🟧 Palantir made a chore coat
Tech tastewashing & more links
One Thing is moving its home base to Brooklyn next week! Forgive any disruption in service. Turns out going through every item you own is a great way to think about what you actually like 🟧 This week, surveillance chic & tech taste-washing 🟧 Coachella’s soulless aesthetic 🟧 a new photography museum in Rome…
Things of the week
Global steakhouse: Bettina Makalintal writes about the restaurant genre that has conquered the world and become internationalized in turn. Now you can choose a steakhouse sub-genre: Korean, Filipino, Caribbean, Mexican…
Cyberdecks are the new Pokédexes: The “cyberdeck” is a new DIY movement for hacked-together, portable computer devices that look like something out of Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokémon. They’re a rebellion against the tech broligarchy.
Rome’s first photography museum is opening in a former slaughterhouse in Testaccio.
Coachella just happened; you might have seen it streaming on YouTube instead of dancing on a muddy field. Dazed has a good essay about how “soulless” the Coachella aesthetic has become, which might apply equally to the general glossiness of the indie music scene at the moment.
Coachella fashion has aged like a landfill indie band. What was once fun now feels stale and cringe. Each April, celebrities and influencers are helicoptered into the desert with full glam squads – not a splash of mud in sight. The process is smooth and frictionless, with every moment optimised to look good on screen. Each outfit is meticulously curated to appear free-spirited, which obviously misses the point, and the result is a largely soulless facsimile of festival fashion.
The problem of Palantir’s chore coat
by Kyle Chayka
Palantir, a global digital surveillance / AI company that assists things like ICE raids and military targeting, broke a very niche corner of the internet with this tweet of its forthcoming chore coats. For a straightforwardly evil, para-governmental, secretive tech company, Palantir sure has been doing a lot of merch drops. You can show off your allegiance / fandom with baseball caps, hoodies, or American flag patches. But something about the chore coat was particularly triggering, probably because it so closely adopts the 2020s hipster / Brooklyn dad / indie graphic designer aesthetic and inverts or weaponizes its values. Though One Thing has been pro-chore coat for a long, long time, this is one chore coat I would not wear.
Email and Photoshop / Figma workers have been appropriating workwear style for quite a while now. Carhartt canvas jackets and pants with hammer loops were the prime examples of the digital creative class’s attempt to look more “artisanal” in the wake of late-2000s / early 2010s lumberjack vibes. After mechanic and barn coats came the vogue for slimmer, cleaner French work coats — the Bleu de Travail — worn by waiters and chefs and shopkeepers. So every chore coat might be stolen valor, sure, but clicking away at a creative agency while looking like a Parisian waiter is very different than working for a major military contractor and sporting its logo on your breast pocket. The Palantir drop denatures the chore coat, turns it toxic and unappealing. You are not doing chores when refining a model to determine who gets deported.
AI companies are desperately in search of new branding for themselves, as marketing becomes a major differentiator between purveyors of AI models that are very similar to each other in the eyes of any normal human consumer. Branding will make the difference between which company is Microsoft and which is Apple. The designers at AI-forward companies are grabbing on to high-touch, faux-analog, high-texture aesthetics in order to seem like they’re doing something other than hoovering up, digesting, and spitting back out the entire history of human art and culture without compensating artists or writers. Notion also produced a chore coat; General Intelligence just released an embroidered, flower-bedecked baseball cap; and Anthropic already did Claude pop-ups at coffee shops with branded hats and notebooks. (Anthropic is also hosting a party at Cannes film festival with Graydon Carter.)
This all falls under my phrase “tastewashing,” which I brought up in a recent New Yorker column. Tasteful styles and symbols are being deployed to give an aura of quality to products whose mechanisms and values are extremely abstract and incomprehensible. We can’t understand a data center or the eighth release of a “new model” this month, but we can understand a chore coat or a baseball cap. I think AI companies are going to sponsor a boom in pro-AI cultural production, and this kind of fashion is just the beginning. I’m not going to let them take chore coats away from me.
Yeah! They colonized my em dash. Enough already!
good luck with the move! i recently made the same one from dc to bk, but hope you continue featuring and recommending dc things! i love that brooklyn isn’t center of the universe for one substack at least lol