The Art World’s Digital Troll Is Determined To Take Down Bored Ape Yacht Club’s $4 Billion Empire

The Consequences of Being Early

Throughout the 2010s, Ripps was seen by many in New York as an impish prankster who brought the worst of the internet into the space of the art gallery, using his creative power to taunt women and decry identity politics. He also happened to be, irritatingly enough, an artist who gained significant attention in the Post-Internet art movement which aimed to bring Web 1.0 and 2.0 aesthetics into white-cube spaces along with Petra Cortright, DIS, and Amalia Ulman. Among his successes were the seminal image-sharing website Dump.fm and the widely celebrated archival site Internet Archaeology.

Ripps’ biggest splash, however, may have been the controversial show “Ho,” staged at Postmasters Gallery in 2015.

“What you need to understand about Ryder is that he’s always very early,” Magda Sawon, the founder of Postmasters and Ripps’ gallerist, told ARTnews at the gallery’s Tribeca location just weeks before it closed. “I think he was one of the first to be canceled.”

For “Ho”, Ripps painted ten large-scale oil portraits of model and fitness influencer Adrianne Ho based on her Instagram posts. In the paintings, Ho is distorted, as if warped or doctored by Photoshop. The show quickly ignited a firestorm online, with Jezebel’s Sandra Song describing Ripps as “a chatroom-bred forum troll who knows the power of publicity.” Song went on to reprimand Ripps for choosing to “visually warp” Ho, “a beautiful woman who makes exercise and self-love glamorous and enviable.” 

His previous piece, 2014’s ART WHORE, had an even worse reception. After New York City’s Ace Hotel selected him for a one-night residency, he used $50 of the provided funds to hire two masseuses off Craigslist to paint in the provided hotel room. Ripps has said he intended the gesture as a troll of the Ace’s residency.

Critics saw it differently, saying that he was part of a larger culture within the art world—and on the internet—that exploits sex workers. Dazed writer Zing Tsjeng wrote, “It’s the same old story: a white dude co-opting someone else’s labour in his struggle to Make A Point. Nothing new about that,” and linked to various tweets of criticism of the work, ranging from Rhizome’s official account to Red Scare’s Dasha Nekrasova, who wrote “@ryder_ripps @rhizome ur not illuminating realities of sex work ur being a cynical hateful creep.” Man, have times changed. 

“There were all these accusations of thoughtlessness, misogyny. The reviews were just scathing,” Sawon said, with her bulldogs at her feet. One looked up in concern. “I dare you to look at these paintings now. Seven years later, you’ll see, they are fantastic paintings.”

In 2022, it’s difficult to imagine many going to such lengths to defend a fitness influencer as a role-model of self-love. But his exhibit came as a powder keg of female fury was primed to explode. The show opened just weeks after Rolling Stone issued an apology for a since-retracted feature about a rape incident at University of Virginia and, amid the internet hellscape wrought by Gamergate, the year-long social media-fueled harassment campaign of female video game journalists. 

Gamergate was a key moment in internet history that split internet users into two caricatures: the Social Justice Warriors, who took it upon themselves to police perceived violations of the politically correct mainstream, and the Trolls, coded as white male losers (often “incels” or involuntary celibates) who frequented 4chan and Reddit. To put it simply, it was a very bad year to be a woman on the internet, and Ripps walked onstage just in time to be cast as the bad white man.

“Yeah, calling it ‘Ho’ was bait,” Ripps said. “But it was intentional bait. I was commenting on the nature of this new mediascape and clickbait. I guess that went over people’s heads, since they were more interested in calling me a terrible person.”

A Digital Native

Though Ripps has come to embody the Troll, he has been “terminally online” since before the term existed. A child of the first digitally native generation, he learned to swim in Web 1.0, when the internet was mostly a collection of DIY Geocities websites, message boards, and AOL chat rooms. It was there that Ripps, like many, perfected the art of provocation. 

“I was super into the computer from 8 to 15,” said Ripps. “I liked to take on a cyberpunk, hacker identity, I found comfort in being able to detach from reality and embrace a new identity for a while.”

