Just as many of the ugliest online fights begin these days, Brian “Box” Brown, an Eisner-winning illustrator and comic artist, sent a seemingly innocuous tweet. It read, in part, “my former regular freelance employer has let me know they’ll be…Embracing NFTs 🙃 so…we had to part ways.” The then unnamed business, Gumroad, shot back the next day with a now-pinned response denying it had plans to enter the controversial crypto-collecting space, and has since attacked detractors from its corporate account, provided conflicting information and alienated a growing portion of the artist community it serves. How did it get so bad?
Gumroad, for the unfamiliar, is a digital goods sales platform, which hosts anything from art to ebooks to self-help courses. It was built in 2011 by then-19-year-old CEO Sahil Lavinglia, who is perhaps the only consistent figure within the company. Following…
