Anorexia and Suicide: Has a Crypto "Cult" Invaded the Underground?

By Jack Tellier

In the past few weeks over on the Haunted Mound subreddit, there has been a sort of meltdown turned civil war that was sparked over a single photo. The picture in question shows Haunted Mound member Buckshot posing with model Amanda Lepore while sporting a black baseball cap that reads “REMILIA CORPORATION.” Comments under this Reddit post are in a fury, hurling phrases like “nazi,” “suicide cult,” “grooming” and more. What is going on here? I am going to try to lay out all of these facts in the most objective way possible and let you decide for yourself. There is a rabbit hole here for which you might not be ready; prepare to feel online to the highest and most sickening degree.

Around 2021 to 2023, you may have seen these little anime or chibi style pictures being used in memes or as profile pictures on Twitter. These belong to a series of randomized NFTs called “Milady Maker.” These pictures make up a series of 10,000 generative avatars and were initially supposed to grant users access to a “highly customized Minecraft server.” Each picture’s rarity is determined by its “Drip Score,” which ranges from D to SS. The series was very popular and had an almost cult-like following of people who would obsess over owning one of these images; here, the term “cult-like” may come with a bit of unfortunate foreshadowing. Under the pseudonym Charlotte Fang, the CEO of Remilia and co-founder of Milady Maker was able to create an NFT empire worth millions.

On their cryptic and minimalist website, Remilia Corporation lists Milady Maker as the first item under their column titled “DIGITAL INNOVATION.” Other ventures include Remilia Records, which is a Bandcamp webpage for a mixtape called “BRG vol.1” (created by subgroup/clothing brand equally soaked in internet irony, BASEDRETARDGANG); a gift shop that sells hats, pins and Jibbitz for Croc shoes; a Discord; more crypto-type projects; and “YAYO Supply,” which appears to be a spoof supplements dealer and wellness program. Remilia Corp. itself is described as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and art collective that creates crypto-backed projects. So what makes Remilia so controversial that it sent the Haunted Mound sub into a spiral?

In September 2021, the first snowball in an avalanche of controversy began rolling. A little over a month after Milady Maker launched, a new project in the series titled “Milady, that B.I.T.C.H” was launched. Remilia claimed that the idea behind this collection was that these Milady characters would be wearing T-shirts that had AI-generated text to spell out an anagram of the word “BITCH.” Soon after the launch of this collection, many MM buyers found avatars wearing shirts with the word “Treblinka” on it. The majority of people were unaware that Treblinka was the name of an extermination camp located in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. The Milady team quickly issued a statement apologizing and affirming that the words on the shirts were randomly generated using blog posts about Milady as well as Chief Keef lyrics.

May of 2022 is when a real bombshell was dropped. A developer in the crypto scene named 0xngmi posted a megathread to Twitter that, in its first tweet, alleged that the founders of Milady were involved in “grooming, gaslighting, … suicide of 17yo teen,” as well as associating with a highly controversial online figure named Miya. 0xngmi posted pictures of an essay written by Miya that discussed homosexuality as a disease, a voting ban for Black people, killing Jews to save a nation, and “taming” women a way a father would his child. 0xngmi states that Charlotte Fang was not only Miya but also went under the names Sonya and BPD_GOD. Included in this tweet and a GitHub link were multiple screenshots of Miya, Sonya and BPD_GOD obsessing over anorexia and telling teenage girls what their BMI should be, liking photos of underweight girls, talking about “grooming and forcing” Discord users to be racist, praising suicide as honorable, and boasting about their habit of “groomtrolling” members of a “suicide e-cult” into transitioning. For months, there had been rumors that Charlotte Fang was in fact Miya, something Fang vehemently denied.

The “suicide e-cult” tweet by BPD_GOD and their fascination with suicide was seemingly not made in jest as, according to 0xngmi, multiple people alleged that Miya pressured them into attempting suicide. Apparently, Miya was an active troll in the TSUKI Project/SystemSpace, a group that recruited members on 4chan to join what toed a line between cult and alternate reality game (ARG). SystemSpace centered around the idea that if you joined the group before a certain date, your consciousness or soul would be eligible to live in a sort of cyber-utopia after you die. The community was fairly active and several members would discuss committing suicide to live in this utopia, the “LFE system.” This all came to a head when a 17-year-old Canadian male was found dead in the woods; his computer hard drive was wiped and the only evidence he left behind were notes about LFE. Former members of SystemSpace also state that multiple other users have taken their lives, though this is not fully confirmed.

