TR.BIZ: 4.23.2024

From Palantir swag to Japan's falling culture clout, this is your late-mid-week check-in 💫

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re going over a new TikTok AI scare, Palantir’s cursed swag, a breakout kombucha trend, and a meme about sentences.

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📍 Watch This: A guide to Trend Report: Trend Report™

If you missed it, this past Tuesday I went live for an hour to give a walkthrough of the new Trend Report: Trend Report™ Q1 report: give it a watch here. Forgive my being a touch low energy and frazzled, as my Tuesday was crazy and I was very half-brained for-the-camera — but I did it! And that’s what counts. Grab the quarterly report here, which will give you access to tomorrow’s office hours with moi 💋

📲 Tech Talk: TikTok’s AI backlash

As if pro-Trump AI people, AI Blackface, and AI shows weren’t enough for TikTok, the platform is pushing new AI features that use your videos to teach its AI. The catch? It can only be opted out of by turning off the feature on each individual video. This is inspiring a big backlash as creator after creator after creator after creator after creator are warning people to take action, that we are being “cast” in the platform’s AI to replace creators with fake AI versions of them. It has inspired viral videos of people going through years of videos to opt-out of AI remixing. This may much ado about nothing, but it certainly signals yet again that people are 1.) not interested in AI being forced onto them without consent and 2.) the general fatigue with the tech as 3.) real humans are feeling like they’re being replaced, illustrating a macro-capitalist trend of people far down in supply chains of industries like fashion and tech having felt like this for decades. It’s to be seen how this tech will be used (Or used against us.) but the conversation says enough: people are over this shit, yet another signal that the tools of tech may be beloved but the culture of it is very unwelcome. Speaking of…

👠 Aesthetically Pleasing: Palantir’s swag drop

Just when you thought you’d heard enough about tech bros and taste, the bottom continues to fall out as Palantir now wants to be cool too. Yes, Palantir — known ghoul Peter Thiel’s AI war machine, that this week went on a technofascist tirade — is trying to enter into the fashion game (??) by offering swag as another entry point into culture that builds on their video game and sports strategy. Two things are happening here: first, as GQ reported yesterday, there is a core line of shit that is a military industrial version of Off-White that features shirts and hoodies that say shit like “DOMINATE” and “SILICON VALLEY DROPOUTS”; second, they’re dropping a chore coat, effectively nuking the formerly working class European garb that was adopted by the American-international creative class to effectively dismantle the garment’s appeal. The latter rightfully sparked a culture vulture conversation, which Max Berlinger put best, noting, “never beating the ‘no taste’ argument i fear.” But zoom out: this is just another way fascists enact culture pushes to soften their brand, as AI pictures of Hailey Bieber posing in a fake Palantir ad swirls, continuing a drumbeat of rage bait-y lifestyle branding shared by larger evil entities (Tucker Carlson, OpenAI, Claude). I’m tempted to write about this further this weekend as it’s certainly a theme of the decade when we zoom out and see how someone like Charli XCX masquerades as “alt” while being mainstream: this is another example of “that,| representing how the vocabulary of “cool” like the literal vocabulary of the left is now being sucked up, colonized, and spat back to advance their oppressive ideals. “We want millions of people wearing Palantir merch around the world,” Palantir’s ghoulish head of strategic engagement, Eliano A. Younes, told GQ. The future is bleak, and it’s successfully stealing fashion too: another score on the board for Trend Report: Trend Report™.

🗺️ Localized: Is Japan about to culture crash?