Dune Crypto Leader Quits NFT Project After Being Accused Of Racism, Homophobia & Grooming

Let’s cast our minds back to January, when I wrote a story called “Crypto Losers Buy Copy Of Jodorowsky’s Dune, Have Played Themselves,” a piece which I thought at the time perfectly captured the extent to which brainworms had infested the blockchain community.

To recap, a group of people known as a DAO (more on those here) bought one of the surviving copies of Jodorowsky’s Dune, a production bible for a failed 1970s Hollywood adaptation of Dune that was made famous by the 2013 documentary also called Jodorowsky’s Dune. Knowing way more about crypto scams than copyright law, they thought they’d be able to do all kinds of stuff with the material within, never once stopping to consider that buying a book doesn’t give you the rights to what’s inside it, nor that it’s one of a number of surviving copies, not the only one.

We hadn’t heard much on the project since, until the weekend when one of the DAO’s co-founders, Charlie/Charlotte Fang—who is also helping run an NFT project called Milady—was accused of posting some truly reprehensible shit online.

Most of the allegations are contained in this comprehensive Twitter thread by 0xngmi, where the poster known as “Miya” compares black people to apes, calls homosexuality a “disease,” and says a nation can be “saved” by killing its Jews. It’s also alleged that “Miya” was involved with the Systemspace community, a group that has been labelled a “suicide cult,” promising a “cyberpunk afterlife,” which was linked to the death of a 17 year-old in 2017. “Miya” is also accused of being involved in the grooming of anorexic girls on social media.

Fang has since confessed to being “Miya” in a series of Twitter posts (though it’s important to note the account is referred to as a sort of shared art project, and they don’t address specific allegations, so it’s unclear which posts were actually them), in which they say their disgusting posts and behaviour was them simply “trolling” and being “juvenile,” and that their “real views hold no room for hate.” They have nevertheless announced they are stepping down from their role with the Milady NFT project, though their status with the Dune group remains unclear (Kotaku has reached out for clarification on this).

As we’ve seen, a DAO is simply a front in order to get suckers to buy crypto, and since we’re revisiting the Dune team’s efforts, let’s check in and see how things have been going for their own currency in the months since they bought the book and…ah.