Come one, come all, anons - this is the LARP edition of the JPG newsletter

For this new installment, we’re welcoming guest writer Gabagool, OpenSea sleuth, FlowerToken cheerleader, and NFT collector.

LARP is manifold. It’s performance art, it’s a community-building exercise, and if 2020 proved anything to us it’s that anyone can become whoever they want to be, breaking free from the labeling, reputation and background-obsessed real world.

We became our pfps, we adopted different personalities, we shed our human bodies and entered the metaverse (or whatever you want to call it). Some accumulated fortunes while staying almost fully anon, some agitated, and some others developed full-blown protocols. In this brave new LARPed world, anything goes. Which way will you go?

Nobody is a carbon copy of their Twitter persona, thankfully. In one way or another, we’re all always performing, LARPing. 

So let’s take the LARP to the next level with my guest in this newsletter, Gabagool, through a dialogue about the most current stuff happening IRL and in thE mEtAvErsE. 

2018 Coco Sollfrank performance at 34C3 - of course here she was not referring to the binary world of IRL vs the Metaverse, but it’s a fitting image (photo is MP’s own)

MP: Hey Gaba, I guess that the usual “tell us a bit about yourself” is a bit contradictory to the goal of this newsletter, so I’m just going to say “go off, King”. 

Gaba: Thanks for having me, MP. The funny thing is that before I went anon, I was a writer and a professor, so I spent most of my time trying to build up a set of very traditional credentials in order to “enter” the Establishment. Now that I’ve chosen a different path, none of those degrees matter, my references couldn’t tell you anything about what I’ve been doing, my doxxed identity has a shit load of student debt but Gabagool is gmi, and that’s kind of strange but I’ve never had more fun.

I’m going to take the “pro anon” stance here. Why go anon? Why LARP as a Soprano’s reference? I started my account because I was too embarrassed to like, follow and RT random NFT/token giveaway tweets on main (my normie friends wouldn’t understand) but slowly I realized that the separation between my fragile, fleshprison self and the new, fully plugged in, anon identity was liberating. I could publish research and be judged based on the content of that work alone. Wallet watchers copy trading me clearly found something in my wallet(s) that functioned as the NFT equivalent of a resume. So maybe going anon was just a way to tell myself that I could have a “fresh start,” without actually having to change anything real + material. 

Why did you choose the IRL, full doxx route MP? 

MP: I was, and still am young and dumb. 

Actually, back then when I started working in crypto, everyone knew each other by their normie names. It was just last year, when the whole world went full covid online and I found myself talking to a bunch of avatars on the internet, that I learned a some of the people I know personally, name and last name, might not be who they said they were. 

I also like IRL a lot. It’s fun out there. Matt Condon has been asking total strangers to scan his body parts in exchange for NFTs for a long time. Now he’s asking people to send their NFTs to a certain address that’s stored in a treasure chest buried in Texas. 

(while arguing this, I came to the realization that Matt’s on a steady path to becoming a cult leader that those that appeared on the 90s tv documentaries - love that for him)

Let me just add to your point on wallet watching, and wallets now becoming resumes - as well as business cards. I can’t wait for the 2023 American Psycho reboot where the business card scene happens on Discord, and include these NFT credentials by Framergence. 

Minted an ecclesiastic Cryptotitle to test the thing for the newsletter - it’s fun but still does not support most interesting NFTs

Gaba: Oh ya, the sun + the breeze, ‘conversations’. I remember those. 

Cryptotitles is cool, seems like a way to bring the private discord / telegram clubs on-chain. When I try to explain NFTs to normies I think the argument that makes the most sense to them is that people love to flex their collectibles and art, and in a world where we are spending more and more time online we should be able to flaunt and posture freely in this realm, too.Somewhat random but I’m going to drop some links because this is a newsletter, ya? 

