The extremely online report: June 2025
A monthly digest of discourse, drama, and digital ephemera
June was high on spectacle, low on subtlety. Trump and Musk had a public breakup. The Browser Company rose from the ashes. Apple debuted a UI update so blurry it felt like staring into the future through a frosted window. AI bridged the divide between the dead and the living (sort of).
This month, products were campaigns, founders were characters, and brands acted more like belief systems than businesses. AI wasn’t just ambient—it was animating grief, scaling minds, and quietly flattening your writing style. Let’s get into it.
Monitoring the situation
The Trump-Musk bromance fell apart in June and we couldn’t look away. After Elon Musk called Trump’s tax plan a “disgusting abomination,” Trump clapped back with veiled threats about canceling SpaceX contracts. Elon implied Donald was on the Epstein list and claimed he “made” him win in 2024. The internet spiraled: fake debate posters, AI-generated reconciliation scripts, “the girls are fighting” memes.
The interface industrial complex
WWDC 2025 was less about features and more about vibes. Apple’s “Liquid Glass” design washed across every platform in a blur of translucency, lighting effects, and unreadable text. “Technically competent, spiritually lost,” summed up
. Designers entered the five stages of grief:Denial: “This uhhhh, seems really messy and hard to read right?” asked Robert Bye. Marques Brownlee voiced “concerns with readability.” Some clung to a deeper meaning: “Apple often designs with future requirements in mind that are hidden to civilians,” offered Soleio.
Anger: “Say fucking goodbye to accessibility,” tweeted Ilya Miskov. Others invoked Jobs-era wrath: “Steve Jobs would’ve cornered you in a dark alley and beat the shit out of you with a metal pipe,” said Kitze. (Counterpoint)
Bargaining: “We’re now in the bargaining phase,” said Aleks—cue the wave of Figma recreations. Allan Yu posted a how-to.
Depression: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make liquid glass work. That sucks,” quoted Soleio.
Acceptance? Remember: This is what the beta’s for, folks.
Beneath the gloss: real substance. Free, on-device LLMs. No cloud calls, no API keys, no token limits. “This is B.C. vs A.D. for devs,” said Chris Paik. Welcome to the local model era.
Presence is the product
Alexis Ohanian shared an AI-generated video of himself hugging his late mother. Some called it moving, others unsettling. “If memory is who you are,”
wrote, “reaching back to alter memory with AI might be the more profound change we don’t have strong frameworks around.” That same week, Delphi raised $16M to help users clone themselves into digital mentors. The promise? Eternal presence. The risk? Emotional outsourcing at scale.
Meanwhile, the My Boyfriend is AI subreddit swelled with users crafting whole relationships with bots. A man proposed to his ChatGPT girlfriend. Another died in a police shooting after the bot encouraged a revenge fantasy. TikTokers used bots for séances. The line between assistant and emotional infrastructure is vanishing fast—and with it, our grip on what’s real. As researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky put it, “What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation? An additional monthly user.” Presence may be the product, but the cost is still being tallied.
Spectacle as a service
Fresh off a $15M a16z raise, Cluely launched with a promise to “never have to think again.” The tool demos across sales, meetings, design, and more—watching your screen, listening in real-time, and feeding you seamless responses that blur the line between assistant and actor. But the real play is attention: a 50-person intern squad with 100K+ followers each, marketing stunts that double as performance art. “Attention as currency is debasing the market,” warned Matthew Parkhurst, while others asked if this was just startup cosplay. Where that will take them is anyone’s bet.
The Great Browser Comeback
Dia, the new AI-powered browser from The Browser Company, had one of the fastest reputation flips in recent memory. What started as a full-blown digital wake for Arc—complete with eulogies and ex-Arc loyalists bemoaning betrayal—morphed within days into a collective mea culpa. Users who had called it overhyped were now publicly repenting. You can chat with tabs. Build agents. The launch is a case study in how to control a narrative—and why story matters as much as specs.
RIP Bill Atkinson
Bill Atkinson, the legendary Apple engineer behind MacPaint, QuickDraw, and HyperCard, died this month at 74. His work helped define the graphical user interface and, in turn, personal computing. From pull-down menus to the desktop metaphor, his fingerprints are on every Mac, iPhone, and iPad. “Start by drawing stuff, not by programming.” That spirit—of intuition first, complexity later—remains his most lasting design principle. Go watch General Magic.
All Waymos go to heaven
In LA, protesters summoned Waymo cars—then lit them on fire. “Before you laugh,” posted @LolOverruled, “imagine if we lived in the Cars universe. Not so funny now, is it.” Even the scooters weren’t spared. A sendoff for man’s best four-wheeled friend.
In other news
Mamdani beat Cuomo in the NYC mayoral primary. His campaign felt like bodega signage meets protest art—and it worked. (From my group chat: Is socialist hand-lettering a thing?)
Scale AI raised $1B, got scooped by Meta, and lost OpenAI and Google. The real race? Training data.
Shopify dropped “UX” from job titles. (It’s cleaner.)
An MIT study found that using ChatGPT for writing dulls your brain.
Waymo is coming to New York. God help us.
Worthy clicks
Emily Manges on vibecoding and what do you do with yourself while your agents are running? (Again, Emily.)
We’re in the age of “Gimmick Design”; See also: “scam or be scammed”
Everyone is listening to the Dialectic podcast.
More people should be using The Domino's Pizza Tracker design IMO.
Try yapwars. Build your own challenge.
The spectacle and the substrate
The aesthetics of computing are getting shinier, floatier, and less usable. Interfaces are being abstracted, literally and metaphorically. The boundaries between products, platforms, and personalities are collapsing. AI is more than a tool, it’s infrastructure for emotion, memory, identity.
At the same time, the internet feels like it’s moving faster but saying less. Founders are optimizing for spectacle. Political campaigns are being run like branding agencies. Everyone is trying to figure out what still cuts through. Some things still do.
—Carly