“Well, look in the mirror, friend. Because we’re all cultural talking heads now.” @AJ_Odyssey with some thoughts on the Colbert fallout 👇

NEW: The People Who Think They Were Born Into the Wrong Race You may have seen Donna Briggs on social media: the platinum blonde “manifestation” influencer in head-to-toe Lilly Pulitzer. On its face, there’s nothing particularly unique about Donna: #LiveinAbundance, the universe provides — all the usual affirmations. Except... something about her felt off. And so, the internet “did its thing,” and people started digging. Someone found old videos: Briggs interviewing Mary J. Blige and Tyler Perry on the radio. Same name, almost the same face... but with one major difference. Briggs was a different race. The influencer wasn’t a white woman in these videos. She was black. Briggs says she just stopped tanning, but the receipts say otherwise — photos spanning years, former colleagues and family confused, a long, and rather successful life. These types of performances have deep roots. “Grey Owl” packed 1930s lecture halls as a Native conservationist (in reality, he was Archibald Belaney, a man from England). Rachel Dolezal still goes by Nkechi Diallo. Like most things on the internet, these are no longer isolated incidents: people who shift race in this way have now formed a community known as “transracialists.” They document each injection, each surgery. They share tips in Discords. Some people make videos promising to “manifest Korean DNA.” They’re not performing race; they’re “finding their true selves.” Briggs is American reinvention perfected for personal branding. Believe hard enough, edit consistently, tell the right story and you become someone new. Reality, after all, is what you can get away with. Fascinating piece from @default_friend about the people who believe race is a “feeling” threaded below 👇

lonely by accident is not the same as lonely by design @micsolana on the goonpocalypse

NEW: How partial acquisitions are killing startup culture — and what we can do about it. Earlier this month, after Google poached Windsurf’s braintrust and licensed its IP (Cognition later acquired what was left), @JustJake coined the term “shell-qui-hires” to describe pseudo-acquisitions in which a company is “acquired” by partially poaching the team. Today in Pirate Wires, he explains how these partial acquisitions are killing the culture that makes startups great. See, startups are a binding of fate. In a startup, you’re basically all in one boat (with lots of holes). It’s you and your crew against the world. Yeah, it’s a shitshow sometimes, but through sheer force of will, you have a shot at making a dent in the universe while capturing all the upside — if you can stick together. Partial acquisitions torch this dynamic. They create massive asymmetries and distrust. CEOs have to make subjective judgment calls about who’s acquired vs. not; employees might’ve been taken care of (paid) but it *looks* like their leaders bailed and left them with nothing; talented candidates and employees start asking themselves, “Is my CEO going to leave me for the Big Retirement home in the sky?” (Google). It’s up to founders to discard this behavior. Loudly. If founders don’t take action, Jake explains, they’re complicit in eroding the sacred trust allowing startups to do what they do best: build the future. He’s adopting an "All or None" clause for his startup (if the company is acquired, it’s everybody or nobody). VCs could do the same. And the FTC, hopefully, will see that current regulations have unintended side effects causing pain for startups — and move to update legislation to make sure everyone gets paid, together. Full story threaded 👇

