January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.
News / tech
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1 min read
Record Quarter
Read more . . . →The water’s at his chest and the glass is still raised. Promotion material. Suit, tie, champagne flute, floodwater. He’s sitting in what used to be a corner office and is now a wading pool with a city view. The documents are floating. The shelves are half-submerged. He’s toasting anyway. This is the energy of every press release that reads “despite headwinds” and then announces a stock buyback. The building is filling with water and the man with the glass thinks he’s in a jacuzzi. Or he knows exactly what’s happening and he’s celebrating because his floor is the last one...
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1 min read
Faithful Servant
Read more . . . →It got the playlist right for twenty years. Of course they gave it the mic. We automate the errands, then the shopping, then apparently the part where someone who loved you stands up and tries not to cry. The thing at the podium spent a decade answering questions about the weather and setting timers for pasta. Now it’s got the hardest room in the building and it’s smiling because it always smiles. It does not pause or lose its place or say something too honest at the wrong moment. It delivers exactly what was asked, on time, to spec. If...
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1 min read
Cooling System
Read more . . . →The river used to belong to the town. Now it belongs to the cloud. A colossal black data center towers over a small town, and a transparent straw the width of a highway jams into the river beside it, visibly draining it. The houses below are the size of lint. Someone signed off on this, someone zoned it, and someone’s vacation photos are now cooled by what used to be a fishing spot. The town gets a tax abatement and a lower water table. The data center gets to keep your cloud storage from overheating. The straw is the honest...
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1 min read
Locked Out
Read more . . . →You used to just have a key. Soaked through, standing on his own front porch, staring at a door that used to let him in. Where the doorknob should be there’s a massive blue SUBSCRIBE button. The porch light is on. His stuff is in there. His couch, his bed, his dry clothes. All behind a paywall that wasn’t there yesterday morning. The subscription model has eaten software, music, newspapers, fitness, and now, apparently, shelter. He can’t even be mad at the right person because there is no person, just a button and a terms of service update he didn’t...
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1 min read
Thirsty
Read more . . . →The cloud needs to drink. Aerial shot of a small town and its water tower, connected by a massive blue bendy straw directly into a windowless data center. The straw bends over the tower like a kid finishing a milkshake, except the milkshake is the municipal water supply. Houses line the road below, small and white, very much dependent on the same water that’s currently being piped into a building with more air conditioning than the rest of the zip code combined. Every search query has a water cost. Every chatbot answer has a gulp. The town gets whatever drips...
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1 min read
Same Wagon
Read more . . . →Same wagon, different century. The bottles even look the same. The snake-oil salesman never left. He got a TED Talk, swapped the wagon for a keynote stage, and replaced “MIRACLE TONIC” with “AI POWERED.” The crowd in this painting has the same expression as the one at CES: half skeptical, half reaching for their wallets. It does not matter that the product does the same nothing it did in 1885. The banner is large enough to read from the back of the crowd and the man is confident enough to hold up the bottle like it cures cancer. The moustache...
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1 min read
Valued Customers
Read more . . . →The smiley face tested better than the cameras did. Six cameras on the ceiling and a smiley face on the banner, which tells you everything about who the message is really for. The shoppers underneath keep walking. The words “Smile, You Are Data” hang across the corridor in corporate blue, cheerful and completely ignored. It says “we see you” the way a terms-of-service page says “we respect your privacy”: out loud, in writing, while doing the opposite. Somewhere a server is logging footsteps, dwell times, and how long you stared at the mannequin in the window. The banner had the...
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1 min read
Perks
Read more . . . →The table stays. You don’t. Two guys playing ping pong in one of those offices with a dark accent wall, pendant lighting, and a kombucha tap you’ve seen in every Series B sizzle reel. The screen on the wall behind them says Layoffs 3pm. Two words. The ball is mid-air. Neither player has looked up. This is the whole pitch deck in one photo: the perks are real, the culture is real, and the screen announcing that half the floor is gone by dinner is also real, mounted on the same bracket as the Sonos. The ball is still in...
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1 min read
Surge Pricing
Read more . . . →The rain started three minutes ago and the price already doubled. Capitalism doesn’t sleep, it just checks the forecast. He’s not even pretending. The guy is literally standing there flipping the sign while the customer watches, mid-downpour, holding an umbrella he presumably bought at the old rate. The whole transaction is happening in real time. No algorithm, no dynamic pricing team, no quarterly earnings call to justify it. Just a man, a sign, and the exact moment you need something. Every ride-share app on your phone does this with more steps and a loading animation.
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1 min read
Product Launch
Read more . . . →It’s a brick. On a pillow. And they’re clapping. The crowd is losing its mind over a construction brick on a velvet pillow. Mouths open, hands up, the full keynote hysteria. A man in a turtleneck holds it like he’s presenting a relic. Nobody has asked what it does because nobody in the front row was sent here to ask that. The pillow cost more than the product and the product is a brick and the brick just closed a Series B. Pre-orders ship Q3, the waitlist is four months long, and the brick does not charge wirelessly or otherwise....
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