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kellypendergrast.bsky.social
kelly pendergrast
@kellypendergrast.bsky.social
2.9K followers 600 following 890 posts
technology // aesthetics // labor // shapes

writing: kellypendergrast.com
working: antistaticpartners.com
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kellypendergrast.bsky.social
hmm
Q: We are hearing you will have indoor trees and a maximalist look. True? A: True. The great Flora Grubb has agreed to be our consultant in all things plant-related, and together we are dreaming of a virtual forest of trees, succulents, flowers, and even vines inside our space. We want the look of Art + Water to be maximalist, warm and welcoming, and bursting with life and color. And because of the unique nature of the pier, most of Art + Water will be on wheels - endlessly re-shapeable. You'll never come to Art + Water and see quite the same space twice.
November 5, 2025 at 11:39 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
if the new Dave Eggers art school space thing wants to be taken seriously it is imperative they get a new logo because

www.artpluswater.org
logo for a new art initiative called "Art + Water". The logo is a kind of wordmark with the word Art aboove the word Water, both in extremely over the top white cursive. Between the words is a teal plus sign, and on the left and right of the teal plus sign are random teal curlicues.
November 5, 2025 at 11:35 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Anyone know a zeitgeist bouncer who can be enlisted to scare away the tpot meetup dorks?
Twitter user deepfates writes: every Tuesday we go to the punk bar patio and enthusiastically talk about Al, peptides, Twitter drama and other freak stuff Join Us zeitgeist, San Francisco, 6pm. meet your mutuals it's OFFICE HOURS
November 5, 2025 at 1:46 AM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Who decorated Tucker Carlson's gothic americana mancave and were they purposely channeling the Texas Chainsaw dining room?
Nick Fuentes talking to Tucker Carlson on his show, facing each other across a wooden table. A chandelier made of antlers hangs above them. In the background, a bunch of creepy woody props line the walls, like oars, tools, an American flag, a hutch with mugs in it, a portrait of a dog, etc. Dinner scene from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, shot from behind Sally's head and looking out at a wooden table, where the family sits leering at her. On the wall in the background, a bunch of antlers and a skeleton hang.
October 31, 2025 at 5:08 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Read my new essay about the shriveled imagination of the life-extension guys!! On Bryan Johnson, communist cybernetics, and the Human Centipede.

And if you're in NY, head to the launch party in Brooklyn tonight for Empty Set mag (Dear Friends Books, 7pm🩸)

www.emptysetmag.com/articles/blo...
Promo image showing the article title “Blood Red” with a subtitle “the fluids grow septic, the blood flows weak”, with info “Kelly Pendergrast, Oct 24 2024” and a feature image from Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delight Poster with information about the Empty Set magazine launch. Top half of the poster is a b+w inverted picture from Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. Bottom half is text, which reads "Empty Set. Tuesday Oct 28th, 7:30pm. Dear Friend Books, 343A Tompkins Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11216. Magazine Launch. Readings and performances by Terry Nguyen, Emma Heath, Steffi Cao, basalt, Yuki + Lele.
October 28, 2025 at 9:34 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Tommy Craggs said "this level of millennial quirk chungus cannot go unpunished"
"And that really is one of the things with guys like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei from Anthropic,” Zitron was saying over burgers on a fine Manhattan afternoon in September. “I work with founders all the time. I’m a founder myself, I guess—I don’t like the title. But when you are a person that has to make more money than you lose, otherwise you lose your business, and you see these chunderfucks burning 5, 10 billion dollars in a year—and everyone's celebrating them? It's offensive.”
October 27, 2025 at 6:59 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Considering Venkatesh Rao the height of intellectual insight, believing Fredric Jameson secretly admired globalized commodity production, and claiming that postmodernism has a "business model": just another day at the Andreessen Horowitz dipshit factory!!

a16z.com/prediction-t...
Screenshot of text. The text reads: "Postmodernism quickly figured out its business model: the “front of house / back of house” abstraction of cost-effective, personalized service at scale. My favourite essay on this is Venkatesh Rao’s The American Cloud, on the Great Back End (the enormous logistical enterprise, hidden from view, that grows our food and heats our homes) becoming abstracted out of view, while coastal consumers interact with pleasantly recreated “situations”, like Starbucks or Whole Foods. This idea was so powerful that its best biographers were its Marxist critics. In Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson wrote in a tone that’s so frustrated it betrays a hint of admiration: “Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of even more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.” This is almost a sentence you could find in Atul Gawande’s completely sincere article about why hospitals should operate more like The Cheesecake Factory. It could also describe mobile app development. There’s one coherent idea through it all: the meaning of things is how they’re rendered-for-purpose."
October 27, 2025 at 5:21 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
I have been wanting to write about Bryan Johnson (Don’t Die guy and prolific poster) for years now. And I finally did! Also about communist blood transfusion, fluid potential, and the horror of the segment.