NEW IN PIRATE WIRES: Goodnight, Late Night cbs cancels colbert, the monoculture (or what’s left of it) is dying, and the media is fragmenting into clarity and chaos From @emilyjashinsky CBS is not just pushing out Stephen Colbert, it’s retiring the iconic Late Show brand altogether. That’s the buried lede getting lost amidst frenzied speculation over politics and palace intrigue. If cutting Colbert is a bid to juice Paramount’s pending merger or to punish him for criticizing it, as Democrats are now arguing, CBS just stumbled right into the future. Colbert’s time at the helm of The Late Show perfectly illustrates the most important trend in media and culture. One might fairly wonder how Colbert, a man who leaned so far into #Resistance comedy he could hardly get up, has dominated the late night wars throughout Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of American politics. Johnny Carson, for example, famously skewered both political parties without fear or favor. Carson won the late-night wars when networks faced less competition, meaning his goal was to appeal to as wide a swath of the American public as possible for the sake of selling more ads. By the time Colbert took the helm from David Letterman, late night ratings had collapsed from their high watermark. This is partially why Greg Gutfeld is able to actually beat Colbert’s ratings on a cable network, a feat that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s. Like Colbert, though, Gutfeld doesn’t approach politics as Carson did. This is the new model: cultivate a loyal niche that returns night after night, giving you an edge over others competing for increasingly smaller pieces of the pie. The result is microculture. Monocultural institutions, like The Late Show or the New York Times, no longer can and no longer do appeal more widely than their core audiences. For the Times, this is their subscriber base and it’s why, for instance, the paper committed obvious journalistic malpractice by yanking Sen. Tom Cotton’s infamous “Send in the Troops” op-ed back in 2020. As the “paper of record” for all of America, that decision made no sense. Cotton was expressing a mainstream position in his party and in the country. But Times subscribers were furious, and that critical business interest shifted the outlet’s editorial position. (This, of course, was helped along by a staff increasingly aligned on an ideological level with the paper’s narrow subscriber niche.) One of our greatest sources of cultural angst stems from the inability to recognize these institutions of the monoculture have shifted to microculture. Whether they supported Trump or Bernie Sanders, plenty of Americans outside affluent urban bubbles figured that out years ago. It’s the institutions themselves that often cling to these outdated brands, so blinded by their own biases that it’s become difficult for the C-suites to even recognize what’s happening outside Manhattan — and the Hamptons don’t count... ──────────────────── This is an article preview. Read Emily’s full piece on our site (link threaded).

President Trump Signs Stablecoin Bill Into Law The President signed the GENIUS Act into law today after the legislation passed in the House on a 308-122 vote, paving the way for a regulatory framework for payment stablecoins. Back in January, @bridge__harris and @abhidesa1 did a deep dive for Pirate Wires exploring how the transition to a consumer-scale stablecoin payment network would work in practice: “credit cards” that run on stablecoin rails? Enterprise giants like Walmart and Amazon jumping at new opportunities? Check out the full piece below as today’s ruling opens the door for their thought experiment to become closer to reality — link threaded 👇

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the most brutal war for talent in tech history is breaking the social contract between founders, employees, and investors that has facilitated its incredible growth for decades. the ever thoughtful @absoluttig has produced the first great piece on the trend.

NEW: How a network of underground tunnels could one day replace DoorDash. Imagine it’s late in the evening. You’ve been debugging code for hours, need to hit a tight deadline, and have an almost pathological craving for Taco Bell (many such cases). The delivery of your Crunchwrap Supreme, however, no longer involves ludicrously expensive burrito limousines or any other version of a human-operated, three-thousand-pound vehicle trundling through the streets. You place your order and 7 minutes later your meal materializes, miraculously, in a drawer inside your apartment. What else can you receive via this magical drawer, you ask? Cups of coffee, groceries, power tools, a rented tux, and really any object you can imagine — all summoned in under 5min and for less than 25 cents, beating Amazon Prime at its own game. It sounds magical and impossible, but it’s really not. It’s actually quite simple: literally just dig tunnels underground, and fill them with small autonomous vehicles. Today in Pirate Wires, @gb_rango speaks with @pipedream_labs about their new network of “thing pipes” in Austin. Before they connect these pipes directly to new construction, they’ll partner with drone delivery companies to fly your burrito (or burger or power tool or whatever) from the pipes to your door. The long game is radical. Reduce our need for delivery trucks, reclaim our streets, and end porch piracy (finally). Eventually, we’ll get higher-quality stuff faster and cheaper. When “thing pipes” become infrastructure, people will use these systems 10, 20, 30 times a day — and objects will move beneath our feet like data. Read the full story in Pirate Wires. Link threaded 👇