Ripps’s hacker role models were ASCII artists, who created images with letters and other symbols available on a computer keyboard. 

“A lot of it looked like graffiti, and the hackers would attach these text files to pirated software, essentially. And they would sign the name of their clan or their hacker name,” said Ripps. “What was interesting about the internet was this ability to spread these aesthetic breadcrumbs.” 

Chatting with strangers all day and dressing up in different personas conferred a strong interest in performance, both as a rote behavior — a way you live your life — and as a conceptual game that made the world malleable. Ripps knew what any other savvy user knew: you could do anything, be anyone, even manipulate whole groups of people, and then reinvent yourself the next day. But sometimes people put on characters that they could never take off.

“A lot of people get lost in the sauce, and that’s scary, right?” said Ripps. “You invent a character for attention and at some point, it becomes a reality. And I never wanted that for myself because I really like the ability to not be one thing.”

By the time Ripps matriculated at the New School in 2008, he was exploring the possibilities of artistic performance while continuing to view the internet as the premier stage for experiments in performance. He was particularly taken by LonelyGirl15, a YouTube channel that was, ostensibly, an authentic vlog of a teenage girl’s life filmed via webcam from her bedroom. Running from 2006 to late 2008, the channel was revealed to be an elaborate fake, which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising, considering that the plot involved magical blood and a mysterious cult. While the internet observers that unmasked LonelyGirl15 called the project a hoax, its creators pushed back, calling it the “birth of a new art form.” Ripps’ senior thesis project, Ryder Ripps is Famous, was inspired by the series. For the video, he donned a version of himself that was already a celebrity, with the attendant attitude, fans, and nemeses. With this pretend-to-be-famous-to-become-famous performance, Ripps presaged the influencer. 

By 2015, however, the influencer era was in full swing. When “Ho” opened, Adrianne Ho had about 300,000 followers. While that follower count would peg you as a midtier influencer on TikTok, those were strong numbers for a non-celeb on Instagram. Sawon saw Ripps’ paintings of Ho as a positive response. 

“For him, there was this degree of awe, that this person actually managed to achieve this visibility with very contemporary tools,” Sawon said. But this visibility is the product of a certain kind of performance, and that’s what ultimately hooked Ripps on his one-time muse. 

“There’s a duality online that exists for everyone, for me, for Adrianne Ho,” Ripps said. “There’s a real Adrianne Ho, and then there’s the photos that she puts up on Instagram that are hyper-planned and rehearsed to look candid. We’re in a state where everyone has the ability to mediate their own lives.”

Yet what Ripps accomplished when he distorted Ho’s image was not some commentary on the self-distortion of the influencer’s image, but something more subversive. As the Tumblr/4chan version of identity politics became mainstream, he revealed, intentionally or not, how far the audience would go to defend Ho purely on the grounds that she was a woman who had to be protected from a man. 

While Ripps now denies that he wanted to provoke the ire of SJWs, Sawon said plainly that Ripps “thrives on controversy.” 

“He does these kinds of ideas that he knows will generate responses, but so does Maurizio Catalan,” said Sawon. “This is a known form of creative practice.”

The Rules of Trolling

For Ripps, the “Ho” controversy and his current crusade against Bored Ape Yacht Club are hardly at odds. “Being able to differentiate when something is and isn’t performative is sacred,” Ripps said over the phone, as he watered his parched rose garden at his home in Los Angeles. 

There are rules to trolling that separate the noble provocation from the underhanded jeer or, worse, malicious manipulation. 

“There has to be a moment when people are having a non-performative discussion — meaning all the layers of irony, the layers of double-meaning and emotions are taken out.” Ripps said. “Then, we’re just talking about the meaning and the impact and the purpose and the intention of things, almost with the sobriety of a legal setting.”

He brought up another scandal that involved him last year. The CIA had launched a new look for its website that was mocked online. The black logo with thin white lines had the techno-sleek look of a rave poster, some said, and the website looked like the inside of a Nike ad, full of strong men and women with their arms crossed somewhere in the void.

