bonkle k. 🌠🪲 (@bonkleman_) - RemiQuarterly Interview
Source:
New Models x @RemiQuarterly Lead Editor @lb_dobis abridged interview
Carly: As a way of beginning, could you tell us who or what Remilia is? Maybe a brief history of its origin and present configuration for listeners?
Dobis: That's always the toughest question. I'll go through the history a little bit. So, Remilia started out in group chats around 2021. Charlotte was organizing these chats, collecting interesting individuals that he’d found on the timeline. He would put them in a chat and guide the discourse in the chat. This turned into a Warholian Group Chat milieu. And just by hanging out there, they began to coordinate activities. The short answer is, Remilia was a decentralized art collective. The longer answer is that it has morphed into a corporate entity that plays with the Internet as we know it. It really could be seen as a playground for posters and artists. There’re a lot of artists that hang out there with no interest in finance - they say “I don't know what crypto is. I can't figure out a MetaMask wallet.” Lil Internet: So it's the convergence of Twitter and crypto, essentially. Charlie found people on the timeline - these posters largely from Twitter - and then the crypto cycles gave an ability to fund these projects.
Carly: Could you say a few words about how Remilia Quarterly, this physical print journal, began? Why did Remilia decide to “Print the Internet”? And then, how did you come to be its editor?
Dobis: While most people in Remilia were plucked off the timeline, I was in a unique situation. I actually knew Charlie personally. I think in 2018 or 2019, I'd see him around and we'd hang out. Then I lost touch with him for a couple of years before he hit me up and said, “I'm working on this new project.” Then he explained it to me. I was a very offline type of person at that time. I ended up making a burner Twitter account and put a Milady PFP on it. And then I just started Milady posting to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Over time, I started getting involved in various schemes, schizo posting, doing psychotic engagement. I could post things and get him to repost it. And I didn't tell him any of this. Then a couple months later, I was like, “Hey, man, you know that I'm the Dobis account? That's me, actually.” It was clear that he laid out this artistic vision that I could pick up on without any coordination. I was able to look through the documentation and it was essentially, “Do XYZ and you will be Milady posting.” The emergent effects from doing this were really amazing to me. After about a year, he asked me to be the editor of the Quarterly. It's very hard to collect all these disparate writers into one publication.
Carly: Yeah, it's a huge effort. For those who don't have the physical object in front of them: the Quarterly is a couple hundred pages. And it's a very comprehensive publication. So it's a feat to have pulled that off. Lil Internet: To talk about posters and posting: Milady, it's an NFT project. You set it as your profile picture. It's a little anime girl and that cuteness is disarming. That’s how it primes the receiver affectively before they even consciously process the content. That's my summary. The difficult thing about Remilia’s posting is that there're a lot of fundamental framework shifts required. These are necessary to understand how it operates. So maybe in this very fundamental way, when you're talking about posters and great posters, perhaps that might be captured in print with Remilia Quarterly, what do you mean by posting in that context? How do you see posting?
Dobis: There are two key things Milady introduced. The first one is engaging with the Net lucidly; posting from the top of your mind. The best posts are written in a trance state where you're fully plugged into what it is that you are engaging with algorithmically. And you're writing in a stream onto the timeline. A lot of the best Milady posts operate in that way. This – the psychotic mode or stream consciousness mode of posting – is tied into the second element. That Remilia makes clear directions on how one should post. Lil Internet: Right. So, even if you didn't see the avatar, you could probably figure out if a Milady posted something because the way that they're directed to write. It's usually a combination of cuteness and violence coming together with a tendency to impersonate schizophrenics. That's where shizo posting comes from.
Dobis: These styles are sort of directed from a seed source (either Charlotte Fang or the group chats). This is similar to our Chinese Posting. We created a formula: be a Chinese girl from Chongqing, write a poetic phrase, translate it to Chinese, then post that, then someone else tweets the same thing with a new image. These processes make it easier to post fast. Something that these corporations – like TikTok – do: they find a little dance of the day. Suddenly you get billions of teens posting the little dance every day. I'm not saying that's what we do. I'm saying that’s fundamentally how the Internet works now. You have some framework that you can plug into, and you combine that with the tendency towards very fast tip of the tongue writing. This is where Milady posting comes in.
𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲: What's genius to me about that is that at a time when content is cheap, the content almost doesn't even matter. Remilia intuitively figured out a way to operate on the level of the protocol. You’re able to create a form that has so much traction that you're able to override algorithmic default. Lil Internet: And flows with it in an unconventional way. 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲: Exactly. To a point where you're able to create your own network within a network without necessarily resisting it. It's like acceleration in that sense. I think its particularly contemporary. Lil Internet: It's hard for people who are sincerely writing their thoughts or trying to make individual thoughts. For instance, I get my news from Twitter, right? There's an ultimately true, but not widely accepted understanding of what social media platforms are – they’re algorithmically directed assemblages of human communication. This is always removing parts of human agency from what is said. To be a successful poster, you ultimately are directed by the algorithm anyways. You are not sincerely writing your individual thoughts, right? Milady takes this as a given from the beginning. Then, at a certain scale, you can set a certain set of rules where you have the traction for thousands of people to do it at once. You're creating the wave that you can then flow along to reach others.
