All My Homies Hate Partiful

Making it radically easy to unlock the power of IRL social networks and track your most meaningful relationships...whatever tf that means...

I’m a gatherer. I know this to be one of my purposes in life. It’s a special feeling to bring people together, and selfishly to be the uniting factor they gather around. I love decorating, lighting candles, and making menus with items that complement each other and appeal to the tastes of my fellow liberal arts graduates (Lavender, rosemary-dark chocolate, matcha everything, lemon & thyme).

Hosting allows all my traits to manifest, my thoughtfulness, aesthetic interests, vanity, and emotional sensitivity. What better way to make a big deal out of something than to turn it into a theme? How do we show love but give it a room, hours, and people to experience it?

In elementary school, I handed out birthday party invites to my few friends, and sent them over the mail to cousins. In middle school, a few apps existed that have since settled into obscurity, and eventually, there were Facebook Evites. High school–same thing and sometimes a picsart flyer if someone felt creative. In my niche little corner of Urbana-Champaign, people opted for Canva, and even DIY ransom note-esque invites made on scanners with broken CDs and letter cutouts. A good flyer was essential and almost always digital except for those who posted events in coffee shops and on school bulletin boards. It felt like the golden era of invitation design– 70’s inspired color palettes, airbrush finishes, random auras across the page, and bold expressive letters. It makes me a little sad not to have anything tangible from this time, with many of the flyers belonging to old house-show venues past their prime with no archival of the digital materials.

Flyers from events I went to at UIUC thrown by Soleil Gallery & Tidy Totes

In its most removed and streamlined form, the invite became a Partiful RSVP. When I first encountered Partiful I thought It was the perfect app. As the host of a Partiful event, I could request your attendance, money, surveys, food, etc. all with a bokeh background and a carefully curated playlist. Guests could RSVP with “yes”, “no” and “maybe” buttons, leave comments, and see the full list of attendees. Everyone could share photos from an event using the photo gallery–circumventing the usual post-event “send pics plz” text.

I was really into Partiful for a while, creating invites for gatherings (some that would never come to fruition.) I had a Black Thanksgiving in college, dinner parties, birthday parties for myself and others, barbecues, etc.

It felt soothing to the anxious attachment in me— although I loved the gratification of people attending an event I threw–I also felt worried about people not showing up. RSVPs gave me comfort in at least temporary security with the stream of “yes” RSVPS that would trickle in leading up to an event, but also the ability to heckle people with text reminders without feeling like I was heckling them. There’s a level of digital separation that maintains an air of cool and nonchalance about the event while people still get 4 text messages reminding them to attend.

Around my birthday this past year in October, while I was planning an event— I started getting infographics about the app being co-founded by two previous Palantir employees— ex Product Engineer, Joy Tao and ex Operations Lead, Shreya Murthy.

The Outline describes Palantir as a “data-oriented intelligence firm” that received 2 million in funding from the C.I.A. The company also has created technology used in the surveillance and deportation of migrants to fulfill a $38 million contract with Homeland Security and has done everything from predictive policing to supplying technology for Israel to support the genocide in Gaza.

There’s not currently any news around Partiful selling user data and in their terms they say, “We do not sell your personal information. We may also collect, use, or disclose personal information for other purposes with your consent.” they make their money from offering, “party add-ons and merch on our online store!” But plenty of platforms have sold our data without us knowing or admitting they would, here in Illinois, there’s a lawsuit every few months and at least a few people waiting for some random amount of money in their cash app or Venmo.

The optics aren’t great and I don’t want to use an app that was birthed from surveillance tech. While I love the ease, things lose their magic in our effort to streamline them. I feel pushed to be increasingly thoughtful about the ways I interact with and build community.

The mission of the app is described via co-founder and CEO– Shreya Murthy’s LinkedIn as, “to make it radically easier to cultivate friendships in the real world. We unlock the power of your real-life social network (not your thousand followers on IG) by building a system of record to track your most meaningful relationships & end-to-end infrastructure for socializing offline.” This is a weird ass way to describe an event app. What does it mean to build relationships through a “system of record” and do you need an end-to-end infrastructure to build relationships? And I know that community has become a buzz word but It definitely shouldn’t be replaced with tech-forward corporate lingo like “social network.”

Social networking apps from Tinder to Partiful attempt to do the work of removing the risk from our interactions with each other. Rejection is a much more bearable thing when it comes in the form of a “no” or a swipe left. Connection seems easier when you’ve been following someone on instagram for three years or have read someone’s dating profile and scrolled through their playlists.

Look– I know every news outlet wants us to believe that we are truly socially inept, and have lost all inclination towards human gathering and connection, but it’s companies like Partiful that find success from essentially robbing us of our physical natural ability to connect in ways that are meaningful and even revolutionary.

Mfs was inviting people to protests on Partiful!!!

Social media in all forms has skewed the ways we think about connection and relationship building– we believe these are things that should come easily when in reality the most fruitful relationships and connections we have often take a lot of work and time. People are talking about having low-maintenance friendships; we have begun to lose the plot and the language to talk about connection. When many of us say community it doesn’t mean much, but community is something that requires intention and care.

We all want community even if we’ve grown jaded and don’t believe in its true form in our isolated, individualistic capitalist society. But it’s still there if we try a little harder and hold on a bit longer. Send an invite in the mail, then text your friends and tell them to check the mail because they probably won’t. Call when you miss someone even if it’s a little awkward at first, write a love letter with no assurance of receiving one, craft a gift with the chance that it may go unappreciated–do things the long and inconvenient way. Allow yourself and your loved ones space to be a little raw and weird and unpredictable.

Go to the party and wonder who will be there– the surprise is a part of the fun anyway.