I was in 6th grade in the 1980’s when a classmate gave me what he called “a punk mixtape.” Side A was labeled SKATE ROCK and on Side B was scrawled SUICIDAL. We had basic cable and I’d already become a devout MTV watcher which had heavily influenced my musical tastes, but this cassette rewired my brain in irreparable ways. (I consider that a good thing by the way, anytime you have the opportunity to have your worldview turned upside down I highly recommend it.) I listened to it until it broke, and only later learned that the first side was tracks from Thrasher Magazine’s Skate Rock series, and Side B was part of Suicidal Tendencies first album. My parents refused to let me purchase a replacement for either.
The following year I traded a Bon Jovi cassette for a copy of ‘Wild In The Streets’ by The Circle Jerks. My homemade copy collection was growing and that summer I talked a friend into dubbing me a copy of ‘Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.’ These songs and ideas were exciting in a way nothing ever had been for me, but it wasn’t until almost a year later when I had the opportunity to buy a Gorilla Biscuits 7” when my collector nerd gene activated. Purple logo, yellow vinyl. 2nd pressing, only 2000 existed in the world. There were only 1000 of the first pressing, and 102 of those had a special stamp on the label. How did I know this? That’s where things got really exciting.
By now we had dial up internet and BBSs where you could leave messages for people, but the World Wide Web was still a few years away. My lifeline at this point was fanzines and penpals. This was precious and arcane knowledge shared carefully in small circles. If you were into collecting punk records at that time you knew a guy (or knew a guy who knew a guy) who knew how many of what color of what record was pressed when, by who, and how to tell them apart. I started writing down details and specs when I learned them for later reference and before long people were calling me and asking for information on this record or that. I had a spiral notebook filled with discography notes, it was like my bible. Collecting was fun, but knowing what to collect was even better. I was surprised how few people knew the specifics, and was happy to share what I knew when I could. Beyond documenting the rarities, I was also starting to take note of design themes and ideas, and began learning what references bands were trying to make with cover art and how the visuals were another way to give a subtle nod to their influences, if you know you know kind of thing.
….
A decade later I was spending a lot of time on a website called Alen Yen’s Toybox DX. As a kid I’d lusted over the big metal Voltron toy that separated into lions and heard stories about the “real” Transformers from Japan with missiles that actually fired. I watched Godzilla movies for monsters, but also for the robots and dreamed about what cool toys Japanese kids must have had access to. With the (still early) growth of the internet, websites were popping up where a small handful of dorks who were obsessed with some weird obscure thing could find each other and talk about it. 30 years later things have progressed and now large handfuls of dorks obsessed with boring normcore mediocre shit can easily find each other as well. Anyway, Alen Yen threw up a flag and a bunch of us Japanese robot toy nerds rallied around him. Diecast, vinyl, plastic – all were welcome.
Sharing information became the cornerstone, if only because the audience was largely English speaking collectors from Europe and America drooling over near impossible to find 20-30 year old toys from Japan (and sometimes neighboring outposts in Asia). Someone would find an old ad and get it translated, or someone else would interview someone who had worked on a long forgotten project. We were learning things everyday and the site became a knowledge base for all things chogokin/sofubi/kaiju/sentai related. It was there I met Matt Alt who would become a longtime friend and collaborator across various cultural niches. We built a website called Jumboland trying to catalog and document an obscure line of robot toys called Jumbo Machinders made in the 1970’s which at that point were selling for hundreds of dollars and today sell for tens of thousands. Sadly the website is no longer online, but I still get messages from people who have screenshots or Internet Archive clippings asking me to fill in missing details to help their treasure hunting.
It was also around this time when I started paying attention to bootlegs. Music of course had bootlegs, but they were usually just crappy recordings from live shows or unauthorized re-releases. With toys, bootlegs were an entirely other world spawned from both licensing conflicts and poor translations. Toy manufacturers who couldn’t get a license (or never bothered trying) might release something similar but changing just enough details to skirt infringement issues to a market they didn’t expect anyone to ever know about. In doing so they (likely unintentionally) created new collections with their own fan bases and fanatics, who in many cases would eventually find their way back to the original inspiration. As a bonus, the bootlegs were often just as rare if not more so than the originals, but sold for a fraction of the price so if you decided to collect them it was all about the hunt. A motivated and industrious collector could build really cool collections for very little money that couldn’t be replicated by someone else with a lot of money simply because they didn’t even know where to look.
Some people ignored these as worthless knock offs, but others saw the value of a vibrant derivative culture, illustrating the inherent stickiness and virality of this “thing” which caused people to want to build on it and add to it. I realized a fanbase isn’t a circle, but a series of concentric and ever wider rings demonstrating more than one way to express admiration. Since then I’ve used this as a marker for the cultural importance of something – the more people trying to copy it the better.
….
It seemed like for a while anytime I heard about Ethereum it was in reference to some scammy ICO, but by 2020 I was hearing more and more about people using it for in game currencies, and more interestingly for art. I had an art background. I knew a lot of artists from my gallery days so I thought maybe I should finally get around to looking at this and see if any of it was interesting. Turns out it was, when I looked at how art was being bought and sold, and how onchain provenance helped distinguish originals from copies, and how royalties could be built into sale transactions, I immediately realized this was the solution to so many problems I and other artist friends had been wrestling with our entire careers. As a photographer, editions vs originals was an ever constant topic, and some friends who were video artists or digital illustrators had never been able to think of a file as an original, even if they knew it was their first saved version of something.
As I bounced around from marketplace to marketplace I started seeing a pattern and the more I looked at little pixelated characters I kept thinking this was something I’d seen before, but couldn’t place it. A lot of people were clearly making the same cultural reference, but it wasn’t just some random 8 bit video game graphics, it was something more specific… and then I remembered… CryptoPunks.
I was already interested in Cultural Diffusion and Phenomenology and took note anytime I saw an idea spreading through a community. I’d seen it with records, toys, and art. One of my penpals from the 1990’s was Shepard Fairey, whose Obey Giant campaign specifically played with the idea of repetition and how things like his “Andre The Giant Has a Posse” stickers, when they become ubiquitous enough, take on a life of their own. By this time we’d collaborated on a number of different projects, exhibitions and an early version of his website obeygiant.com. One thing we did with that was make a page trying to document all the bootleg versions of his stickers and art that people were inspired to make on their own. (Eventually that grew too big to be comprehensive, but there’s still a fantastic collection of examples online today obeygiant.com/engineering/bootlegs/ )
Seeing people making derivatives of CryptoPunks clicked for me, and I immediately started taking notes. What had happened between my first interaction with these little pixel people and now, and where was this all heading? I had to catch up, and so I started doing what I always do.
[This is an excerpt from my introduction to the forthcoming book PUNKS:NOT DED, my unofficial companion to CRYPTOPUNKS: FREE TO CLAIM. NOT DED is available for preorder in limited hardcover and unlimited softcover, hopefully heading to the printer sometime this month.]