Read now in advance of the official release of Empty Set mag Issue 1 next week:
Promo image showing the article title “Blood Red” with a subtitle “the fluids grow septic, the blood flows weak”, with info “Kelly Pendergrast, Oct 24 2024” and a feature image from Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delight
October 24, 2025 at 5:59 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
hahahahahahahahaha
Tweet from notorious tech douchebag and civic tyrant Garry Tan, who writes "Met the legend @RickRubin today. In society there are a few people who are there to help birth things that touch billions of people, that leave them changed. It's all we hope to do. Rick's way of bringing about coherence from creators he works with is special in all the world." The text is accompanied by a photo of Garry Tan and Rick Rubin sitting on a couch. Rubin is crosslegged and barefooted. Garry holds a copy of the stupid AI rick rubin book ("the way of code").
October 24, 2025 at 12:00 AM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Unbelievable cruelty!!
Woodcut by Kathe Kollwitz called “the mothers” which shows a group of women huddled together in a solid mass, arms around each others shoulders and a child peeking out from their skirts, with scared and desperate expressions
October 21, 2025 at 4:17 AM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Mini afternoon field trip to Martinez on Amtrak - $8 and they’ve got free snacks and bay views. Two 20somethings just got on with a box of Popeyes and one said to the other “girl if you like BART you’re gonna love the train” SHE’S RIGHT
View of the San Francisco Bay with an estuary area in the foreground, taken out a train window Box of Doritos and other food, and a pallet of soda, sitting on the seats and table of a train carriage
October 17, 2025 at 9:03 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Haha would you believe I got asked if I wanted to write about the Stanley Cup earlier this year and had the same response as you, before realizing they meant THIS Stanley Cup…
October 15, 2025 at 7:29 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Palantir “ontology” merch…??🤪🤪
now I’ve seen everything and can die miserable. Gootbye
Still from a promotional video by palantir about the company’s visit to Korea, showing a hoodie with the word “ontology” wrapped into a circular graphic
October 15, 2025 at 5:21 AM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Kind of incredible selection of reading groups about to start up at Oakland's Bathers Library — highly recommend all bay area folks signing up for something. it is time 2 learn + connect!
non-bay area folks... sorry!!

batherslibrary.cargo.site/current-read...
FALL MONDAYS 5-7pm • On the Haitian Revolution, Humanism, and Black Radical Critique • 10/27 7-9pm • Do They Owe Us a Future? (Of Course They Fucking Do!) • 10/20 TUESDAYS 5-7pm • Reading the Freakiest Novel of All 'Time • 11/13 7-9pm • Cyberfeminist Counternarratives: The Internet Beyond "The Big Daddy Mainframe' • 11/4 WEDNESDAYS 5-7pm • Hospicing Modernity • 11/5 THURSDAYS 5-7pm • We Who Have Never Known Men • 10/30 SATURDAYS 10am-12pm • Chinese Century: Between Sino-Optimism, Techno-Orientalism, & Futility • 10/25 10am-12pm (online) nurturing liminality at the edges of ourselves and the world • 11/2 2-4pm • Diary Study: from day planner to pocket camera • 10/25 SUNDAYS 10am-12pm • Staging the Revolution: Marxist, Anticolonial, and Workers Theater • 10/26 WINTER MONDAYS 7-9pm • In Care and Defiance • 1/19 TUESDAYS 7-9pm • Investigating the Sex Pest • 1/27 WEDNESDAYS 5-7pm • Seeking Change: An Amateur Study of the I Ching through Collective Scholarship • 1/7 5-7pm • Third World Marxism • 2/18 7=9pm • Tuning in to Proust (and hopefully, ourselves) • 1/7 THURSDAYS 7-9pm Working Class Lesbians • 1/8 FRIDAYS 5-7pm • Traumatized and Psychologized: Examining Trauma Culture • 1/9 SATURDAYS 10am-12pm • A Streetcar to Subduction • 1/31 12-2pm • Bodies, Beauty & Ghosts: Memoirs as acts of emancipation • 1/10 SUNDAYS 10am-12pm • ART MONSTERS: ON ART-MAKING & PARENTING • 1/18 (monthly) 12-2pm • The Stakes of Magic: Examining Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch • 1/ll 2-4pm • Caregiving as Radical Play - 1/11
October 9, 2025 at 9:19 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
"i'm in the arena trying things"
Promotional picture of a bright blue cap with the words Doing Things embroidered on white. The hat is worn by a dark skinned model whose eyes are obscured by the hat's brim.
October 8, 2025 at 6:47 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
I really resent the brand-ification // creative agency-ification of outdoorsy-ness.

