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It feels like the early days of COVID, where every day was a new reality. Maskers became anti-maskers. Vaxxers became anti-vaxxers. The scientific community was in the process of being pulled into politics, but the sides weren’t clear yet.

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These last few months, I have begun to hate using the internet more and more. The reason is AI. Well, that may be too broad. The reason is chatbots in particular. In contrast to generative AI, which has gotten better and better, the chatbots have gotten worse and worse. Not only are they worse, the downstream effect of their adoption has been the total destruction of Google. (I’ve been banging this drum for a while now.)

When I’m working and need to do fast fact checks like “What year did X happen?” or “What is the title of person Y?” I do not get routed to fast answers in milliseconds. Instead I wait for Google or Claude or Chat-GPT to tinker for a few seconds and sometimes more than a few seconds. Then I need to scan read 500-800 words of superfluous text.

With more complicated questions like tracking down a specific study or essay or figure or quote, I often have to ask further questions because the chatbot has summarized a quote or essay rather than given me actual quotes. Oftentimes, I have to ask it for the sources themselves so I can go to the webpage and read what was actually written or said. Sometimes I have to double back again because the link has no reference to what the chatbot summarized.

The chatbot will offer a milquetoast explanation for why it is constantly wrong, constantly hallucinating, and impediment to my work rather than a help.

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The singularity is here, so we're told. Artificial intelligence is now sophisticated enough to begin improving itself, unlocking a feedback loop of ever-accelerating progress and growth. This is how superhuman artificial intelligence will be built. Again, so we're told.

Over the summer, Sam Altman and Elon Musk declared the singularity had begun. Stripe, the digital payments processor, even gave it a start date: January 1, 2026.

We're in the phase of the AI hype cycle I would like to call crying singularity.

This won't be the last time a tech founder announces to investors or their favorite podcast host that something momentous is underway. I don't doubt that something very big is happening.

But declaring that the singularity is underway is a historic pronouncement. The singularity is on par with the Industrial and Neolithic Revolutions in its implications. These were events so transformative that it's difficult for us to conceptualize life before modern technology—let alone agriculture. Each revolution was a Rubicon. There's no looking back. I mean that literally. The pre-industrial world could not support the billions of people alive on Earth today.

So you would think the American public might care. Seemingly, they don't. The story has been buried by public backlash against data centers, the settlement of a lawsuit alleging that Facebook and Instagram were designed to harm children, and an online spat between the Federal Trade Commission and Y Combinator over H-1B visas.

Tech claims they are building a new world and Americans shrug.

There are a few reasons why.

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rihannastalgia

/riˌanəˈstaldʒə/ noun

1. Longing for Rihanna’s 2010s pop reign, and for the decade it dominated. “Rihannastalgia is a precursor to the coming wave of 2010s nostalgia.”—over text today with a friend

Origin: Portmanteau of Rihanna + nostalgia.

nontechnical north

/nɒnˈtɛknɪk(ə)l nɔːθ/ noun

1. The northern San Francisco neighborhoods (the Marina, Cow Hollow, and Pacific Heights) where finance and marketing professionals live. “Those in venture, product, media etc. inevitably live in the Nontechnical North. The few engineers here are aesthetes capable of eye contact (spiritually nontechnical).”

Origin: Coined by Neall Seth on X, 2026.

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this time it's different…

Whenever someone insists that this time is different, I'm immediately skeptical.

The AI bubble is a case in point. Insiders insist: THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT! It's not a bubble, but for the most part, those making this argument are talking their book.

They're invested. They're biased.

But for the sake of argument, let's say this time isn't different. The general contours of AI look like the dot-com boom of the nineties, when companies like Pets.com famously landed landed investment wildly disproportionate to any revenue they could credibly deliver.

From a distance, it's obvious that the investors' "irrational exuberance" (as then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan put it) was not a question of if the internet would be profitable, but when.

If the same principle applies to AI (i.e. the bubble is not a question of if these companies are profitable, but when they will be profitable), we should prepare for another market "correction" (i.e. stock market crash).

And with AI accounting for something like 30% of GDP growth, the consequences will be devastating.

who will be blamed?

Tech.

As I wrote yesterday, the techlash is already in its second round, this time with the focus being on data centers rather than social media. I knew tech was unpopular, but I was honestly surprised to find out just how badly they are polling.

With the Democrats running against data centers, and Republicans threatening to do the same unless tech can convince the public their businesses will benefit the communities that house them, a bubble popping seems all the more likely.

