While the normies were resting, we mainlined tech discourse all weekend to bring you the latest trends, rumors, fights, and innovations from the most manic corners of the internet. This week: The internet reacts to You Can See Everything, Sam Altman’s ‘human verification’ app gets into fintech, and MapQuest makes a comeback as the map app that fights for the little guy.
This is Manic Monday.
You can discuss everything
These days, San Francisco feels divided: into rich and poor, locals and transplants, tech people and people who want the tech people to please for once in their lives shut up about tech. Who knew Nathan Fielder, with his off-putting deadpan and unmatched talent for probing the absurd, would be the one to bring us all together? You Can See Everything, Fielder and his co-director Lance Oppenheim's highly-anticipated documentary that follows disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her domineering husband Billy Evans in the month before she reported to prison, hit theaters in limited release Thursday; in the days since, it’s left spellbound viewers in its wake. “My BPM hit 133 during the elizabeth holmes movie. Holy fuck that was insanity,” wrote tech reporter Kylie Robison on X, who — like many, many, many others — continued to unpack the film with her online mutuals all weekend.
Palo Alto writer Malcolm Harris weighed in with criticisms of the film’s framing of Holmes’s warped approach to truth as a quirk of her singular personality, rather than as part of the archetypal Silicon Valley worldview. Mike Wang, an executive at Long Journey Ventures, noted how hard Holmes seemed to be rocking her baby in her baby bouncer. (Wang and Robison also posted about the private screenings they attended, similar to the bafflingly secretive one Andreessen Horowitz co-hosted at the AMC Metreon on Thursday.) Tyler Shultz, one of the Theranos whistleblowers, penned an essay for the healthcare news site STAT where he suggested Fielder got duped by Holmes. John Carreyrou, the journalist who broke the Theranos fraud story back in 2015, also published his thoughts on the film, which leaned more positive: Later on X, he even called for the doc to win Best Picture. —Cydney Hayes
Orb’s got an eye on our money
Cydney’s already written about World, Sam Altman’s mysterious “real human network” designed to authenticate humans in a world increasingly infused with bots. What that means in practice is sticking your face into an Orb scanner so that it can later verify you through encrypted data. A new expansion of World’s product means we’re going to be seeing a lot more Orb action soon.
Yesterday, World announced a new application for banking and finance that “helps institutions establish trust through privacy-preserving cryptographic Proofs.” Those “Proofs” allow World to verify people in Zoom meetings and confirm that AI agents — which learn and operate independently of human inputs — have human oversight. The tool is supposed to be a prophylactic against a surge of deepfakes and AI agents destabilizing online markets and cracking into confidential meetings; the crisis recently led companies like Delta Air Lines, Amazon, Yelp, and JPMorganChase explicitly banning AI agents.
That is presumably not great news for Altman, given OpenAI is one of the leading developers of agentic AI. Altman has always tried to play the good guy, talking a big game about safety measures even as OpenAI gets sued by eight states for… screwing up safety measures. Altman’s now making money selling a product to protect people from the very thing he is building, but hey, what a coup! —Eddie Kim
These new satirical bus ads are so punk rock. No, literally
“We hope you die cold and alone on the streets after our AI employee replaces you, you piece of shit.”
That’s the message confronting people on Polk Street, on a bus ad near the Alhambra Theater. The grim parody of the equally grim AI billboards is the work of Civic Joy Fucks, a trio of political satirists and punk rock bandmates who don screenprinted mesh hoods with the faces of Mayor Daniel Lurie, disgraced supervisor candidate Manny Yekutiel, and Flock investor Chris Larsen while they tear the controversial Civic Joy Fund, its powerful founders, and the AI industry to shreds. The group has been posting on Instagram since early September but garnered more attention this month, thanks to the guerilla bus ads and their band’s live debut on Oct. 10 at the Moth Belly Gallery in the Tenderloin. Will the Civic Joy Fucks have an impact? We’ll see. At least their band, in the words of the two COYOTE writers who attended the show, “absolutely rips.” —C.H.
Surveillance traps tapped by map app
And speaking of underdogs, MapQuest released a new feature on its app last week that shows users the locations of nearby automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs. The “surveillance layer” feature shows ALPRs not only from Flock Safety but a number of manufacturers including Motorola Solutions, Genetec, Verkada, and others, MapQuest said in its announcement post on Bluesky. The company nudged their millions of users — yes, millions, believe it or not! — to “Update your app for spooky season.” —C.H.
Flippin’ out
Last week, Elon Musk revealed the long-awaited reincarnation of Tesla’s two-seater sports car, the Roadster, in what is probably the flashiest debut in the history of the automotive industry. You earn that accolade when your car literally barrel-rolls through the air, looking like a shiny steel skateboard that’s been kick-flipped. As a car nerd, I’m genuinely impressed. Perhaps all of Tesla’s rocket-booster science was, in fact, in service of creating a real-life Hot Wheels vehicle.
Naturally, Roadster discourse exploded over the weekend, and we’ve already lost the plot. Hyperventilating Musk leech/Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis leapt to use the car for political gain, declaring on X (naturally) that he will make the flying Roadster legal in the Sunshine State. (Good luck fighting the coalition of car safety nerds, federal regulators, and insurers who are already dismissing this as delusional.)
Others are fantasizing about a Jetsons future, like ex-Microsoft tech evangelist Robert Scoble, who declared that the new Roadster “makes all the shit I took for years” as a Tesla booster “worth it” — a self-soothing comment that also highlights how insecure the Musk tribe really is. Musk said on Saturday that a flight “over the Snake River or maybe Grand Canyon” might come next, which is a typical next move for the guy who thought a single-car tunnel would usher in a transportation revolution. Elon remains enamored with childlike aesthetics over true solutions; meanwhile, as DC comics writer Scott Snyder responded on Friday, “people just want healthcare.” —E.K.
The week ahead: Someone earnestly nominates Nathan Fielder for the Nobel Prize.
