Stephen Curry because you own the same JPEG collection now. And the troublingly high price of community entrance has led many to ask what they have in common with many of the new owners anyway . . .
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David (@dlitwak), Kyle, Joelle
Great points here! I shared this with my friend and colleague Todd Nilson and this was his response: https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdksDc2B/