Tech
The boom boom aesthetic fetishizes wealth in an era of chaos
The stock market just plunged, thanks to a wave of new tariffs. Your boss just called into Zoom from a mansion-sized cabin upstate. Inequality is reaching heights previously unseen in times of peace. ChatGPT is replacing artists at work. A recession is always "looming." Entire civilizations are being leveled by war. We’re living in a time of chaos — and with chaos, apparently, comes an aesthetic to match.
This one’s been dubbed "boom boom," a shorthand for the aesthetics of Patrick Bateman: high-end, hyper-curated suits; a revolving door of expensive new restaurants praised not for their food but for their exclusivity; and an obsessive fetishization of wealth. Don’t worry: boom boom doesn’t come bundled with the murder, violence, and misogyny of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho.
"We live in an era defined by explosions: of inequality, of knowledge, of information, of wealth — and yes — of actual bombs. Boom boom is embraced by those who see opportunity in the chaos. For those who disagree, this will seem villainous and nihilistic — a dark mode shift, as Edmond Lau called it. But it’s important to remember, no one ever imagines that they’re the bad guy," trend forecaster Sean Monahan said in his Substack newsletter, 8Ball. His work at trend forecasting spans from 2013's normcore to the vibe shift of 2022.
Monahan describes the boom boom aesthetic — not to be mistaken for the nasal stick on Shark Tank — as a "fetishization of the past." If you have money, you want to look like it, and that's what the boom boom aesthetic offers. This aesthetic is the opposite of quiet luxury, shouting your seven-figure income from the top of a rooftop bar with a fur coat on.
Monahan told The Cut that the term was inspired by the Boom Boom Room, a golden-hued club at the Standard Hotel in the heart of New York City’s Meatpacking District that opened in 2009, and Windows on the World, a restaurant at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center that was a hotspot in the 1980s.
Monahan isn't the only cultural purveyor who has noticed our collective obsession with the '80s. The National Portrait Gallery in the UK currently has an exhibition that "brings together the work of over 80 photographers" featured on The Face magazine covers during its 1980s heyday.
"In the future, everyone will blame the '80s for all societal ills, in the same way that people have previously blamed the '60s," Peter York, an '80s style and cultural trend expert, told The Rake. "All the Big Bangs unleashed then — monetarism, deregulation, libertarianism — have been working their way through the culture ever since."
The Big Bang that York refers to has, seemingly, resulted in Monohan's boom boom aesthetic. We now have a president who once lived in a fully gilded apartment, launched a $5 million "gold card" U.S. Visa with his own face on it, swapped the deep red curtains in the Oval Office for golden ones, and — lest we forget — was name-dropped dozens of times in American Psycho, to the point that Patrick Bateman’s obsession with him becomes a source of tension with his girlfriend, Evelyn. Meanwhile, Bateman himself is being resurrected, with Luca Guadagnino set to direct a new American Psycho film.
The "boom" in boom boom refers to a "booming" economy — or at least the illusion of one. In that way, the trend seems to fold in on itself, becoming a kind of self-aware satire. One of the richest men in the world is the president’s right-hand man, and the Trump administration has imposed tariffs so aggressive that even penguins are somehow being economically affected. As The Cut recently put it, we’re in the 2020s now, an era where it’s “no longer gauche to be bougie and brash.” Writer Emilia Petrarca succinctly added, "Online retailer Ssense currently sells a $55 T-shirt that reads YOU’RE A SLAVE TO MONEY THEN YOU DIE. The purists here are the butt of the joke."
During men’s Fashion Week in Paris a few months ago, Saint Laurent featured men in Wolf of Wall Street-esque suit jackets on top with baggy leather pants or thigh-high boots on the bottom. Armani's January campaign featured the broad-shouldered, loose-fitting power suits of the ’80s and ’90s. Celebrities jumped on the trend, too. Ayo Edebiri's oversized gray Loewe suit at the Golden Globes; Chappell Roan wore an oversized grey suit to the Grammy Museum; both of Doechii's Thom Browne looks at the Grammys were reminiscent of 80s suits, and her pinstripe Thom Browne suit at Variety's Hitmakers Awards Ceremony was boom boom to a T.
Boom boom is everywhere. Like all aesthetics, it's political — but Monahan argues this one isn’t partisan. I’m not entirely convinced anything can be political without being at least a little partisan, but boom boom does seem to resonate across the political spectrum. It might be an evolution of the "old money" aesthetic teased in Succession, but to me, boom boom feels more sarcastic, more biting. It embraces power-dressing and corporate themes just as we drift further into work-from-home culture — a strange response to nostalgia for the office, or maybe a glamorized reaction to corporate precarity. It mirrors a kind of reactionary longing for rigid hierarchies and traditional power structures.
