Mega unrelated but I’m already on a pill so WHO is responsible for the terrible Metrograph website redesign?????? I gotta click through every day to see what you guys got on??????????????????????

Over the weekend, Twitter/X was inundated with posts about the Claude/Anthropic pop-up at the Air Mail shop in West Village, which basically amounted to a lot of orgasmic swooning over Anthropic’s “anti-slop”“aesthetics” (which many fans compared to being on par with Apple) and the absolute F-tier visual pun of handing out baseball caps with the word “thinking” embroidered on them. But you would have thought Steve Jobs himself reincarnated and was doing a meet-and-greet judging by the buzz, which even by 2025 standards wherein marketing is the only art form we are incentivized to develop opinions on, rose to Jesus-lives!! levels of adulation.

Where to even begin……………………………

Honestly I would love to simply bang out a line or two about how this campaign seems like the dumbest, clanker-brained dogshit I have ever seen in my life so far (which unfortunately means that it will likely be the least dumb, clanker-brained shit we will eventually be forced to see in our lifetimes) and call it an easy day’s dunk. But that’s low-hanging Honeycrisp.

After all, my personal disdain for AI, or more specifically, the strain of AI mania that exults in a total obliteration of human creativity and likely an entire labor class (not to mention basic natural resources), is quite literally vocational; I’m not of the class of builders & believers who stand to make a zillion dollars before age 27 off this latest tech bubble, nor do I desire to learn very much more than I have to about the technology itself, which will probably in hindsight resemble the stubbornness of every other atavist who’s fallen out of relevance throughout history. (Besides, I do like those automatic email response generators now don’t I???)

It’s almost too easy, too expected to call a bunch of nerds making bad merch, well, nerds making bad merch—or to try to out-do bluechecks in somersaults of PR criticism. And yet this whole thing offends me down to my ribosomes. Frankly, the actual workings of AI and how it can probably help heart surgeons do heart surgery as easily as it can make videos of meaningless pixels that will scramble my children’s sense of consciousness are not terribly interesting to me; if you want a robot thingy that will do your job faster so you can Netflix más, that’s your business, not mine. Do the thing you have to do without some childish desire to be, what, liked as a brand? Grow up and stop wasting our precious, precious attention trying to convince the rest of us that your robot thingy is cool, actually (or less evil than the others), or that Tech Company Maybe Nice. And try to do us the favor of not clogging up our closets and visual field with embroidered Urban Outfitters deadstock; god at least make it Loro Piana for the flex??? I thought you wannabes at least have money????

Besides, I maintain that it is the distinct purview of writers and artists and actual non-baseball-cap-enabled thinkers to get our dunks in where we can, in the beautiful city of New York and larger project of America wherein cultural capital is still not something that can be entirely bought and stripped for parts yet; thus being able to categorically reject an AI company’s attempt to be “cool” and “community-minded” is probably the closest thing to artistic freedom we will have in this decade. So let me reiterate, actually, that I think this shit is so fucking dorky, and anyone who is excited about the “aesthetics” of an AI company reveals a soul so malnourished from lack of exposure to basic facts of experience, sensation, context and yes, TASTE, that a semblance of a gesture toward meaning activates some kind of rhapsodic trip-wire within. Oh my sweet children. I can’t believe you think that’s beauty.

Obviously, the real cultural cachet of working in tech has disappeared—listen, you’re not getting up in the morning and going to work at your FAANGhaus because you actually think you’re, what, “connecting people” and “improving the world” anymore lol. Meanwhile, the office kombucha tap has figuratively and literally run dry. So what’s the point again? What’s keeping you from risking grubby, unoptimizable failure and trying to make books and films and sweaters and gardens and restaurants and block associations and skyscrapers and paintings and plays and poems and cocktails and songs and parties and generally wasting shareholder value like everyone else in your so-called permanent underclass? (Literally I would respect it more if you clankers made like the much more normal financial villains and just accepted the cold, naked transactions between you vs. the rest of the world that you hope will tip you over on the side of invulnerability when The Big Quake comes, or at least imbue you with some nice memories of ordering omakase and flying Delta One before it hits).

You don’t know, or you can’t live with the nakedness of what you do all day, so instead you try to claw back some of that sexiness ,courtesy of whatever lessons you’ve gotten summarized for you from some errant Wharton deck, with a minor in Corporate Memphis, because godfuckingdammit it can’t just be about the money and pwning your enemies and draining the world of all aspects of that annoying, frustrating, inefficient humanity of ours can it????? No, baby, you want the same basic shit we want: a sense of belonging and respect and delight—sometimes yes achievable by wearing a little thing that other people are also wearing; we sometimes call those people friends, sweetheart, not your plastic narc necklace—and sure, let’s just admit it, there’s also a tiny trace of that Machiavellian satisfaction of getting other people’s priceless attention, god there’s truly nothing like it, is there. It makes you feel like a wizard king, and you cannot understand why they won’t just shut up and let you be wizard king. If only they understood the incredible satisfaction of being able to conjure an entire community—no wait, an entire universe—by merely by stringing together a combination of symbols on a screen somewhere. The power that has. Well, you don’t have to tell us. If only you knew that a simpler technology for that already exists. Personally, I recommend Moleskine.