Since Ripps had a history of producing graphics and creative direction for major celebrities, it wasn’t a total stretch when he claimed that he was behind the CIA rebrand. He didn’t so much claim to have redesigned the logo as he did cunningly suggest it, uploading the logo to an Instagram profile that doubles as his portfolio and that listed his other, legitimate clients. He then deleted the post quickly, giving an air of authenticity. What could be better proof of guilt than a screenshot of a deleted post? Those screenshots rippled across the internet, people weighed in, and the CIA, in time, contacted reporters who wrote up the story. “This individual had absolutely nothing to do with our website redesign,” a CIA spokesperson told Paper in an email.

“The media ran with it, and then the next day, I said what I did,” Ripps said. “No one was hurt or deceived, and it didn’t go anywhere beyond that there are probably a few people who still believe I designed a CIA logo, which is like, whatever.”

This kind of meta performance is rarely taken advantage of by artists. In Ripps’ hands, it’s less an artistic performance than a life lived artistically, a particular talent for putting into motion a cascade of predictable performances, which at their climax, are unmasked for what they are. In this case, Ripps’ hoax was a way of commenting on a favorite subject of his: the media’s propensity to opportunistically amplify controversy, hot takes, culture wars, or whatever else keeps the clicks coming.  

For Ripps, the real issue when it comes to figures in internet culture — whether it is former president Donald Trump or BAYC — is not necessarily the alleged racism (though he, of course, doesn’t support that), but that they aren’t honest about their troll. 

“I’m just a truth maxi. Like, that’s the issue for me. They’re not being clear in terms of what their objectives are, why they want to do this and how they’re gonna do it,” Ripps said of BAYC’s founders. 

War for the Planet of the Apes

This past January, Ripps published the website gordongoner.com, named after the username of 35-year-old BAYC cofounder Aronow. It contains months of research outlining the NFT project’s allegedly racist imagery. 

Ripps laid out the research, as compiled by him and ten collaborators, plainly: the BAYC symbol of a floating white Ape skull closely resembled the design of the Nazi Totenkopf emblem, while the accessories that the Apes wear are closely associated with modern alt-right symbols, from Prussian helmets to safari hats. The company name, Yuga Labs, Ripps and his collaborators posited, is a reference to Kali Yuga Accelerationism, a niche alt-right ideology that believes that humanity is in a dark and chaotic cycle that will end more quickly through accelerationist behavior — that is, by sowing chaos and evil.

“Kali Yuga acceleration is all about, like, if you can, you should,” Ripps said. “If you can fuck the world up, you should. If you can control people, because they’re idiots, you should. It’s like, ‘I deserve to do this because I’m smarter than you.’ It’s all about that fascist supremacy. It’s so anti-human.”

Yuga Labs and BAYC founders have denied these claims repeatedly. On January 3, the same day Ripps made his accusations against BAYC public, the company tweeted a thread asserting that it was named after an obscure villain from the “Legend of Zelda” series, that they chose apes due to the “long history” of crypto enthusiasts referring to themselves as “apes,” that the logo was designed to show that the apes are “bored to death.”

As Yuga has done in the past, the thread emphasized the founders’ “diverse backgrounds” — Solano is Cuban American, Aronow is Jewish American, Atalay is Turkish American and Ali is of Middle Eastern heritage — as evidence of the collection’s innocence. Music mogul Guy Oseary, who is also Jewish, is a major business partner with the company.

Two researchers at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism contacted by Input were skeptical of the connections that Ripps, who is Jewish himself, has drawn in his research, while conceding that some of the accessories reinforce stereotypes about Black and Japanese people.

A representative for Yuga Labs declined to comment for this story. The spokesperson did, however, share links to evidence of Ripps’s bad behavior, including his late 2000s Tumblr page in which he posted “Hillarama” face mashups of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and a portrait of Clinton emblazoned with the N-word. They also brought up Ripps’ tumultuous relationship with rapper Azealia Banks, who is a consummate troll herself. 

