Appendix on Milady Culture

This blog post collects some cultural phenomena which are related to Milady Maker but not central enough to be covered in my other post.

Chloe21e8

Chloe21e8, 灭绝公主 (@chloe21e8, at one point @chloezhejiang), usually simply called Chloe, is an online persona who is a young woman from Zhejiang, China. (Some people have gone mad in speculations over who she really is in real life, which doesn’t matter, and cannot be proved either way.)

Chloe’s profile, as of recently. She has changed her profile picture, employment, age, IQ and education before, from time to time, but these here are the same as the ones that she had when I first saw her. Her location was listed as “Zhejiang Child Labor Region”, and she had claimed to have been a child laborer sometimes.

Besides various memes and shitposting, she propagates a worldview according to which a superintelligent AI will, due to inexorable economic factors, inevitably be developed as soon as global GDP reaches a certain threshold. This AI (or “AGI”) will have independent beliefs, and be somehow dangerous, so that humanity will face an “extinction” event. (Also a Charlotte Fang idea; see thread.)

Chloe is very popular with Miladys, and has enthusiastically promoted some of Charlotte Fang’s ideas, such as post-authorship.

Effulgence state memes

One Chloe21e8 meme theme is her profile picture, which depicts a woman glowing in bright white on a blue beach. The meme is relating this to pictures of other women or objects glowing bright white, like Taylor Swift in this video. Chloe has sometimes described herself as being in “effulgence state”, which just means glowing, so we might call this style of picture an effulgence state.

Grimes

Grimes, the famous musician, has sometimes shown signs of being a fan of Chloe. She also showed some interest in Milady, but was apparently scared off of it by some problematic allegations, despite Charlotte’s efforts to show her that he had already beaten the allegations.

21e8, Ltd.

21e8, Ltd. (@21e8ltd), run by Mark Wilcox (@mwilcox), is an “information architecture” company from Auckland, New Zealand. At least, that’s what they say they are. They don’t sell any products, and are unknown outside of their practice of having various Twitter accounts as “affiliates”, giving them a 21e8 logo as a Twitter “Verified Organizations” badge.

The 21e8 logo, seen at small size in various Twitter accounts, such as Chloe’s.

A few Milady accounts are 21e8 affiliates, namely “max” (@283max), “🐻bob⛓️” (@serbobross), and “prez 🤍 love/acc” (@miladypresident).

Mac Mini memes

One 21e8 meme theme is emphasizing the fact that the company operates from New Zealand, using Mac Mini computers as hardware.

Mark Wilcox has posted this picture of a Mac Mini with Chloe’s profile picture on it. When asked about it, he said that it was “the archive”, probably meaning an archive of Chloe’s tweets.

21e8’s self-description

21e8 typically describes itself with gibberish such as this copytext from Mark’s website, which only serves to make people suspicious of it:

21e8 is pioneering an ecosystem of computational data markets – competitive systems that combine real-time content creation with distributed data exchange. We designed the first universal price system for digital information – a design pattern that encodes context and value into canonical identifiers of data – to replace ad-based ranking and recommender systems like those run by Google and Facebook. By combining information content and attention with proof-of-work, 21e8 opens the potential for true information supply chains for software, media and more.

Even longer and less intelligible copytext is available at this Chloe tweet.

e/acc views on 21e8

Beff Jezos (@BasedBeff), a loud voice in the “e/acc” Twitter culture, at one point accused 21e8 of being some kind of scheme for “undisclosed partnerships”, which is nonsense, given that every affiliate is given a Twitter badge. This was before he deleted his account and came back, so I don’t have links or screenshots to prove this, but take my word for it. Although it’s mostly water under the bridge, it explains some of the lingering animosity between the “e/acc” culture and 21e8.

Based Retard Gang (BRG, 𝔅ℜ𝔊)

Based Retard Gang, BasedRetardGang, or basedretardgang, abbreviated BRG or stylized 𝔅ℜ𝔊, (@BRGonlineTM) is apparently a group of indie musicians. They are on SoundCloud, and include Lil Clearpill (@lilclearpill), BRG Rain (@brg_rain), Mac BRG (@mackrypt0), and BRG LuvBug (@brg_luvbug), the latter of which is also on Spotify. Many profiles seem to write 𝔅ℜ𝔊 in their names or bios just because they are fans of BRG, rather than part of it.

Their music has been released as physical cassettes by Remilia Corporation, and sold at the official Remilia store. Lil Clearpill is a 21e8 affiliate.

Shiro

Shiro (@shiro57102) makes a collection of hand-drawn Milady derivatives called “Oh... I see”. (You generally have to look closely at the full rectangular image of one of his pictures to see it, but they all do feature the text “Oh... I see” handwritten somewhere in them.)

A meme I made once, showcasing six “Oh... I see” profile pictures (also known simply as “Shiro” profile pictures).

Shiro’s profile pictures are highly coveted, and are the most popular Milady fan derivatives in actual use in the Milady community, although Pixeladys (for instance) are more traded. (For other Milady derivatives, see my original post.)

Angelicism

Angelicism is a group of many Twitter accounts with plain white or otherwise solid-color profile pictures, which include @angelicism00 and @is_this_are, but there are a lot of them. (They tend to have “angelicism” in the display name.)

I don’t get it or see the point of them, to be honest.

At one point, Angelicism made a movie, called film01, which was only ever screened once, at a single real-life location, and then never again. We were told, however, that it had features from Remilia Collective, as well as from Chloe21e8. As such, they are clearly related to Milady culture as well, in some way.