Eg this launch of Usal's presence in northern california, which brings nature cleanups, birdwatching, bikepacking, visible mending, etc etc all into play as elements of a brand aesthetic and lifestyle package.
Instagram post showing a lineup of events hosted by Usal in Northern California in October and November. The text appears over a background image of a rocky coastline. The event listings are: DEADBEAT EARTH SWEEP USAL SF OPENING PARTY SUN PRINTING WORKSHOP TRAIL RUN - GOLDEN GATE PARK SOUND FORAGING - SAN FRANCISCO LONG SLOW DAYS BIKE RIDE VISIBLE MENDING WORKSHOP SEAWEED & KELP IDENTIFICATION & HARVEST MARIN COUNTY BIKEPACKING TRIP LOST COAST CAMP TRIP NATURE DRAWING WORKSHOP URBAN ECOLOGY HIKE CLAY HANDBUILDING IN GOLDEN GATE PARK CREATIVE BIRDWATCHING ALCHEMY SOUNDBATH GORP GIRLS HIKE - ROCK SPRING TRAIL
October 7, 2025 at 11:44 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Still on my mind
Tweet by Refaat in Gaza (username @itranslate123): If I get killed by Israeli bombs or my family is harmed, I blame Bari Weiss @bariweiss and her likes. Many maniacal Israeli soldiers already bombing Gaza take these lies and smears seriously and they act upon them.
October 6, 2025 at 3:57 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
The ecstatic reception of the anthropic retail popup merch drop is sooooo funny. people talk about techies “reinventing the bus/library/etc” — this is “reinventing 2018 hipster b2c company marketing aesthetics”. What other ancient trends can we revive and sell to these guys????
Tweet by Sam McAllister saying “GOOD MORNING NEW YORK CITY • • COME DO YOUR BEST THINKING AT OUR THINKING SPACE IN THE WEST VILLAGE SAY NO TO SLOP” with four photos of Anthropic merch Tweet from Cooper Gadd saying “worth the wait” and a photo of hat that says “thinking” and some slim books on a cafe table.
October 5, 2025 at 5:00 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Whenever the Menswear guy posts about how you don’t need to be thin or athletic to dress well, and that big guys can look great and sexy, it’s always with a photo of this exact guy
Painting by Frida Kahlo of herself and a Diego Rivera. He is wearing straight legged high waisted black slacks; a kind of cummerbund, a blue chambray shirt, and an unbuttoned black jacket with rounded lines
October 3, 2025 at 3:31 AM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
If you're in NY, head to the release party on Oct 28!! Meet the cool crew, buy issue 1, read the essay I wrote for it!
Poster with information about the Empty Set magazine launch. Top half of the poster is a b+w inverted picture from Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. Bottom half is text, which reads "Empty Set. Tuesday Oct 28th, 7:30pm. Dear Friend Books, 343A Tompkins Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11216. Magazine Launch. Readings and performances by Terry Nguyen, Emma Heath, Steffi Cao, basalt, Yuki + Lele.
October 1, 2025 at 5:08 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
For my buds still sad about the end of Real Life mag, and anyone else bored of the current state of writing-about-tech, it's time to get excited — a very exciting new left tech-etc magazine is dropping later this month. Empty Set! No website yet but follow on insta www.instagram.com/emptysetmaga...
Empty Set is founded on the idea that technology writing is at an impasse. Despite growing interest in "tech criticism," the genre has found itself flattened and constrained in recent years. As publications dedicated to grappling with the many contradictory shades of our techno-culture have shuttered-Real Life, WIRED Ideas- -the industry has shifted towards hype cycle-based business reporting, at best, and thinly veiled advertorials at worst. Though there remain a few bastions of critical thought, these have mostly survived as watchdogs, too tired from keeping up with a neverending cycle of abuses to speculate more broadly on what our evolving relationship to technology is doing to us. We believe that technology writing can be so much more. After all, despite what we so often assume, technology isn't synonymous with the latest gadget, or digital this-and-that. It is ancient-as old as our bodies and words. If language was one of our first technologies, then shouldn't technology writing give rise to poetry? If our bodies were the basis upon which all technical prostheses emerged, then shouldn't technology writing know how to move? The tech writing remaining today is too sober, too timid in style and subject matter to capture what it feels like to inhabit our world: the millenarian fervor of the techno- evangelists, the riptides of rage and desire we traverse