To try everything Brilliant has to offer—free—for a full 30 days, visit http://brilliant.org/CallumUpton/
    The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription

    Today the Kpop fans rise up against NFT’s after the announcement of a weird dystopian blockchain experiment. crypto is going fantastic!

    #crypto #blockchain #fail

    This video was sponsored by Brilliant

    Support me:
    Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/CallumUpton

    Social Links:
    https://linktr.ee/callumupton

    Music:
    artist: Jupiter
    song: Lost Love
    Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/3nKRAaO5Tmk9gZHzkGAVb6?si=112a84fe01ee4e07

    28 Comments

    1. Never mess with Kpop stans, they are the scariest force on the internet, but for real kpop groups are seriously abused by the companies that run them

    2. I know more about K-pop than web 3. For the people that feel confused by the idol group explanation, this is what web 3 sounds like to me. 😂

    3. Regarding sub units:
      An idol group is also often referred as a unit and with larger units like this or even larger ones like akb48 and it's offsprings (and yes the number isn't a joke, it's actually how many ppl they intended for the group to have) where aside from the group as a whole there are smaller sections which act partially on their own in terms of making albums and whatnot

    4. So for fun, I googled crap descision making voting film. I get some movie called 2000 Mules. Also a memory of some movie called Swing Vote where the fate of the election falls to Kevin Costner.

    5. So halfway through I finally understood the logic of this… thing. Even then, it's hard to put into words.

      This is like how every NFT game is marketed. Not with actual good gameplay or high quality graphics, but with as many 'features' as they can come up with, and list as bullet points. Is it much more complex than it needs to be? Yes. They're throwing everything up on the wall and seeing what sticks.

    6. IDK I was kinda interested in the convoluted bonkers logistics of the elmination game-selection thing. I don't understand why or were it was going, but that's why I got curious…

    7. I love how Callum's lack of knowledge about K-Pop terminology confused him so much more than all the crypto-nonsense he's had to endure so far. Until the explanation for the voting system, all of this is rpetty much just standard K-Pop fare and has nothing to do with crypto.

    8. I'd wager that nonpayment scam is even worse than it sounds given that Kpop stars are usually young heartthrobs, so by the time they "pay off" their training and can start receiving actual wages, they're likely nearing retirement already.

    9. 13:20 I've seen other projects like that. Like the people running the project didn't want people to know their contributions would be made into NFTs because they knew there would be backlash.

    10. this feels like music industry's eploitation exploration just how far can the grift go both towards the hopeful artists and potential customer.

      as much as i hate recording industry for its horrible treatement of both aforementioend groups its still nowhere near as just concentrated evil as this. because they artists are not gonna get payed NFT are utterly worthless,fans are going to get scammed and only one benefiting in any way are the ones nobody wants to benefit – the scaming scum.

      Oh right the (smoke) signals are building up daily login addiction / habbit i am guessing?

    11. Tbh i bet that the complicated system around the group roster has nothing to do with NFTs, just koreans doing korean things – earlier on fans would've been required to send SMS to vote for their most treasured members, and now the whole NFT layer is added to the process.

    12. Always fun when two worlds collide XD
      For the record, the confusion you face from 7:00 on is… pretty common in Kpop. Nowadays a lot of groups, if not all of them, have "lore", an entire vocabulary built around personas/fandom name/and so on (if you're so inclined, look up aespa and its use of "æ"," kwangya", etc.) and much more. The daily vlogs are a bit more unheard of, but it's not unusual to have very regular livestreams by group members, as well as entertainment videos, behind the scene videos, reaction videos, previews, etc, so it's not a huge stretch from practices common in the industry, and in the case of TripleS the (projected) number of members allows for additional flexibility in that regard.
      It's mostly a marketing technique that creates storytelling from release to release, builds a spirit of community, and… creates a HUGE parasocial relationship, which is essentially what companies are selling in Kpop if we're being real. For younger fans there's almost an indoctrination aspect to it, frankly. But so, for the most of it, what is described in the video you watched is business as usual and has nothing to do with crypt-oh or Neo Fungus Trading specifically, as you noted, in the sense that most groups do something along those same lines. Even without web3, Kpop is very much about building metaverses indeed. In this case, though, it builds a system in which Neo Fungus Trading is embedded in a number of mechanisms that are already considered part of how a fandom should function. That's the thing : by making it a completely built-in thing in the everyday life of the group AND the fans, the Neo Fungus Trading is designed to be even more unavoidable. You can't separate it from the group if you "stan" the group. I have to say, it doesn't feel like the video you watched was specifically about the web3 aspect, but more about the group itself ("concept" is a word used in a specific context in Kpop ; same for "sub-unit" which can happen pretty commonly in big groups, for instance a boy group called NCT).
      TripleS is not the first group to attempt dealing with web3. It hasn't gone very well so far : they initially announced the Neo Fungus Trading, then got a bit more quiet about it, particularly when their first release was a hit. Of course they can't escape it eventually, because that's the business model of the massive group they're managing, and given common management practices in Kpop (as you underlined in the beginning), money tends to run out fast and then members suffer. Some of the members from artms, who are ex-members of LOONA, actually got out of their "slave contract" (that's how they're called) after much legal turmoil. I digress.
      If you're interested and haven't seen it yet through your research, the channel "Jihoons Carat" made a video titled "NFTs Don’t Belong In KPOP: Why NFTs are BAD and Why You Shouldn’t Support Them" last year that gives other examples of previous debacles. My favorite one being a group called Dreamcatcher which had an eco-conscious release last spring… and used crypt-oh to promote it. 😛 clap clap clap
      For the most part it should be noted that the vast majority of people investing in Kpop-related projects in web3 are not the fans, but rather the usual suspects, who think the popularity of Kpop comes with a build-in guarantee of ROI. So far it hasn't really be the case much. As you could see, fans themselves are really against it.

      12:03 Save yourself, don't look up "Kpop survival shows". For me it's too late but you can still escape it.

    Leave A Reply
    Share via