NO MORE MILADYS, NOT NOW: A NOTE ON CHARLOTTE FANG (DEFANGED) AS 'MIYA'

'OK, full disclosure: I was Miya.'

EXTINCTNAMING

As they say, time will tell whether Charlotte Fang’s decision to extinctname as Miya and step down from the Milady Maker Empire—just at the moment when Martin Shkreli is out and on the prowl for new investments (he already has the neochibi pfp—at time of writing)—is something like a good thing, whatever that would mean in this context. But the immediate temptation is to flatly deny that can ever be the case.

The reason given for the coming out is quite simple: toxicity. Taken on face value, this is an attempt to dissociate Milady fully from Charlotte’s supposed ‘toxic baggage’ and to allow Milady Maker to go freely into the future under Milady Sonara’s purer stewardship.

Fair enough, as far as it goes. There is no doubt this asset is on fire. That it needs protecting. That some deeper considerations have been scanned. We can also assume that Miya herself is—perhaps—hardly done with her Russian Doll Game of self-cancellations.

But here’s the thing. Didn’t CharlotteFang77’s ‘full disclosure’ just break the no extinct-(dead)-naming unwritten law that makes for the essence of ‘Network Spirituality’? Namely, didn’t she/he just compromise whatever kind of unity remains under netspi protocol, even just as that spellboundness itself? Breaking the fifth wall is also doable and viable as strategy of course—and there are no actual rules, written or otherwise.

But on face value it means all really is fallen off now foreal—and this in the same moment that Wet Brain and their flunkies are doing a trade fair in NYC ‘made possible by Urbit’. To self-doxx is nothing more or less than a doxological moment (a moment of opinion, and commonness, a falling off, a caving to the principle of cancellation). In one sense, the Fang defanging is not even a reveal. To purge toxxicity in 2022 of all moments is to simply accelerate it.

AURAS

The simple fact is that Charlotte Fang is not Miya and that Charlotte Fang and Miya both know this—to say otherwise is to misread the meaning of the history of the Internet, even if such a misreading is necessary as a moment of determinate trade.

We can allow that perhaps for example Milady Sonara has other plans, and perhaps Charlotte does too. Who knows what is in the background. So the break needs to be—and will remain—just another legend. Symbolic, as they say.

Yet therein, still, lies a problem. Where Milady just now was a product held in place by layers of Kali Yuga genius and dark lore, now it falls more plainly into the category of the marketable cartoon. And for that eventuality the post-art market may well have its reactions—or its boredoms.

Art loves controversy, especially under extinction conditions, and that is why the Treblinka Miladys remain more interesting and darkly beautiful—as extinction analogues (‘extinction assets’, may we say?)—than vanilla Miladys. Other NFTs still don’t even get a look in, as we know.

Milady without Charlotte is, will be, will have to have been—let’s at least speculate—a fully extinct Milady, and not just the icon of a divine indifference to human life that in all its cuteness was at least still blinking even now. The indifference of Milady to human life—the Kali Yuga aspect—is not extraneous, and is not really Charlie’s fault. (‘She’ is not really in a position to disavow, anything—as we will see.)

It is no coincidence that in this very moment Milady seems poised herself to become both aura and hologram—and this is meant precisely. And here the ultimate aura would be the aura of extinct art’s full rainbow body of dematerialisation (extinct-naming itself).

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FIGHTING FOR THEIR LIFE

The Miladys will now group-formation themselves into a future that was in any case already not there—or at least, threatened beyond belief (denied them). They will ‘fight for their life’. They will adopt Charlie’s carnival wit formation remote therapy defence formation more than ever after the fact—they will have to.

When I first wrote about Miladys and compared them to ‘water coolers in Treblinka’, it was in some ways for a simple reason—because all art now takes place, if it can be said to take place, under certain extinction conditions. (The Holocaust must be relativised for this to be thinkable at all—such is the hell we are in.)

Admitting the toxicity of an asset under these conditions is therefore a doubled down mistake, but still one that may be gamed. The asset cannot be rid of its toxicity not because art loves to fash, but because nature rn loves to extinct. Art as nature is going fully insane (extinct).

This means Miladys defanged will have to go hyper or hyper abstract (the auras are an interesting sign in that respect). But the pitch of their reaction will be—properly speaking—unwatchable, since Miladys already located themselves in a triplicate gesture of lethal denial, and this will therefore be even more extreme (and yet vanilla).

Fang’s disavowal can’t help, perhaps on the contrary.