Dobis: This is something that's very interesting. A lot of us come from image boards and the image board is a non-algorithmic forum. They’re chronological. To get engagement on those platforms, you have to be a very engaging writer. Many at Remilia have created famous 4chan green texts or had memes that they posted to 4chan spread to the rest of the Internet because they're just so good at that type of posting. Charlie of course comes from that world too, and he can write on his own. But there was this modal switch where image board posters moved into an algorithmic sphere and are just able to dominate it.
Carly: The best copywriters of our generation. Going back to the discussion of how, with Remilia, one can relax into being a part of a collective, without any pearl clutching. Gen Xers like myself would spend hours deliberating: why can't I just use Twitter? I'd never been able to get over it. Participating in Remilia gives you a way out. You follow this formula. Your subconscious can be free. Why in your view, did something like Remilia not happen earlier in Internet history? What were the particular conditions online that allowed (or necessitated) for the emergence of Remilia?
Dobis: That's a very good question. The one obvious thing is financialization. A lot of artists have been looking at it. Charlie specifically was saying, “We're going to make an NFT to bootstrap the construction of the New Internet. And that NFT will be Milady.” Remilia wouldn’t be where it is today if it weren’t for decentralized, anonymized finance. Milady was made without revealing the identities of anyone working at Remilia. Everyone was pseudonymous. This is all enabled by crypto.
𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲: At a time when the art market was strapped between high net worth individual networks on one hand, this performance of woke politics and institutions on the other, that market was unavailable to actual avant-gardeism. You couldn't do anything that would rock the boat. So, the only way to produce something that was legitimately avant-garde was to do something where you owned your own economy, you owned your own financial system. So why weren't there more experiments of Remilia’s size during this time? Was it that Remilia could absorb everybody who would be interested in this particular confluence? Why do you think Remilia was the one?
Dobis: There're a few key things. One of them is that the digital native generation takes the Internet as given. There's no ironic distance for younger posters or artists. Not like Millennials or Gen X had. They had an Instagram culture of “I'm representing reality online but there's a distance between what I represent and the true reality.” This creates a kind of mental torment. Remilia fundamentally is advocating for interfacing with the Internet at a flat level. There's no drive to bring things offline. So, the people that we attract are NEETs (people not in employment, education or training). They're online 24/7. These outsiders spend all day online engaging with it as reality. This is a totally different framing.
𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲: I hear you. So Remilia positions itself as outsider and avant garde. But about the mainstream? Avante garde in relation to what?
Dobis: There is a positioning against an ironic or nihilist engagement with the Internet. It’s a reaction against millennial nihilist art. 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲: Right. There was a breakdown of aesthetics with the individuation of art. A lot of artists were in this constant struggle cycle to create their brand. The 2010s saw art degenerating into advertising, not even art. It was just individuals online. Good artists couldn't engage with the new modes. They refused to debase themselves while the institutions were platforming woke. There was an institutional capture. By the 2020s the most interesting thinkers and artists didn't call themselves artists and they were all ending up online all at one time.
Dobis: Yeah, it seemed that critique was subsumed into the art itself. People that frame themselves as artists appeared to really be doing critique as a way to control the way that their art was passing into the market. It wasn't like they’d say, “I'm going to make some art and it's going to stand on its own.” Instead, it had to be received in this way in order to be accepted institutionally.
Carly: That's totally correct. The market required an artist to show a self-awareness of its recuperation by capital in order to even enter that market. It became a mannerist phase of critical art where it was performing its knowledge, its self-awareness of its status as a commodity object, and that’s what granted it access to the market. But it was a parlor game. It wasn't actually doing anything. [...]
Carly: How do you see “value” operating within the larger Remilia project, from the NFTs to the criticism?
