AI as an ironic icon
A few hours before Halloween, TechCrunch offers a series of last-minute costumes inspired by the figures and fears of the tech world. The article, by Amanda Silberling, begins with a simple admission: those who have not prepared a costume can improvise using references recognizable to an audience of industry insiders. The result is a satirical catalogue in which the themes of the tech debate — from the speed of AI development to privacy — become material for masks and accessories.
The source explicitly cites the fears expressed by Dario Amodei and Sam Altman about an AI that could develop too quickly, up to a possible “recursive self-improvement” capable of making efforts to slow its advancement futile. From this premise comes a conceptual costume: portray the version of yourself you imagine becoming by New Year’s, with self-help books, a yoga mat and a water bottle. The idea, as the author admits, does not even attempt to represent the technical concept, but exploits its suggestion.
Avatars, glasses and recognizable traits
A second group of proposals concerns the AI assistants recently launched by Meta and OpenAI, described as having “eerily cute” avatars. The comparison offered is with Elizabeth Holmes: an innocuous appearance that hides disruptive potential. The costume consists of making yourself bulky and colorful, adding a hat or glasses to resemble a ChatGPT icon, and asking party guests for read and write access to their Gmail inbox. It is a joke, but it touches on a concrete issue: the permissions we grant to digital tools.
On the surveillance front, the source imagines a costume inspired by camera glasses, suggesting applying a red or white circle to one lens to simulate the recording indicator. The article specifies that this is a parody and urges people not to film anyone without consent. It then cites Mark Zuckerberg’s style, with oversized black T-shirts and the phrase “Building is my love language,” or the Latin version “Aut Zuck aut nihil,” which appeared on a T-shirt worn by the Meta founder.
Another costume concerns running out of Claude tokens: a piece of cardboard with screenshots of usage-limit notifications is enough to scare those who code with generative AI tools. The source links the idea to the recent discovery, attributed to AI, of critical vulnerabilities in PHP, dubbed “PHP-ocalypse.” The corresponding costume is a T-shirt with the word PHP, accompanied by a sincere emotional confession: here, the vulnerability becomes literal.
Between satire and verification
The list is completed by the reference to biohacker Bryan Johnson, whom the source cites for a statement published on X regarding a body-pressure practice called “GLP-Bryan.” The proposed costume is simple: T-shirt and jeans, with an imitation of the scene described. Here too, the author acknowledges that reproducing it at a party would be at the very least bizarre.
Overall, the article announces neither product news nor market data: it is a piece of costume journalism, a genre TechCrunch has long experimented with. Its relevance lies in the cultural reflection it offers: anxieties about AI, privacy and dependence on digital tools are now widely shared enough to become masks. It remains to be verified, however, how faithfully the quoted statements are reported and in what original context they were made, since the piece evokes them without direct links. The source itself specifies that the costumes vary in levels of effort and that some ideas are deliberately unworkable: an element suggesting that satire is the article’s true register, rather than a practical guide.
