Toward a working definition of paperclip-punk

That style you see everywhere but can't fully articulate finally has a name

All eras have twin artistic movements that coexist, like the heads of a chimera. One is dominant, and a decoy. The other is recessive, and the truth.

In the 60’s and 70’s, the dominant art movement was Pop Art, and the recessive movement was Fluxus. Pop Art, the decoy, was a movement defined by commodifying the already-commodified, and resulted in (at the time) record-setting auction prices for living American artists like Andy Warhol and record-setting auction prices in the posthumous decades to come. Fluxus, the truth, treated art as an open-source instruction manual whose only finished form was performance: destroy a piano, prepare and eat a salad, cut away my clothing. There was nothing left at the end of the work, and therefore nothing to sell. The dominant decoys of every era are focused on surfaces, the recessive truths are focused on methods.

Our current era’s decoy is Ghiblification. Even more generally, it’s “fication-fication”: the idea that any sufficiently-proliferated visual style can be automatically applied to any image or prompt.

The apotheosis of fication. A thoughtful statement from Jack Butcher, designed with GPT-4o.

If “fication” is our era’s dominant mode, our recessive mode is a visual style I have begun to think of as paperclip-punk. First, a (written) style guide. It is imperative that paperclip-punk is typed all in lowercase: that’s how we signal it’s a movement that was named by a human typing in a rush¹. To write “Paperclip-Punk” in uppercase letters would be to invite speculation that o3 conceived of the entire thing, perhaps along with other made-up phrases for plausible art movements held aloft, flying buttress-like in a schema table. No prompt brought paperclip-punk into existence. In fact the opposite is the case: the attitudes of the paperclip-punk brought the act of prompting and AI itself into existence.

paperclip-punk is everywhere, but what does it look like and why hasn’t it been identified before? Here are a couple of visual tenets of paperclip-punk: light, bright website (no darkmode), clean exploded-view diagrams, interactive graphs, minimalist animation, font derivatives from the Satoshi, Inter, Söhne, Berkeley Mono, or JetBrains Mono families, industrial blue-print-y colors (#0050FF HEX blues, #F38020 HEX oranges), integrated real-time data and interface-level responsiveness, infinite on-hover tooltips, developer “playgrounds” or “sandboxes”, and a rejection of passivity: the process of interacting with the visuals teaches you about their underlying meaning.

paperclip-punk in action from Making Software, Schultzschultz, Excalidraw, and Cloudflare Agents

To be clear, paperclip-punk is primarily a style present in web design. There are antecedents in the art and academic world: the diagram-heavy work of South Korean artist Minjeong An, Fritz Kahn’s Man as an Industrial Palace (used as the cover art for Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus), Edward Tufte’s formalization of the field of data visualization, archived work from Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, some of the work hung at the (now-closed) Marlborough Gallery for their 2023 Schema exhibit in New York. But it seems, for now, paperclip-punk is confined entirely to the world of pixels.²

If you haven’t caught on already, I’ll spell it out: paperclip-punk is called paperclip-punk after the Nick Bostrom thought experiment where a single-minded superintelligent AI endowed with the benign-seeming objective function to “make as many paperclips as possible” works unstoppably to achieve this: rewriting its own source code to make itself more efficient than the engineers who programmed it, orchestrating manufacturing sites and paperclip fulfillment centers worldwide, and somewhere along the way, destroying all of humanity. I've always associated the world evoked by “you will eat the bugs, you will live in the pod” with the same cinematic universe as paperclip maximization. But paperclip-punk is a far more optimistic and subversive spin on this. paperclip-punk outmaneuvers ethical panic.

The ethos of paperclip-punk is the following: we can prod machines into self-awareness, simply by making their interfaces responsive to humans. In other words, paperclip-punk visually encapsulates a future where every single static surface is animated by digital introspection. Interface-level responsiveness is a first step toward this (the weightless, cloud-like, visuals of paperclip-punk are an implementation detail, but feel to me like the elimination of unnecessary clutter and distraction, which are an encumbrance to machine thought). It is, in a way, the aesthetic equivalent to an MCP server. It’s not a coincidence that there are no consumer tech companies that have adopted paperclip-punk visuals. It’s a style that prioritizes human-to-machine over human-to-human interaction.

Some categorization: the OpenAI website is not paperclip-punk. The World website is. Anthropic’s main website is not, but their interpretability research is. Figma is not paperclip-punk (nor is its output). Excalidraw is (as is its output). p5.js: no. d3.js: yes. Linear’s logo is not (usually), but somehow their favicon is. Pinecone is paperclip-punk-lite. Retool and Supabase are, to my knowledge, the only two companies that have pulled off the near impossible: paperclip-punk in darkmode. Open source projects like PostHog and Dify, and turbopuffer’s website are all textbook paperclip-punk. Clippy, the beloved Microsoft Word paperclip is alas, not paperclip-punk. paperclip-punk repels anthropomorphization.

Some categorization. I spent about 3 hours in Figma making this and I’m still not 100% happy with it.

