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Welcome to Babe: the hardest soft launch on the internet

a future-culture newsletter exploring alt perspectives across tech, art, and society

Author

Laura Winberry
January 21, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

In this week’s issue:

Hi/welcome, friends.

A quick pre-note: On a day and in a time when everything feels sideways in a new way, this newsletter is here to carve out a different kind of space. A hallowed hollow of art and frivolity and thought—determined to persist through, not around. I present to you, Babe.

If this newsletter were an Instagram relationship reveal, consider this first issue the photo of my hand on his leg at dinner. Or maybe it's the "my person 🖤" story with said person’s face just barely out of frame or blurred by motion (we’re on the dance floor, ofc). Either way, the first issue of Babe is here and we're doing this—soft-launching a newsletter about tech, art, and society that takes itself about as seriously as a soft launch deserves (which is both not at all and very much so).

first gif ever made an airplane from 1987

What to Expect from Babe (the unexpected, obvs)

Every Tuesday, at whatever time the data says is the best time, you’ll find Babe in your inbox. Each issue will look something like the one you’re reading now, only different. To keep things classy and somewhat organized, it will almost always include the following four elements. It will for sure serve.

Touch Grass: A deep dive wherein I analyze tech/art/society through a lens that'll make you question everything. Or at least wonder wtf I’m talking about.

It's Giving: A short list of hot takes and pattern recognitions for the culturally curious and spiritually aligned.

Still downloading: Where I run a buffer test with humans ahead of their time (or very much of the times, but never quite behind them).

Bible: A curated menu of internet gold that you absolutely need in your life, trust.

elphaba and glinda hair flip

After too many hours spent staring at screens last week, I walked downtown to one of my favorite coffee spots. I had been so in it, and then—the imperfect unfolding of three-dimensional life outside and beyond this 15.4 inch screen kinda knocked me sideways. The bars of sun and shadow on the bridge. The lone construction worker tethered into rebar (am I walking through an exhibit at The Whitney?). The seed-pod puffs catching light as they floated off to create other worlds.

Alright, lfgooo.

Touch Grass: Why Prompt Engineering Feels Like Astrology

In both fields, we're all just vibing with invisible forces and calling it expertise. This week I dive into how tech's latest darling is giving big "Mercury in retrograde" energy, what this means for AI development, and why that's not necessarily a bad thing. Plus, why every prompt engineer I know has a crystal collection (jk but also fr).

Last week, a prompt engineer told me she adjusts her prompts based on the moon phase. I laughed. Then I remembered how I spent three hours tweaking a single comma because "the vibes felt off." Turns out, we're all just reading celestial tea leaves here—some of us just call it optimization.

Prompt engineering and astrology both pull off the same magic trick: making the unknowable feel knowable. We're crafting perfect word combinations like spells, believing certain phrases hold power, and building entire frameworks around pattern recognition that's hard to scientifically verify. Prompt engineers have their "best practices" like astrologers have their house systems—and both groups will fight to the death defending their chosen methods while admitting "sometimes it just works differently."

Both communities thrive on this unspoken understanding that success comes from a mix of technical knowledge and pure intuition. Just like how astrologers know Mercury retrograde doesn't actually cause chaos but something's definitely up, prompt engineers know that sometimes the AI just "feels moody today." We've created these elaborate systems to understand forces beyond our control, whether those forces are planetary movements or artificial intelligence.

So maybe the real question isn't whether prompt engineering is just astrology for tech bros. Maybe it's about recognizing that humans will always create systems to understand forces beyond our control—whether those forces are planetary movements, what comes after life, or artificial intelligence. 

And maybe that's not just okay, but utterly necessary. Intrinsic and essential, really, to who and how we are as humans.