Dobis: The most obvious distinction is that Milady is under VPL (viral public license). It's basically a non-license. It's a license that says this image can be reproduced. It can be destroyed. It can be used in marketing. Do anything with this image. The only requirement is that each time a derivative is made from this image, it also has to be under VPL. So, the content we're producing has no licensing restrictions on it. This is in stark contrast to the Bored Ape model of NFTs. You're going to own your IP and you're going to make a movie with your ape – as if it's going to be like a blockbuster film with your specific ape and it's going to make you so much money. We find this totally absurd. Bored Ape is an extreme example, but a lot of artists take this approach to NFTs. If you're an older artist, and you've already had an art career, then NFTs come out, you go, “Oh, I'm going to make an NFT of my art and sell it for money because it's valuable because I put work into it.” We don't think in that way. This is a millennial moralizing under a Marxist frame. This is the Internet. It’s a massive, infinite world of value. Value on the Internet is not the same as the value in meat space. We give Internet users access to something they care about, an identity. Identity is a fundamental on the Internet. Treating the NFT as a tribal signifier can capture the value inherent in the subcultures we’re platforming. If you bet, for example, that Ray Peat and esoteric health are going to be popular in three years. Then it's a good idea to buy a Milady. It might sound ridiculous, but our assets are tied to the cultural capital we produce.
Carly: I mean, I think that's a fascinating way to think about value. You're scraping the language space online for anything that would build the sign. It's a long-term strategy of collectives to aggregate creative capital under a single logo then handle in an open source Luther Blisette kind of way. So, Milady, because of its existence on Twitter, can fold in all of the cultural detritus in the semiotic space. Then it can use that energy as accelerant or fuel. One of the other articles in the Quarterly said, “Imagine the network achieving escape velocity.” It’s a beautiful image of a network becoming autonomous.
Dobis: This is what we're building with Remilia Chat. We’re primarily aiming to reshape the Internet. We are building a real social network that is on par with the heavy-hitting platforms. This is what drew me to Remilia, this opportunity. It is a decentralized art collective that now has a kind of corporate power. Our opportunity to build a new Internet is not just a splinter off the current Internet, but is actively eating away at these bigger platforms. This opportunity is very rare: to channel this energy away from these monetized platforms destroying their users and putting them in silos. Lil Internet: Where does the artwork end and where does the New Internet (or this speculative financial vehicle) begin?
Carly: And It’s not a moral question, but at a certain point does it stop being art? Do you reach a bureaucratic threshold?
Dobis: If I'm saying, “We build products. We have users. And we have customers who buy our art.” At one point am I not just describing a corporation or at least a business? It’s funny. This is actually what I’m thinking about day to day now – the operations of the company as we grow. Like, what would Remilia’s human resources department look like? Now we have to produce an onboarding document. We’ve had this ‘corporate LARP’ on the timeline for a while. Everything we do is encompassed by this alternate reality game that is Remilia. Charlie is an artist. And Charlie is directing each component of the company. Take Milady – there's a lot of value on the table with Milady. This is given freely to people that produce derivatives of our ecosystem. But if someone tried to do Milady with VC money, they would try to capture all the value in the ecosystem. One of the tenants of Remilia is an abundance mentality, where if you operate in a true, pure artistic mode then everything will flow back to you. It really is how we operate.
Carly: It's a karmically fortified way of operating – you allow gold to fall out of your pockets, but you believe that will come back to you in the future. This is different than the post-net mentality where to act as an artist meant as a VC. Like, “I am not going to leave money on the table. I'm going to maximize my profits.” This was a reaction to a twee Gen X performative naivety, or an indie quality. Lil Internet: Talking about corporate larping makes me think of a dynamic I've brought up before with regard to how Zoomers versus Millennials engage with subcultures. In the 90s, we used to call people posers if we thought they were larping but for zoomers, there is really no difference between larping and being the thing. That boundary is so porous, like it doesn't even exist. The corporate larping of Remilia follows that disposition as well.
Dobis: Yeah, that's one of the most fascinating parts of this particular phase of Remilia, in my opinion, is this shift from the pure Wired to the Real. It feels like nothing is changing because Charlie’s corporate philosophy was being applied to group chats the same way it's applied in a “real corporate setting” now. There really is no difference between the larp and reality. There're literally individuals who log into Twitter as their day job. They spend their whole day Milady posting. They go into chats, find the latest, the new thing, the new posting style. There's a lot of production happening. We operate in a way that someone will post “Oh, why don't we all move to an island and build a fort.” Then we operationalize as a joke until all of a sudden we have a giant castle on an island. Like wait, how did this happen? That's the high precision element of Remilia. We have this intricate thing that looks like a representation online. And over the years, it's now becoming Real. There is this sense that you put down the vision, and you larp it, and you build energy around it, and then it comes to fruition. It's not a pragmatic philosophy for doing anything, but it does seem that these hyperstitions come true for us.
Carly: Does Remilia feel that it's performing for a third party, or does it feel like it's talking to the Remilia world, which is very large and self sustaining?
