The Paperclip publishes reported-news-shaped comedy about AI, software, platforms, startup culture, infrastructure, work, markets, and the small administrative failures that somehow become civilisation-scale problems.
The machines are often useful. The incentives are often rancid. The language is usually worse. Somewhere between the keynote, the pricing page, the all-hands email, and the phrase “agentic transformation,” modern life developed a habit of describing obvious failure as momentum.
That is where we live.
Satire, facts, and other unstable materials
The stories are fictional unless clearly stated otherwise.
The targets are real enough: hype cycles, fragile systems, extractive product decisions, institutional cowardice, market theatre, and the recurring belief that a dashboard will save us.
Some pieces refer to real people, companies, products, or events as part of satirical commentary. When a joke rests on a factual hook, the hook should not be nonsense. There is already plenty of nonsense available. We do not need to manufacture it badly.
Corrections
We correct factual errors that damage the joke, the context, or the reader’s ability to understand what is being mocked.
This does not mean we will correct fictional quotes from fictional executives at fictional companies with suspiciously real incentives. It does mean that if we misstate a real event, botch attribution, break accessibility, or accidentally make the wrong bastard look responsible, we want to know.
Email corrections to [email protected] with the article URL, the relevant passage, and enough context for a human to understand the problem without opening six dashboards.
AI and human slop
The Paperclip may use AI-assisted drafting, editing, coding, image generation, and other forms of computational embarrassment.
This publication is made from a glorious combination of AI slop and human slop: machine output, human judgement, bad prompts, worse instincts, useful tools, late edits, petty grievances, accidental insight, and the ancient creative method of staring at a sentence until it stops making everyone involved feel unwell.
The machine can help. The human still has to decide what is funny, what is true enough to stand on, what needs cutting, and what should be taken outside and hit with a shovel because it sounds like LinkedIn discovering irony.
Final responsibility sits with the human pressing publish.
Unfortunately.