But it’s not just political commentary. Boom boom cosplays the one percent — it mocks them. And yet, the people selling us this aesthetic are the one percent. All love to Doechii, Chappell Roan, and Ayo Edebiri — they’re immensely talented, but also figures of significant cultural influence, likely with the financial stability to match. The head designers at Saint Laurent or Thom Browne hold their own kind of capital. And let’s not forget: The man with the golden apartment we mentioned earlier is literally the president.
It's difficult to tell if boom boom is actually ironic or if it just uses irony as a shield for indulgence, not unlike what happened with the commodification of punk.
So who actually benefits from an aesthetic that celebrates, whether playfully or not, the shameless pursuit of wealth above all else? And in a world where satire and reality blur beyond recognition, how do we distinguish boom boom's performative parody from the dangerous obsession of a real-life Patrick Bateman?
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It seems OpenAI has been caught with its hands in the proverbial cookie jar. Anthropic has reportedly cut off OpenAI’s access to Anthropic’s APIs over what Anthropic is calling a terms of service breach.
As reported by Wired, multiple sources claim that OpenAI has been cut off from Anthropic’s APIs. Allegedly, OpenAI was using Anthropic’s Claude Code to assist in creating and testing OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-5, which is due to release in August.
According to these sources, OpenAI was plugging into Claude’s internal tools instead of using the chat interface. From there, they used the API to run tests against GPT-5 to check things like coding and creative writing against Claude to compare performance. OpenAI allegedly also tested safety prompts related to things like CSAM, self-harm, and defamation. This would give OpenAI data that it could then use to fine-tune GPT-5 to make it more competitive against Claude.
Unfortunately for OpenAI, this violates Anthropic’s commercial terms of service, which ban companies from using Anthropic’s tools to build competitor AI products.
“Customer may not and must not attempt to access the Services to build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models or resell the Services except as expressly approved by Anthropic,” the terms read.
OpenAI responded by saying that what the company was doing was an industry standard, as all the AI companies test their models against the competing models. The company then went on to say that it respected Anthropic’s decision but expressed disappointment in having its API access shut off, especially considering that Anthropic’s access to OpenAI’s API remains open.
A spokesperson told Wired that OpenAI’s access would be reinstated for “benchmarking and safety evaluations.”
It’s not the first time this year that Anthropic has cut off API access. In June, the company cut off Windsurf’s API access after rumors that it was being sold to OpenAI. That deal ultimately fell through, but Anthropic’s cofounder, Jared Kaplan, told TechCrunch at the time that “it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI.”
Anthropic has also tweaked its rate limits for Claude, which will take effect in late August, with one of the reasons being that a small number of users are violating the company’s policy by sharing and reselling accounts.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
It’s the end of another quarter, which means it’s time for yet another earnings call with concerning ideas for generating more revenue. This time around, it's Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who told shareholders on Thursday that there’s “significant financial opportunity” in delivering ads through Alexa+, the company’s new AI-powered voice assistant.
“I think over time, there will be opportunities, you know, as people are engaging in more multi-turn conversations to have advertising play a role — to help people find discovery and also as a lever to drive revenue,” Jassy said, per the investor call transcript.
Since launching earlier this year, Alexa+ has reportedly reached millions of users. Unlike the original Alexa, which mostly turns off lights and sets timers, Alexa+ is designed to be more conversational, context-aware, and AI-driven. It can help you plan your date night, entertain your kids, and even dabble in basic image and video generation — all under the banner of your $14.99/month Prime subscription.
But so far, Amazon Alexa has been an ad-free experience. It's also more than 10 years old, and it doesn't make money; thus, it's been deemed a "colossal failure" by those within the company.
Of course, Amazon isn’t alone in trying to figure out how to make AI pay for itself. Both Google and OpenAI have explored ad integration in their AI products as a way to generate revenue. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in particular, has made a notable pivot: once firmly against advertising in his chatbot, he’s since reversed course, possibly opening the door for ads in future versions of ChatGPT.
Whatever the motivation, injecting ads into Alexa+ would mark a major shift in both user experience and Amazon’s strategy, especially given the assistant’s long history of being expensive to maintain and hard to monetize. Ad-supported Alexa+ could be Amazon’s attempt to finally turn its once-money-burning smart assistant into a revenue machine, without hiking the subscription fee (at least for now).
Alexa+ is still new, and what an ad-supported experience would actually look like remains unclear. According to Jassy, the idea is to frame ads as helpful, something to assist customers in discovering products they might be interested in buying.
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