It's Giving: BDE BD-AI

  • The way every tech CEO is suddenly an "AI safety expert" is giving high school theater kid who just discovered Method acting. We get it, you're very concerned about the fate of humanity, right after you finish rushing your AI product to market. → Sam Altman's latest statements on AI safety

  • Fashionably late: LinkedIn's pivot to TikTok-style content is giving midlife crisis at scale. Nothing says "professional networking" quite like watching your former boss post thirst traps between AI think pieces. → This, this, and these #IHateLinkedIn

  • The trend of adding "AI-powered" to literally everything is giving Y2K-era "cyber" and "e-" prefixes. Can't wait for AI-powered toothbrushes to tell me I'm brushing with existential dread. → Some absurd AI products—and oh, the drama

Still Downloading: 3 Questions with Sam Marin, Head of Social @ Scrib3

Babe: You've gone from Columbia track captain to DAO talent scout to web3 growth expert. Make it make sense—what's the through line that absolutely no one would expect?

Sam: I’d say that I like experimenting and trying new things! I enjoy working with people with different perspectives and am not afraid to take risks and go for the less safe or straightforward option. I also don’t like being bored or under-challenged. I like to think I’m open-minded to new experiences.

Babe: Everyone's busy building the future but you've actually kinda lived in it—running content for DAOs, working in web3 native spaces. What's one thing about the future of work that Silicon Valley is completely wrong about?

Sam: Probably that it’s way messier than most people probably imagine, haha. Remote work means you can hire the best talent from anywhere but it also comes with a lot of communication struggles. And time zones are a real real struggle. But a really great thing is that most people I’ve come across in these spaces have a global perspective—they’re super worldly and open-minded.

Babe: Your newsletter is literally called Testnet. What's the riskiest experiment you've run in crypto marketing and what did it teach you about human behavior?

Sam: Unfortunately I’m not writing this newsletter anymore, too crazy with work stuff :/ But I’d say the riskiest experiment was a massive multiplayer rock paper scissors game at EthDenver that was decentralized across side events. We made custom pokemon-style trading cards that players would give to the winner of each rock paper scissors game and whoever collected the most cards at the end of the event was the winner. It was supposed to be a coordination game to get people to work together to get the most cards. Kind of insane. It taught me that people are easily distractible and it’s hard to compete for attention. I suppose I already knew that from working in web3 social but it’s different to see IRL.

Bible: Gworl

Bonus Palate Cleanser: Iris van Herpen’s Other-World

Like an amuse-bouche only post-meal instead of pre-, let's end with Iris van Herpen making high fashion feel like a Grecian pseudo-future fever dream (when is it not?). Her 2022 Meta Morphism collection:

"...examines the ancient visions of Ovid’s mythology through modern themes of transhumanism, where man and technology exist in eternal fluctuation, thus defying classification, allowing us to question the limits of our self. Resounding the thematic tensions between artifice and nature, the collection is built around three myths—the story of Arachne, the story of Narcissus, and finally the story of Daphne and Apollo."

Check out the collection’s runway debut as it turns Greek mythology into a conversation about digital identities, hyperreality, and haute couture.

kardashian saying you're welcome

Well, this first issue of Babe was a fucking blast to create. Thanks for reading and sharing—wait… you're gonna share this, right? As a treat? For me? Classic soft-launch behavior is forcing everyone you know to engage with your content, so, lfgooo! Now we—you, me, and everyone we kinda-sorta know on the internet—can consider this hard newsletter officially soft-launched. No more cryptic hints about what I've been working on. No more something exciting coming soon, bbs 👀xoxo. (Hm, if I were smarter I would have done more of these things to "generate buzz." Note to self.)

Here we are—somewhere between the cliff edge and mid-air, finishing the first issue of Babe together, online but making it quasi-spiritual, not sorry about any of it.

xoxo,

LW

PS: Remember, early subscribers get a free year of Babe because that’s the kind of math I can do. Subscribe now if you want in on this arithmetic.

Next week in Babe: AI convos that are giving grad school seminar, the art of democratic poetry, doppelgängers, and more.