daily on our devices, the anxieties and distant hopes that shimmer on the horizon. We need writing that not only thinks about technology, but with it. The stakes are clear. Having failed to address this latent world- where technology becomes religion, flesh and code intermingle, and ghosts haunt the machine--we've let the worst among us steer the conversation. Peter Thiel sells out lectures on the Anti-Christ while pseudo-intellectual bloggers peddle dollar-store fascism by misreading Hegel. In our failure to experiment boldly, to speculate and myth-make and take all the strange corners of our techno-culture seriously, leftist technology criticism has handed over the reins of sensemaking to feudalist wannabes and reactionary trolls. Donna Haraway once wrote that "it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with…. what thoughts think thoughts." Empty Set is dedicated to finding the concepts and thoughts that we'll need in order to tell a new story about our technologized lives. Writing in the dust of this critical landscape, it's only fitting that our first issue takes on decay. Though the promise of technology is one of eternity (living forever, endless access to information) it's rot that undergirds our world today: brainrot, entropy, planned obsolescence, 404 errors, poor images, lossy compression, nutrient-rich humus, carbon- rich biomatter turned oil and coal. Rot is a process that encapsulates the short-sighted excesses of our techno-culture, as well as a potential force we might channel into new hopes. After all, without decomposition there could be no regrowth, nothing underfoot for life to arise in. By sitting with this decay, we hope something new might take root.
October 1, 2025 at 5:04 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
After watching OBAA last night i am now giving myself the ick by reading PTA interviews ... ew ❌ (www.thrillist.com/entertainmen...
Interviewer: When HAIM became famous, it was so cool because these Jewish girls from the Valley were rock stars. And I was a Jewish girl from the Valley. You've used the Valley in so many of their music videos that you've directed. How did you initially establish that rapport with them and how did that lead to casting Alana? Paul thomas anderson: Well, our shared experience connected us growing up here, but the story is well documented that their mother was also my art teacher at elementary. It makes the Valley small. It's funny, we don't have any time or any money when we make those videos. And so, you do what you have with what's right in front of you, and you fight them with what you've got—as the Israeli army says, "Fight them with what you've got." And the best special effect in the HAIM video is them. That became kind of rule of thumb for how we would approach doing these things. All the people that I've worked with for 20 years lived in the Valley, the grips, the electricians, camera assistants. Some maybe live in Los Feliz, but we all live right here. The film developing lab is right here. It's in Burbank, FotoKem. So this is our backyard. This is a home game for us, and we know it.
September 26, 2025 at 6:03 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Also many of you doing it in the most karmically wretched way possible
Bowl of ground beef and banana slices, glass of milk in the background. Text on screen says “hot take: beef and bananas is the best food combo in the world”
September 18, 2025 at 4:00 AM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Absolutely bizarre looks among the attendees of Peter Thiel's first of 4 lectures on the biblical antichrist in SF this week. Man in orange... what is going on here.

sfstandard.com/2025/09/16/p...
A group of men wait in line for Peter Thiel's lecture, as protesters hold signs criticizing big tech. The man in the center of the frame is a tall thin white man wearing creatively painted jeans, a blue button down with multiple buttons undone, a very large star of david medallion visible beneath his open shirt, an orange leather blazer with large 70s collar, and an orange trucker cap that says "RETARD" in white block letters.
September 17, 2025 at 7:11 PM
kellypendergrast.bsky.social
Come hang out with me & @annapendergrast.bsky.social in Antistatic Group Meeting next Tues!

Topic: FINDING AIDS. In a partly de-physicalized cultural landscape, are there still ways to follow your nose or happen across something excellent?

Info and sign up here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
A screenshot of a zoom call where all 6 attendees have homemade backgrounds. The people are blanked out in bright green so just their outlines are visible.
September 17, 2025 at 5:47 PM