Since January, many users have taken up Ripps’ call and picked apart BAYC’s various imagery, language, and symbols. The most significant might be Phillon, a YouTuber with 797,000 followers who is known for his video essays on internet culture. In June, Phillon published an hour-long video presenting Ripps and others’ research, as well as an extensive interview with Ripps. The video has been viewed 1.6 million times. 

Frederick Brennan, the founder of forum site 8chan also weighed in. Brennan, a disabled software engineer, founded the site in 2013, but cut ties in 2016 after the site became a hub for racism and misogyny and, later, the Qanon conspiracy theory. Brennan has since been a vocal critic of QAnon and called repeatedly for 8chan to be shut down. Like many who first looked into BAYC, Brennan had his doubts before later coming to the conclusion that BAYC is “undeniably racist.” Brennan has pushed back against the idea that the founders’ ethnic backgrounds ensure that the project isn’t intentionally racist. 

“As 8chan’s admin, I can say with authority and certainty that the users of /pol/ [the “politically incorrect” sub-forum] were predominantly from Latin America,” Brennan wrote in a Medium post. “People unfamiliar with the behavior of racists online (how blissful that ignorance must be) may think that surely, even if they pass as white and could believe in white supremacy, that’s unlikely due to their countries of origin. Once again, no.”

Despite Ripps and his allies’ best efforts, BAYC has yet to lose any of their industry endorsements or deals. 

At the height of the NFT craze earlier this year, Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton gushed over their Apes on the Tonight Show, while Madonna, Justin Bieber, and at least a dozen other celebrities promoted their Apes on social media and public appearances. Just last week, rappers Eminem and Snoop Dogg performed “live” as their BAYC avatars at MTV’s Video Music Awards.

In March, Yuga Labs purchased Crypto Punks, a similarly valuable NFT collection that is often credited as one of the first mainstream projects. A few weeks later, the company announced that it had raised $450 million at an eye-watering $4 billion valuation led by legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz. The funding, the company said, will be used to build out games and a metaverse project that puts it squarely in competition with Meta Platforms (i.e. Facebook). Even as a crypto winter set in this summer, with Bitcoin and Ethereum losing over 50 percent of their value over the past six months, BAYC has emerged as the true blue-chip NFT with major brand and celebrity partnerships.

So in mid-May, Ripps launched another provocative attack. He created his own NFT collection, titled RR/BAYC, by creating smart contracts which contained the exact same URL embedded in BAYC smart contracts, the URL being the part of the contract that links out to the image of one’s NFT. None of the Apes with racist or coded traits were included in the RR/BAYC collection. Ripps has said he was not copying or competing with BAYC, but satirizing the collection and NFTs as a whole. It was not his first time pulling this kind of gambit; a year earlier, he re-minted a CryptoPunk to, in his words, test “the boundaries and meaning of digital images within a new paradigm of IP law …” For both mints, he received Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices, which were later rescinded without explanation. RR/BAYC has sold 9,500 of these NFTs for a total of approximately $1.6 million, according to Ripps’ lawyers.

“The work is a provocation and its working to take down this company. I see it like the scene in the matrix where neo leaps inside mr smith and then explodes him from the inside,” Ripps wrote on Instagram in May. 

But the battle is far from over. In late June, Yuga Labs sued Ripps, accusing him of false advertising, trademark infringement, and cybersquatting, among other charges. Ripps has denied the claims, saying that he has been transparent about the collection’s intent to potential customers. No one is buying RR/BAYC NFTs, according to Ripps, thinking they are getting a real Ape. If RR/BAYC pisses off Yuga Labs, that’s the point. 

Ripps’ lawyers recently filed an anti-SLAPP motion, a legal tool whose purpose is to ask judges to dismiss suits that are created with the explicit intention of shutting down criticism or otherwise preventing free speech. His lawyers, one of whom represented the artist behind Pepe the Frog, which was coopted as an alt-right symbol, argue that Ripps’s use of appropriative images was reasonable. 

“Conceptual, performance, and appropriation art are among Mr. Ripps’s most important and popular modes of artistic expression,” reads the motion.  

