First: Milady is not an evil and vile cult. You conflate it with Miya, Charlie's pre-Milady net art experiment, and should read this summary (miladymaker.net/2022cancel) and then independently verify ratwell's tweets; the 2022 allegations were simply untrue. The best piece written about the topic is this Palladium interview (palladiummag.com/2022/11/04/…). It's not flattery. It's honest about how offputting the interviewer found Charlie, and how weird and deliberately creepy Miya was. It is an excellent critical examination of Milady circa 2022 and worth a read alongside Charlie's own writings about Miya as net art (paragraph.com/@charlemagnefa…). Milady is a different net art project, in a different world, with different values, that has attracted different people. Milady is not a roadblock to a positive sum social revolution. It's a pink glock with Hello Kitty stickers on it and is as neutral as any gun is. To the extent that Milady has a cult, the choice of picking CULT as the ticker for the ICO is a tongue-in-cheek callback to rock the cult moniker as a positive thing. I've been called an Ethereum zealot and I don't care, I don't care, we need zealots. Next: let us engage critically with the actually-stated values in some recent works that Miladys have poured significant effort into. Read the Ethereum 'zine, where Milady espouses a sense of profound appreciation for Ethereum and faith in the mission of Ethereum (perfectcel.xyz/files/milady_…). Or look at this image I attached of the cypherpunk purity spiral shirt. Free speech, free markets, free association, free information, free thought, free Ross, free Roman. These are the values espoused. Miladys put their money where their mouths are and collectively donated tens of thousands of dollars to Roman Storm's legal defense. It was one of the strongest shows of support from any Ethereum community and entirely self-organized. Next: let us go back to 20222 and consider why so many admirable developers in Ethereum love Milady and feel drawn to the work. NFTs are booming across Ethereum, all copying the same uninspired playbook of bored apes. Ten thousand procedurally-generated profile pictures and you get special access to a Discord community and you own the IP rights and there's a DAO building a video game! This was the "fork Compound governance" of NFTs. Remilia rejected this with Milady, licensed everything as VPL, promised nothing, and operated as the anti-NFT. This appeals incredibly well to people who found a real community decoupled from price. I can talk to Miladys and learn about Japanese streetwear, or play Minecraft, or teach them about Ethereum, or catch beetles because we all mostly forget there's an NFT with a floor price. We simply share a commonality of being terminally online and mostly unashamed of it. Network spirituality is real. Let's go back even further and discuss the VPL more. Many who came to love Milady share the same experience of growing up interacting with chan culture during the Great Recession. We were watching Terry Davis streams and shitposting on /g/ about Richard Stallman and seeing that a really romantic era of software was dying. Bloated FAANG monstrosities and ZIRP aimlessness and ever-stifling prvivate corporate censorship on social media characterized 2012-2020. Everything was becoming corposlop. This drove so many of us into crypto, and particularly Ethereum as the uncensorable world computer, in the first place. The pandemic broke this system's back and forced us all online. A sizeable contingent of people who fled corposlop for Ethereum saw the same pattern of enshittified centralized scammy NFT projects sucking all the air and attention out of the space. We still collectively suffer the sins and unbridled greed of that era. Milady was salvation: a message of pure free association to declare "I disavow this ugly corposlop, this is not Ethereum, this is not why I am here." That's what I found in all that Remilia built. You can see them still building this today. The branding is as corporate as it can be, using industry as an artform and glorifying the corporation as the ultimate organism. They went to New York fashion week and presented a suit. It's all a great rebellious joke against corposlop: the RemiNet social network is all about collecting and smashing beetles together to have fun online. It's cute over profits. It's art. Milady is seriously committed to the VPL, free speech, and free association. They genuinely love Ethereum as the uncensorable forever computer. To conclude everything: as Vitalik wrote, "I am free to criticize you, much as you are free to criticize me." You can disagree with Charlie and Remilia. As an agorist, I often do. Nothing bad happens to you. It's healthy for the network to offer genuine criticism, but the criticism has to be well-founded and high-quality.