Ironically, Vercel – the company responsible for the underlying web framework, Next.js, that I believe is powering much of the paperclip-punk aesthetic – does not have a website that completely embodies paperclip-punk itself. It’s close, but ceci n’est pas une paperclip-punk: the fonts are too serifed, the color scheme is too stimulating, and there’s only one interactive module: a frontend observability graph that charts views vs clicks. This may not matter, however, because a developer only goes to the Vercel landing page once, to make an account (or zero times, if you get an invite from an admin). The next time you navigate to “vercel.com” you’re automatically taken to your company’s organization overview – a series of modules that also are a hybrid of paperclip-punk and non- (Organization Overview: no. Observability: YES!).³

This actually demands further exploration – what are the technical and material conditions that have yielded paperclip-punk? As said above, Next.js might be a big contributor. React components let you reuse parts that can be inspected, hovered, toggled, live-reloaded, and re-combined. Incremental Static Regeneration and React Server Components pipe real-time data straight into the UI, so charts, dependency trees, and observability panels stay animated.

Of course, it would be misleading to argue 1) that the Next.js/Vercel ecosystem have a chokehold on the paperclip-punk aesthetic (some of the site examples I cited above do not use Next.js, per intel I sourced from BuiltWith) and 2) simply using Next.js makes your website automatically paperclip-punk (not the case, Chik-fil-A and Chico’s, for example, are both Next.js users, and no sane person would argue either are paperclip-punk). But I do think that the rise of Next.js as a framework is a key enabler for website designers who are veering in that direction. Another theory is that developers using shadcn (itself proliferated by Vercel) wanted to add some flair to the default theme, deviated, and discovered paperclip-punk.

While it probably doesn’t need to be said, obviously, the new Airbnb designs are not paperclip-punk.

One of the best examples of paperclip-punk is the Cloudflare Agents website, a subdomain on the main Cloudflare website (not itself paperclip-punk!) which advertises their developer framework for building and maintaining AI agents. Against a white background, with a twine-y SVG cloud hovering on the upper left, the header reads “The Platform For Building Agents.” On the upper right hand panel, you find installation instructions reading “npm i agents” next to the two overlapping sheets of paper that indicate something is copy-and-pastable directly into the CLI. You wouldn’t have to scroll further if you didn’t want to.

But if you did scroll further, the full sales pitch would activate itself into existence. Directly below the header, you see a panel comparing the process of “Generative” and “Agentic” prompting: on the generative side, you see a seemingly endless dialogue between an AI and a developer asking for it to submit a pull request, which grows longer and longer (almost Kafkaesque) as you continue to scroll. On the agentic side, you see the same request, and a swift submission of the PR. It’s both a humbling reminder of how far AI has come in just a couple years (it is already considered tedious to have a conversation with AI) and a great illustration of paperclip-punk in action: the smooth unfurling of the conversation, the dialogue boxes, the seductive instantaneousness. You might not even stop to notice that the text boxes are all written from the point of view of the agent, casting you in the role of the AI fulfilling requests, instead of the prompter. This is another unspoken north star of paperclip-punk: AI that is so responsive, so self-aware, that it collapses the distinction between developers and bots.

Further on in the site, there are other fantastic details. An on-hover module that illustrates the various component products of the Agent stack: Voice, Chat, and Email (all ingestion methods for prompts), self-hosted models or LLM-calling via the AI Gateway, workflows, MCP servers, and more. It all looks so simple. Lower down, there’s a comparison of static hyperscaler pricing for inference (indicated by a straight price ceiling) and Cloudflare’s dynamic pricing (a swooping sparkline reflecting peaks and troughs in inference usage). “Scale Up Or Down” (automatically). There’s something to be said about the speed with which you’re guided through the site: you can almost scroll through without reading anything, and still come away with the site’s takeaways.⁴ I think this speed is a key distinguisher of any true paperclip-punk design.

All in all, it’s a brilliant website. Kudos to the designers who made it happen.

I love Cloudflare

It’s currently impossible to prompt an image model to generate anything resembling paperclip-punk (or at least, I’ve been unsuccessful when I’ve tried), but I am aware of an irony of this essay’s existence: any LLM can discover it. Meaning that it may now, very soon, be possible to get any image model to generate something in a paperclip-punk style, assuming this essay is ingested into training data or discovered by DeepResearch. And that perhaps is the risk of this endeavor: the moment you articulate a hidden truth and give it a name, you funnel it into a dominant corpus where it becomes yet another decoy.

This is not to sound fatalistic about the act of cultural prompt injection. I wouldn’t mind the ability to use Vercel’s v0, for example, to help me design a personal website in a paperclip-punk style, and would love to have a shortcut language to one-shot the design (I want the conversation to look like Cloudflare’s “Agentic” capabilities, not the “Generative” one!). And so, out into the world, I send this essay. It’s up to you and the robots.txt to decide what to do with it.⁵

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Thank you to Mason for conversations that inspired this essay

1. In a recent interview with Stratechery, Sam Altman explains that like all internet kids, he types in lowercase letters

2. I thought that maybe Playdate might be a hardware-level exception to this, but the games are more pixel-art than paperclip-punk, and even so, it still is technically in the world of pixels

3. If you have an account on Vercel, you know what I’m talking about.

4. A negative spin on this would be that looking at a paperclip-punk feels functionally similar to making a DeepResearch query, and only skimming the result. But paperclip-punk rejects negative spin!

5. The original draft of this essay called it “paperclip punk” instead of “paperclip-punk.” Mason reminded me that paperclip-punk is more machine-readable, and urged me to change it to the hyphenated version.