How can Big AI build out the infrastructure they need to achieve profitability on a reasonable timetable if the general public is in opposition? Was this level of opposition priced into the huge investments already made into AI?

I doubt it.

so what happens next

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Yesterday, Axios reported on a memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It seems data centers are so wildly unpopular, support for them is now a political kiss of death. From Axios:

AI is as popular as nuclear waste. Incredible.

The memo was addressed not only to Republicans, but also to executives at AI companies. The subtext is clear: if you want our political support, you have to generate the public support. Directly from the NRSC memo:

There's no exaggeration here. The polls for local data center development are shockingly bad. See the graphic below from Heatmap.

And if you want to cross-reference the results of a climate journalism media outlet with a more neutral polling organization, the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania published similar findings a little over a week ago:

Interestingly, even though heavy AI users are less likely to believe AI will have a negative impact on the U.S., they oppose the construction of data centers—necessary for the rollout of AI—just as much as non-users.

the second techlash (redux)

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In San Francisco, where the flex is now reflex, young tech employees pose for a photo. Maybe they're wearing formal wear. Ill-fitting tuxedos and pashminas frame faces that look too young and too hydrated to have ever smoked a cigarette. Or maybe they're trying to be trendy. They show off corporate merch inspired by streetwear from five or six years ago, not realizing how dated the references are. For the basic, Silicon Valley sweater sets (branded hoodie over branded tee). For the more adventurous, maybe the sold-out OpenAI socks or the limited-edition Claude thinking cap. They hope people will think they work for a trillion-dollar company, even if they don't.

The photo, like everything they do, is part of a grander status-seeking strategy.

It will inevitably have an effusive caption. "Look how hot and cool and smart everyone is!" "We are awesome!" They are attempting to mog, but trying to do it nicely. The tone combines the braggadocio of Andrew Tate with the earnest inclusivity of an HR lady. It's stilted. Can you be elitist and egalitarian? But then again, it is a corporate photo-op.

At least they don't call each other "rock stars."

These sorts of images really should stay in the group chat, and if there is some pressing reason to share, keep them on LinkedIn, or as a last resort, if you're truly desperate for the attention, a walled garden like Instagram or Snapchat. But since this photo was taken in San Francisco, no caution will be exercised. It will be posted on the cruelest of all social media platforms, X.

Tech Twitter still exists, even if the name is now anachronistic. The poster hopes to generate a respectable number of impressions within his local scene. Ironically, the technologically adept locals who hang out on that part of the platform are often blind to the animal spirits that run wild online. They know how X works, but they don't know people. When the post goes viral and users from outside Silicon Valley's sandbox begin piling on, the replies give them a brutal introduction to the average internet user.

The average internet user isn't a friendly nerd.

Girls who insist they are hot are derided as ugly. Parties that insist they are cool are mocked as lame. Ivy League graduates are reminded that many of their fellow alumni are seemingly illiterate. Reddit posters brag about their high TC (total compensation), only to have their low SMV (sexual market value) shoved in their faces. Eyes roll every time a new day-in-the-life video is posted to TikTok, detailing the snacks eaten, meetings attended, and naps taken at yet another open-plan corporate office. Do these professionals even do any work at their fake email jobs? The internet wonders.

These are the strivercels. And the rage they elicit and the vicious comments they receive whenever one of their posts goes viral is the Strivercel Effect.

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Los Angeles is the new Detroit and San Francisco is the new San Francisco. By which I mean, the original boomtown is booming once again. Gone are the days of doom-loop discourse. And as with every new fountain of wealth, the courtiers and consultants are carpetbagging to the Bay.

They say, during the Gold Rush, the people that sold the shovels did better than the miners who dug with them. I wonder if that will be true today…

I don't know anyone selling shovels. (I suppose keeping with the metaphor, shovels would be chips today.) But I do know quite a lot of people selling status services: art advising, styling, decorating and designing. And I've heard stories of a lucrative market for etiquette classes.

In so many ways, our current tech boom is the inverse of the last. Feel-good grand narratives are in short supply. Facebook is no longer trying to connect the world. Rather, AI companies caution that they may be building Satan in a black box. There's no Zuckerberg-style Revenge of the Nerds middle-finger antics this round. Instead, tech seems, for the first time, anxious about how both institutional America (i.e. the government) and the American public-at-large receive them.

This may be as simple as the fact that this round's boom doesn't seem to be translating into prosperity for the masses. Or, more worryingly, that the general distrust and dislike of the tech industry will make building the infrastructure necessary for the roll-out impossible. You need community buy-in to build new energy infrastructure, data centers, and chip fabricators.

