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. Today, culture reporter Joshua Bote contributes. This week: OpenAI employees are calling Anthropic a cult; an “ABG networking event” is mostly networking and very little ABG; and Peter Thiel joins the Blue Man Group.
This is Manic Monday.
Do you believe in Claude?
Is Anthropic a cult? A trending essay posted by X personality and OpenAI employee Roon argues yes. He opens the essay: “It is a literal and useful description of Anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships Claude” and “is run in significant part by Claude.” He goes on to posit that Claude even selects new Anthropic hires, staffing the company with people susceptible to joining the cult of Claude in the first place. I’ll admit, Anthropic does have some culty vibes — I’ve even called it as much in past articles — but I can’t in good faith consider any such critique lobbed by an OpenAI employee as a neutral observation. With Musk v. Altman underway and an IPO on the horizon, every OpenAI employee is incentivized to help paint their competitors as creepy religious fanatics and themselves as logical normies by comparison.
ABGs LOL at B2B SaaS
Last weekend, three startup girlies hosted a networking event for ABGs — or Asian Baby Girls, a subculture of young, rebellious Asian women who have tattoos, piercings, bleached hair, and a social calendar full of raves. The Partiful invite had promised “makeup tips, gaming the system, looksmaxxing, GRWM, make abg content, X/Twitter farming,” but the actual event appears to have flopped, drawing only a meager crowd gathered of poorly dressed, uncool tech people, zero fake lashes in sight.
Tasteslop, the dominant aesthetic of our times
As the vice grip of corporate interests continues to squeeze every last drop of profit out of everything beautiful and interesting, the tech world has become obsessed with the concept of taste. When AI can write, code, draw, educate, therapize, romance, bully, whatever, founders are desperate to differentiate their middling startups by leveraging coolness. Unfortunately, when you’re in the AI business, slop seeps into whatever you do; enter the concept of tasteslop. Since the concepts of both taste and slop are subjective and nebulous, an essay titled “tasteslop” by brand strategist Emily Segal made the rounds this weekend. Segal helpfully defines tasteslop in three ways: 1) “Slop made out of things considered to be tasteful,” like an AI-generated moodboard, 2) “tasteful things deployed in service of slop,” like those minimal ChatGPT billboards or Renaissance-style images on SaaS websites, and 3) “recurrent tech discourse about the significance of taste,” which of course includes her own essay — and this blurb, I guess.
Former kings of their domains
The nostalgists of X are loving this thread of corporate domains that used to be random personal websites. Annie Rauwerda, a writer and collector of internet ephemera who runs the popular account @depthsofwikipedia, rounded up some great examples: OpenAI.com used to belong to some dude named Glenn; Slack.com was once a simple HTML blog called “David’s Wacky Web Page” that featured photos of those giant chef dog statues that once graced JFK Dr.; Midjourney.com hosted the blog of a woman named Shannon, navigated midlife; OnlyFans.com was a modest music forum, while DoorDash.com was a porn site.
Shades of blue
X has been gently flooded with images of Peter Thiel, edited so his skin looks somewhere in between Doctor Manhattan and the Hulk. It is because of a woman named Woah Vicky, who asked a question that launched a hundred photo edits among Silicon Valley tech guys: “What is peter teal email??” (Get it?) Woah Vicky is the performer name of Victoria Waldrip, who first gained internet infamy in 2018 by Blackfishing and fighting with the “cash me outside” girl. (A couple of years ago, she lied about getting kidnapped in Nigeria as a bit.) Woah Vicky has resurfaced a bit in the mainstream consciousness, mostly for strangely profound musings on X. She has also been recently spotted with Clavicular, who himself is affiliated with Peter Thiel. Which brings us back to the Teal of it all. The post went viral, images of blue-green Thiel are softening this real-life supervillain into a meme, and there is a non-zero chance that Woah Vicky will get Thiel’s patronage out of this. The right-wing media ecosystem continues apace. — JB
The week ahead: Woah Vicky is named a Thiel Fellow.