@hexangel616 has a collection called “no feature,” depersonalizing some of the most recognizable PFP NFTs of our moment (Cool Cats, Crypto Punks, Cyber Kongz). The collection’s meta-signifier is “no feature,” a Mitchell F. Chan style blank canvas. Perfect for the anon who would like to join a community without revealing their particular account holdings (just keep it in an alt, funded from CEX, ofc).

@0xgokhan (follow his ass) shared this NFT’d concept for a Conceptual Art DAO, which I think is relevant to this LARP discussion. 

It’s interesting that all of us are interacting with a technology literally OBSESSED with provenance, with ownership, but because it’s the Online a little identity obfuscation is necessary. There are a few experiments with AI artists (@genekogan’s Abraham AI project - @abraham_ai_ comes to mind) that I find fascinating. I think we’ll start to see more AI Artists, or projects where a collective of anons/IRLs construct a singular vehicle for minting pieces. This is not new in any sense, artists have long experimented with fabricated personas, but the technology available on and off chain at the moment allows for further autonomy for the machines & non-individuals among us.

Let me be clear though, I like IRL too and I think that there is a difference between, idk, a sockpuppet account and a more stable anon identity. 

MP: On the topic of provenance, the most wonderful LARPing act I’ve heard of was actually about forging provenance of the fake Pollocks, Rothkos, Madewells and others during the Knoedler case. The best and strongest cases for LARPing and forging identities or adopting new ones, happen IRL. I’m gonna die on this hill. 

There’s a reason why you call them con artists, right?

Are scams just performance art? 

Gaba:  We are living in a copy-paste world, and the question is what side of the divide are you going to land on. Everyone got really upset about the people over at Moonrock Capital paying 200k for a Solana Punk, and yea that is extremely dumb but the speed at which copies, derivatives and various other cashgrabs are appearing is dizzying and I understand the feeling of not wanting to get left behind, to find yourself on the wrong side of a historical shift in the valuation of jpegs. But trying to chase hype like that seems like a losing battle. Who knows, I lost some money on an Arbitrum token the other day and it was a nice reminder that I’m horrible at trading. 

Being an anon is a form of performance art, just as much as being a con artist is (it’s in the name after all.) But everyone is performing, a bit, when they log onto a platform, mediate themselves through a chosen avatar, and edit an ‘about me’ section. Nothing is pure, MP. 

Marc Horowitz’s 100 Performances collection lands us in the murky territory of trying to “value” artistic performance online. One of Marc’s past performances was a digital road trip he took with a friend, during a particularly broke time of life. Video chatting through a Google Maps road trip with a friend, Marc would ‘stop’ at various fast food restaurants and run out of his house to go to, for example, an actual KFC and then run back to enjoy the meal with his friend via Skype. 

I hope that someone will follow Marc’s twitter instructions and safely ‘perform’ one of these NFTs, bringing the story to its proper conclusion. 

MP: Either way, purity is overrated. I’m not interested in a pure world. Performance and roleplaying are necessary both IRL and in the metaverse. Within the metaverse, transparency, which is oftentimes related to purity, is brought to the center stage by way of the web of transactions that connect us all. The mistakes we make, the good trades, the NFT flippers, it’s all out there.

In the light of this “nowhere to hide” scenario, I agree that we need LARPing and anonymity to preserve our integrity, and why not, a certain opaqueness and obscurity that in my opinion, are good traits on their right measure.

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If you read this to the very bottom, kudos. You deserve some good alpha. I had a lot of fun minting random 3wordsproject  NFTs by querying the map in the page - mint period is over but you can find them in OpenSea. 

On the topic of the tx mistakes we make, the NFTs we flip and the gas we spend, OGCrystals is “crystallizing” it all into beautiful imagery and NFTs - check them out. 

Proof of Beauty Studios (the team behind $HASH and $LONDON) just launched a new project, check it out! One of the best teams in the game. 

I have a bunch of stuff to review and post about, but I'll leave it for some other time. Gaba and I hope you enjoyed this impromptu newsletter performance. See you next time.