This round, Silicon Valley is trying to learn from past mistakes. They imagined themselves outsiders, disruptors. But now they seem to want to be let into the fold. They're looking beyond the tech industry bubble at the status signifiers that enamor, well, everyone else.

Despite its post-Google-bus reputation, San Francisco isn't the worst place to figure this out. Not so long ago, tech was not the dominant industry in the city. San Francisco has a patrician tradition dating back to its once-upon-a-time status as the largest city on the West Coast. In the nineties, the stereotypical San Franciscan was not a software engineer. The city was defined by Beat poets, hippie artists, gay sailors, and old-money California families.

There seems to be the desire to harken back to this, to remind people of the San Francisco of Pacific Heights rather than SoMa. That’s why everyone is going pygmalion mode. Like Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play, Pygmalion, they hope a more refined affect will convince people Silicon Valley is up to the task of guiding us through whatever the AI boom might bring: economic catastrophe, the singularity, the apocalypse…

pygmalion mode

/pɪɡˈmeɪ.li.ən moʊd/ noun

1. The attempt by those from lower classes to affect the manners, diction, and taste of a higher caste — class passing as self-transformation, made newly conspicuous by the AI boom. Over dinner in Marseille: "Everyone in San Francisco is in pygmalion mode."

Origin: From George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913).

Not to be confused with: Pygmalion effect: psychology term for high expectations raising another’s performance (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968).

Other neologisms I've encountered recently. Some words are newer than others:

dark whimsymaxxing

/dɑːrk ˈwɪm.ziˌmæk.sɪŋ/ noun

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The Shift to Vibes or Nick Catucci's 'vibe shift' roundtable

It's been five years since I diagnosed the vibe shift, and in that time I've been approached innumerable times about what is the new vibe. Were we in a vibecession? Were the vibes shifting left and against the right? Was there a Kamala vibe shift? An anti-Trump vibe shift? Had woke returned, shifting the vibes once and for all?

Something I've noticed over these last five years is that vibes, like presidential elections, happen at the margins — and the shifts, like the political narratives that come in every election's wake, are attempts at making the marginal general. Trump may have won the popular and the electoral votes in November 2024, but did his 1.5% margin of victory really give him a sweeping mandate?

The big swings, like Reagan's blowout election in 1984, or the death of disco, just don't happen anymore. Even vulgar decade-ism feels inadequate to describe our present — though this may be more an artifact of our ability to see clearly congealed decades retrospectively, not when we are in the midst of them.

Vibes have become our preferred unit of measurement because they work well to describe a culture that is in the process of fragmenting. Vibe shift worked well to describe the moment millennials handed the baton to Gen Z as the stewards of youth culture because Gen Z will likely be the last generation to remember any semblance of a mainstream, just as millennials are the last generation to remember a time before the internet.

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This is the way a trend ends. This is the way a trend ends. This is the way a trend ends. Not with a bang but a whimper…

Today OpenAI’s merch arm, Supply Co. released what we can only hope is the last in a long line of attempts at merging the Silicon Valley sweater set (T-shirt and hoodie) with the hypebeast culture of streetwear. It's all very 2010s—but…

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Sometimes I sense an exhaustion with the neologism Olympics. Portmanteaus, Germanic-inflected compounds, digital gobbledygook, and meme suffixes—most recently -maxxing and -slop.

And yet…the language engine that is the Internet chugs on.

Some of the eye-rolling stems from a desire for more thoughtful discourse. Something the academy has not been providing for twenty-some-odd years. And no, Substack is not providing this either.

Some of it stems from living in an era where the median age ticks ever upward and the number of young Americans declines. Perhaps rightfully, forty-year-olds resent the idea they should have to keep abreast of teenage slang.

Slang is supposed to annoy people. Its linguistic purpose is to create boundaries between subcultures, stymying outsiders from understanding what is being said.

But it’s also supposed to be fun. The friction is part of the pleasure.

In that vein, here are some new words I heard on a recent trip to New York.

yachtstitute

/ˈjɒtstɪˌtuːt/ noun · informal, often derogatory

1. A person — typically a young woman — who cultivates the company of wealthy men aboard yachts and at attendant events (regattas, film festivals, resort seasons) in exchange for luxury, access, or payment. “How many yachtstitutes did you see at Cannes?”—my friend Lauren at Sant Ambroeus

2. (broadly) Anyone whose glamour is contingent on proximity to someone else’s boat. “He wasn’t crew and he wasn’t a guest — just a yachtstitute in good linen.”

plural yachtstitutes · (often used attributively: yachtstitute economy, yachtstitute season)

Origin: Blend of yacht + prostitute, following the productive slang pattern of -stitute coinages. Popularized in tabloid and social-media commentary on the Mediterranean superyacht circuit. First known use: 21st century (informal).

