While the normies were resting, I was mainlining tech discourse all weekend to bring you the latest trends, rumors, fights, and innovations from the sweatiest corners of the internet. This week: Palantir posts a manifesto on social media, a local polycule is looking for its next corporal punishment-friendly member, and the internet wonders where the heck TBPN went two weeks after its acquisition by OpenAI.
This is Manic Monday.
Software that dominates… the timeline
On Saturday, Palantir posted a 22-bullet manifesto on X that argued for the reinstatement of the draft, an end to cancel culture, the objective superiority of “some cultures” over others, and the moral obligation of Silicon Valley to go to war for America. The reception online has been negative, to say the least. If this was a marketing play for The Technological Republic, the business book co-written by Palantir CEO Alex Karp and head of corporate affairs Nick Zamiska that originally argued these points, I’m not sure this translated well with the reading masses.
San Francisco is not, in fact, real
A flyer soliciting new blood for a local polycule that recently “had a defector” went viral after people checked out its new member application form. It’s pretty long and full of absolute winners of stipulations, so I won’t go through the whole thing. I’ll just say, if you are willing to share your drugs, be drafted into a breeding market to produce a superbaby in three to four years, endure “reasonable corporal discipline” as a consequence for rule-breaking, and are between 5’5” and 5’10” (for “practical positioning reasons”), you might be a great fit.
Goodbye, TBPN?
Two weeks after OpenAI acquired the livestreamed talk show TBPN, people online have started to notice that the show has seemingly disappeared. Did it get shadowbanned on X, where it used to proliferate? Is it suffering from deflated metrics now that OpenAI is its only sponsor? Are netizens over hearing from tech industry shills now that the industry is sort of openly evil? For now, nobody knows…
Hello, MTS
…but don’t worry! If you enjoy the beautiful, life-affirming experience of listening to tech industry pawns online explain the world to you, then you can go ahead and tune into MTS, which stands for Monitoring The Situation, the notably TBPN-like, techno-optimist talk show that a16z launched today as a part of their “new media” push. To make the transition as smooth as possible, MTS will be livestreamed straight to X, just like TBPN. After all, “X is — and always has been, the real world,” the venture capitalists behind the project tell us. Ah, how lovely it is, ceding one’s reality to the techno-industrial complex. MTS? More like Music To my Soul!
Get me the Bump outta here
Lastly, I was delighted to read this thread from X shitposter @iamaheron_ detailing the deranged experience that is the location-sharing app Bump. It’s kind of like Find My Friends, if Find My Friends was in the style of someone tweaking on speed, watching 50 hours of Nickelodeon for inspiration, and then just going to town on Figma, or wherever the designers created this monstrosity. For journalistic purposes, I’m tempted to try out Bump for myself; that said, the general insane vibe of the app, plus the fact that the corporate email for Bump’s parent company, amo, is love@amo.co, has creeped me out enough to make me think they may not be quite fastidious enough with my geodata.
The Week Ahead: Tim Cook buys whichever outlet publishes the friendliest Tim Cook retrospective article this week.