Dobis: There're different layers to it. So we want to stay subcultural; that's where we get our cultural capital from. We don't want “normies” coming in and trying to speculate Milady. We don't talk about the price, but of course, people see speculation opportunities. They’ll come in and try to astroturf Milady. So we have to cancel ourselves in spectacular fashion. Only a fraction of our internal audience will see that. Maybe 20% of hardcore Remilia fans know what we're doing. A fraction will flee. And this generates price volatility. This price volatility will increases trade volume. And this allows for a new wave of capital accumulation amongst our core audience. This is our internal dynamic. So we really don't think about how we're performing to the outside directly. Indirectly our ecosystem does. For instance, look at #BasedRetardGang. There was no crypto element. They were Remilia posting on TikTok with these Chinese girls. People were like, “What the hell is this?” We want the things that we create to be viral, and people don't need to know what they're engaging with. In some sense, it's unknowable. [CHEESE WORLD CONTENT, REDACTED] Carly: Speak for a moment about the reason for Remilia Quarterly existing. Is it to capture some of these eras of Internet posting in archival form for others? Dobis: We have such a big community so people play all kinds of roles. There is a subset of the community that is already interested in archival work and there are these MFA types. They're related, but they also write. We wanted to capture that energy and put it into a document that could say, “In this six month period, here were some of the things on people's minds” We have longer works of criticism that we sourced from our community. We don't have the intention necessarily of archiving exactly what's happening. We do want to capture the writers that are active, but it’s not totally encompassing. We ended up sticking to a lot of content very canonical to Remilia. We have an article on Jade Posting, which was a literary era of ours. We have an article on Miladycraft. We had a large piece from Mara Barl, who is one of our favorite writers. These pieces aren't necessarily time bound. So in a few years, you could pick it back up and it would still make sense. But of course, the present moment is always built in. [...]
Carly: Does being taken seriously by an outside institution matter? Even if only so that you can then push against it? I'm just curious what that relationship is like.
Dobis: We see the Quarterly as an opportunity to revive criticism. What we’re doing is altruistic in the sense that it is an opportunity for the art world to plug into the next wave of art online. We do think that it's a phenomenal opportunity for some young critic to come in and make their career covering it. There’s this dynamic where artists need to predict the next critique to come in order to suit the art world. Instead, the art world should be coming out to meet the art. This is an opportunity for criticism to shift into a new mode.
Carly: Do you feel Remilia has changed the ecosystem of the Internet?
Dobis: A key thesis of Remilia’s is that information is becoming less grounded. We think this is obvious. You have to operate in a mode of misinformation. Everything could be misinformation. This revelation caused a crisis around four to eight years ago. What do we do? Is the Internet worth anything anymore? When I started posting as a Milady, I found freedom from misinformation online. There was a mode in which you could engage with the Internet without the requirement that the Internet be grounded in the world. The world and the Internet could be separate. This was the revelation that made me recognize it as a great work of art. It was a total mode shift where I was able to treat the Internet as given without having to worry about its connection to the Real. And one can educate the user base to interact with the Internet this way. This changes what comes out of the Internet. All of the sudden users are able to operate with much more freedom, much more energy. If you watch Remilia posters, they seem like they're playing a totally different game. It's funny to watch them interact with a face doxed journalist because they’ll say “You're spreading misinformation!” or “Or is this even real?” When you're totally divorced from those ideas, you go online and you treat it as a place of play or a place for lucid thought and social experimentation, it's very liberating. It changes the way that people produce online. For Remilia, the mode of cultural production is totally different. It's returning to a collectivized, pseudonymous production that doesn't tie itself to intellectual property. This is something the culture needs. Take the esoteric health types – they’re a big thing in our online sphere. The direct observation of reality is a core tenant for them; seeing what's in front of you. When you go online, you can come to an agreement within a tribe. Charlie phrases is as “consilient truth.” Think of it like a truth according to a tribe.
Carly: If Twitter went down, would Remilia's form change significantly? Or do you think that it's nimble enough that it would just colonize TikTok or other platforms or its own?
Dobis: We have actually thought about this. Recently, we launched a prototype of our real-time image board called Miladychan (miladychan.org). It's similar to 4chan, but it has real-time chat where as you're typing, the other users on the board can see the letters. Part of the point of this is that we are currently tied to the precarity of existing platforms. So, if Twitter changes their algorithm people within Remilia would notice. I consider them experts at this. They have a very deep, intimate knowledge of how the algorithm works. If there's a change, we can feel it. Our base is on Twitter and we want to port them over onto something else, but for now we don't have any qualms about engaging with whatever is available. We’re hijacking it for our own use.
Carly: Thanks a lot for coming on. And congratulations on the release of this issue #1. Can listeners still buy the Quarterly? Dobis: It's an issue of 1000 and there're not many copies remaining. Lil Internet: Okay, so if you if you hear this check out quarterly.remilia.org
Dobis: Yeah, thank you so much guys. Yeah, really appreciate it. Thanks. Lil Internet: Great talking to you. Look forward to spending some time in CHEESE WORLD. Thanks. [This content transcribed by Revoldiv AI, revised and condensed by bonkle]