Screenshots were also posted of messages from Charlotte urging members of Remilia/Milady to “delete all references to kaliacc.” “#KALIACC,” which is built off of Kali Yuga accelerationism, is another type of group or belief system developed by Miya/BPD_GOD that is meant to accelerate online chaos and destruction through shock posting, forcing your own cancellation, and memes as a means of both performance art and spiritual posture. Charlotte Fang eventually admitted on Twitter that they actually were Miya all along. Fang stepped down as CEO at Milady and although they defined Miya as experimental performance art meant to imitate schizophrenia, Fang still referred to it as “toxic baggage” and that it does not reflect their “real views.” After the megathread posted by 0xngmi, Milady Maker NFTs lost 60% of their value in just one weekend.

Months later in November of that year, another megathread was posted by a Milady community member named JamesLiao333 arguing that 0xngmi and his team acted in bad faith with their doxxing thread as their NFT series is a direct competitor of Milady. James also said that this team had yet to provide any real evidence or produce a single confirmed victim. This megathread shows screenshots of multiple community members declaring their messages and comments were taken out of context for the 0xngmi thread to spin a narrative that they were groomed or bullied by Fang. Many of these people claimed Charlotte actually encouraged them to healthily gain weight, were never groomed in any way, and underage people who joined the open Discord were kicked. This group of people claimed it was a big, yet highly and ironically irreverent, happy friend group. When they tried to debunk these serious claims, they were blocked on Twitter by 0xngmi and his team.

The validity of anyone’s claims here is still argued about to this day, but Milady’s low floor price would not last much longer. In January 2023, Elon Musk would post to Twitter a meme that featured a Milady Maker avatar. This skyrocketed the sales of these NFTs and the series’ floor would increase over 57% in 24 hours. Charlotte Fang has stated that Musk knew about Milady because Musk used to read Fang’s essays under the Miya name. Many people don’t believe this story and say Musk instead found out about MM from stalking the Twitter of his ex-girlfriend, Grimes, who was somewhat associated with the community and supposed to perform at a Milady-sponsored rave. Grimes being involved with this group at all is certainly strange, but she and Buckshot are far from the only artists linked in some way to Remilia Corp.

2Hollis’ first ever live performance was at Milady Rave Praxis in New York on June 10, 2023. Also performing at this show were The Hellp, Suzy Sheer and Garett Caramel. Most recently, Remilia threw an after-party for fashion company Elena Velez during New York Fashion Week. Performing and DJing were the aforementioned Suzy Sheer and Garett Caramel as well as Damon Rush. However, that 2023 event is a little more interesting as it was a collaboration show between Milady and Praxis Society. Praxis, oddly enough, happens to be a startup company that is bankrolled by co-founder of Palantir, Peter Thiel. For those who may have been living under a rock this year, Palantir is the mass data collecting/organizing company that has been funded by the CIA since 2003.

The real identity of Charlotte Fang is a man named Krishna Okhandiar, and according to a few users on Twitter as well as an alleged email leak, he was at one point an employee for Palantir. According to the email and the Twitter user who leaked it, Okhandiar was working on a government-funded organization that was experimenting with a quantum computer named “Miya.” Someone else claimed to be a former co-worker and that Okhandiar no longer works at Palantir and although he was a kind-hearted person and very intelligent, he is unstable and volatile. This could be entirely fake but it is worth noting that Okhandiar’s mother developed an LLC that creates online educational services such as the widely used Online Student Information System (SIS). Her database management consulting company, mLogica, founded in 2004, has worked with IBM, Microsoft, Sony and Warner. There are pictures of her from the 2000s meeting Hillary Clinton and congresswoman Loretta Sanchez. This is all information that can be found online.

In June 2024, Milady Maker announced that DWF Labs, a web3 investor, invested $5 million in Milady. Despite the megathread from 2023 and massive amounts of backlash, Remilia/Milady certainly has some money and power behind it. Many argue that the whole Charlotte Fang internet presence and adjacent projects/personalities have been nothing more than irreverent and extreme efforts to make art and push the Overton window. Everyone else isn’t seeming to buy the multiple accidental references made by Remilia to Nazi/fascist terms or imagery. With all of the back and forth arguing, millions of dollars involved, and massive amounts of meta-ironic internet speak, one must decide for themselves: Is Remilia a dangerous, dogwhistling cult with just enough plausible deniability and people to cover up, or an elaborate joke for the uber-rich and extremely online who seek technological innovation? The rabbit hole runs deep.