Synonyms: yacht girl, deckhand-adjacent (euph.), charter companion

Related forms: yachtstitution (noun)

wordslip

/ˈwɜːrdslɪp/ noun

1. The process by which a word’s mistaken use — a malapropism, a hypercorrection, an inference drawn from its parts rather than its history — hardens into a standard sense, eventually displacing or rivalling the original. ”Gen Alpha’s new definition of preppy is a classic wordslip.”—my friend Paul walking home from another Paul’s Casablanca.

2. The resulting word, especially one caught mid-transition, meaning two contradictory things at once depending on the speaker’s age. ”Nonplussed is a live wordslip: to one generation stunned, to the next unbothered.”

Origin: Coined compound, word + slip, in the sense “small inadvertent error.” No attested usage.

Related forms: wordslipped (adjective, of a term already relocated); wordslippage (noun)

Examples:

• literally — hyperbole hardening into an intensifier, until the word answers to its own antonym.

• nonplussed — reanalysis from the parts (non- read as “not bothered”), producing a sense opposite to “bewildered.”

• prep — wholesale re-referencing: a class marker hollowed out and refilled with a color palette, by a cohort that never held the original referent.

narcglasses

/ˈnɑːrkˌɡlæsɪz/ noun · plural, informal

1. Camera-equipped smart glasses, especially Snap’s Specs and Meta’s Glasses. “Does anyone even know if the narcglasses are on?”—discussing the Kylie Jenner campaign for her new Meta collaboration.

Origin: Coined compound of narc (informant, narcotics officer; by extension, anyone who surveils and reports) + glasses, on the model of beer goggles.

brand victim

/ˈbrænd ˌvɪktɪm/ noun

1. An update of fashion victim for an era when the allegiance has spread past clothing to the entire field of consumption: a person whose identity is organized around the brands they buy — not merely overdressed but over-affiliated, performing membership in Erewhon, Stanley, Aesop, Rhode, Labubu as a substitute for taste or self.

2. (broadly) The consumer as unpaid marketing: someone who does the brand’s advertising for free, mistaking loyalty for identity. “The queue outside the drop was fifty brand victims deep before sunrise.”

plural brand victims · (often attributive: brand-victim economy)

Origin: Modeled on fashion victim, the term attributed to Oscar de la Renta for a person unable to recognize the boundaries of style — at risk, in the classic formulation, of becoming a “walking billboard.”

notes on brand victims

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It struck me last night: social media has lost the ability to generate mass hysteria.

It ended sometime in 2021, as the pandemic was winding down and I declared a vibe shift.

Discourse has rushed around, chasing after new social and technological developments—but the masses seem nonplussed in both the modern sense of the word and according to the traditional definition.

A quiver moves through the social body and then abruptly…stops.

Remember:

• wokeness?

• MRNA vaccines?

• social media censorship?

• misinformation?

• crypto?

• NFTs?

We’re now in the midst of the same cycle with AI and its corollary slop. It’s all discursive feints. And every one misses the mark.

Everyone is in a rush to declare Year Zero. But no one seems to care.

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Last week, I released a timeline tracing the genealogy of prep. A comment from a subscriber alerted me to a new usage of the word among Gen Alpha—a new term now used for middle schoolers and younger. (I've already written that I’m not convinced our current generational schematic is correct—but let's go with it for the sake of this post.)

I asked Claude about the new Gen Alpha usage of the word and it replied with a cache of TikToks from the last two or three years: befuddled Gen X parents, middle school teachers, and memeologists all detailing Preppy Nation. The aesthetic is neon pink, frilly, features ubiquitous smiley faces and has a fascination with Stanley cups. It's counter-positioned to emo, which does feel in line with preppy's original meaning. In the eighties, preppiness was juxtaposed to punk and goth. In the nineties and 2000s, the same dichotomy prevailed but in a more productized suburban setting: Hot Topic vs. Abercrombie & Fitch.

If I were to add Preppy Nation to the chart, it would descend from Lilly Pulitzer and Abercrombie & Fitch, with a dose of Golden Goose and Love Shack Fancy—the tacky post–Gossip Girl brands that dominated the tween wardrobes of Upper East Side private girls some years back.

The tension between tacky and tasteful has always defined preppiness.

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