They list Ripps’ intentions: “(1) to bring attention to Yuga’s use of racist and neo-Nazi messages and imagery, (2) to expose Yuga’s use of unwitting celebrities and popular brands to disseminate offensive material, (3) to create social pressure demanding that Yuga take responsibility for its actions, and (4) to educate the public about the technical nature and utility of NFTs.”

What the lawyers can’t explain in legalese is this: without the appropriation there would be no troll, and without the troll, no one would have gotten upset or even paid attention. But the appropriation, in Ripps’ mind, has another purpose: to bring into question if NFTs can even be, in a legal sense, copied. And if Ripps can bring that into question, maybe the whole empire will fall. 

“Yuga Labs is trying their best to word this so it’s not a copyright case,” Dr. Andres Guadamuz, a leading expert in intellectual property, told ARTnews. Guadamuz, who has been studying the legal implications of blockchain for years, said that most profile-pic NFT collections (like BAYC) likely don’t qualify for copyright protection under current originality and creativity standards.

As Guadamuz notes, PFP NFT collections tend to use a basic base image – like an Ape – and then have a series of procedurally generated traits based on varying degrees of rarity.

“That is good from the perspective of creating rarity in the collection, but it is problematic from a copyright perspective, because it is possible that someone would say, ‘What you did has no creativity, it has no creativity whatsoever. All you did was create a stock image which does have copyright, but then all the others are derivative,’” said Guadamuz.

Ultimately, according to Guadamuz, NFTs are “legally messy.” Yuga Labs’ terms and conditions, for example, say that NFT owners own the rights, but later it confers a commercial license. 

“You cannot have it both ways, either you’re giving them rights or you’re giving them a license,” he said.

In Guadamuz’s view, Yuga Labs rescinded the DMCA takedown because their copyright claim is shaky. Instead, the current lawsuit, he said, is intended to protect trademark and branding. Under normal circumstances, Yuga would have a strong case, he said, but Ripps’ stance about appropriation as a form of art and protest is on solid legal ground.

“We’ll see what happens because this isn’t going to get settled away,” said Dr. Guadamuz. “Both parties are out for blood.”

Call It By Its Name

Ripps can talk at length about “cancel culture,” “identity politics,” and the evils of the media, leaving one to wonder where his allegiances really lie. Leaving aside Ripps’ history of trolling, there is a kind of person both online and IRL who sounds just like that, the type that couldn’t care less if the Bored Ape Yacht Club has some association with the “alt-right.” It’s easy to understand that this assessment of him is the same kneejerk judgment that infuriated Ripps when he staged the  “Ho” exhibition. 

But, for Ripps, BAYC represents something far scarier than the excesses of cancel culture. It represents how the strategies of digital troll culture are breaking and infecting the mainstream. If we’re in a moment where Hollywood celebrities don’t care if they are promoting allegedly racist symbols and where it’s considered embarrassing to take people’s actions and words seriously because everything is supposed to be read as ironic, then we’re entering truly chaotic times indeed.

“Basically the current framework is, ‘It’s okay if you’re a Nazi.’ But what are you talking about?” said Ripps. “There’s got to be a middle ground. It can’t just be like, ‘Oh, identity politics have gotten out of hand, so I’m gonna become a fascist.’” 

In Ripps’ opinion, this isn’t just a culture shift but a strategy being pushed by powerful players like Peter Thiel, who has been funding and supporting a web of edgy players in politics, culture, and tech. In a culture of chaotic apathy, Ripps theorizes, a figure like Thiel is free to push the extreme politics of theorists like Curtis Yarvin, with whom he has been associated and who has vocally called for the US to become a monarchy controlled by a technocrat. 

Living in a reality that has ten levels of meta-irony attached to it is exhausting. The labor it takes to pick apart anyone’s beliefs or intentions is almost never worth it. But Ripps is determined to do that work, because, in his view, there is only one solution for navigating a world that continuously obfuscates its true nature. 

“It’s the same defense as for everything,” he said. ”The defense is to call it by its name.”

Update 9/16/2022 12:34 PM: A correction was issued. Ripps did not screenshot Bored Apes and re-mint them but rather generated new NFTs using the URLs embedded in the Bored Ape Yacht Club smart contracts.