We’re rebranding the rabbit hole
An important company announcement
To our loyal users and beyond,
We know we’ve been keeping you all in the dark for sometime now. We chose to step away from our platform with great regret, but we knew we needed the time to make a proper choice.
We’re changing our name.
From this day forward, we will no longer go by Mindfuck™. Additionally, we will no longer associate with the general term “mindfuck” either. Please do not refer to us as it anymore, as we have found a new direction to go in.
Over the years, we’ve been blessed to visit many places and be mentioned in a wide variety of discussions. It has been an amazing run. People from all walks of life understand our products as essential to their lives and our name has become synonymous with excellence.
Our suite of devices was painstakingly designed with the user in mind, with providing such an expertly precise stream of inter-connected media in one fell swoop that it offers them no other option but to recoil in a sea of undetectable emotions. They sit back, revel in existentialism and go: “Wow, that was a mindfuck.”
Our dedication and service to providing an overwhelming experience to your daily lives has been our number one priority. We studied the very core tenets of human curiosity to create a product that piques every single millimeter of your interests. The Slopstream™, as we coined it, was designed to move from information node to information node following the path of most curiosity, but nimble enough to shift to related scandals, to opposing viewpoints, or to adjacent conspiracy theories based on the user’s reaction. We provide the best-in-class information overload.
From day one of testing, your overwhelmedness was our number one concern.
And we love the community outreach over the years. We love the memes. The tattoos. All of it. None of those things go unnoticed to our hard-working staff. The mindfuck community is so much of our reason for existing.
But frankly, we decided that we just won’t be associated with the term anymore. We were proud initially when our branding would come up simultaneously with the term. When people would say “mindfuck”, it was like a direct link to our cause and what we stood for.
But we think we’ve outgrown it.
(And to address the elephant in the room: The recent wave of people craving new cognitive sensations that are attempting to try and fuck themselves in the head with physical objects… well, we have nothing to do with that. As was falsely reported, that use of ‘mindfucking’ is not caused by our product. It does not align with our goals, and we think it’s very unfortunate. Condolences to everyone involved. The timeline just happens to coincide with our longstanding efforts to pivot our company.)
So no, we won’t prohibit anybody from using the term. How could we? It’s so widely used and it means so much to so many people, beyond our products. I mean, how else would you describe your favorite Christopher Nolan movie? With their ever-cascading logic puzzles that often involve a twist that satisfies a shortlist of psychological questions you’ve been thinking about since childhood. They’re made to give off an explosive release inside your brain. So, we totally get it. There will always be things out there that make you sit back and go “Holy shit, that was a mindfuck.”
We don’t take this for granted, and we know better than anybody how good it sounds. It has a ring to it. Which is why we’re sad to see it go.
But if we’re honest, it was never our “why” when starting out.
We started in a dusty basement over on 76th and Sentienz, breaking things and innovating our own proprietary technology. It was a wild time. We were young, bright eyed and ambitious, but there was one problem. We were tired of going down rabbit holes so deep that we couldn’t possibly share them with anyone else in our immediate circle. It only forced us further down the rabbit hole, isolated, with no way to get out. So, in turn, we built products that allowed everyone this experience; allowed you a shot at your own rabbit hole. The rest was history. But deep down we knew then that if we were going to go down this pipeline, we would need an escape plan. We would need a way out of the rabbit hole eventually.
Years later, we’ve pioneered this ‘rabbit hole’-like experience for millions, and industries have shifted around our creations, but we’re also taking notice of our impact on the world. We’re evaluating our way forward.
And frankly, we at HQ have also been feeling a little mindfucked lately. Long hours, meetings that end without next steps. Often meetings from every sector of the company, from design to marketing and even to finance, will involve several staff members talking endlessly about something they learned on the platform. They can’t stop themselves. Before long, everyone is waiting their turn to express their latest fuck in great detail. It even happened on a Q3 earnings call when an investor told us his entire theory about the moon landings. But after so many of these instances, the question dawned on us… should we pivot?
Should we go back to our roots, and renew our commitment to living truthfully alongside the rabbit hole instead of deep inside it?
We think so.
So with that, we’ve settled on a new name. A brand new identity.
And so much more.
Introducing:
Mindhump™, est. 2022
A frictionless experience for friction-filled times.
For getting over the hump.
For making it through another day, another week, another life.
Welcome.
Mindhump is built on the same framework as it’s predecessor, with a twist. It’s designed to notice when you are feeling overwhelmed by our patented Slopstream™ technology, and immediately shift to providing you with a piece of content that counters that. Instead of deepening your knowledge base without yielding, it instead jolts you right back out to a new topic. Something surface, something simple. It’s like just getting your beak wet, over and over again. This way, it’s so much easier to cover much more ground. We designed our curiosity matrix to keep you moving along surface level explorations through varying topics. You won’t be limited to a deep rabbit hole that blows your mind and makes you think for days on end, debilitating you. Think little rabbit divots, that you can enter and leave at will. More knowledge, less friction. You’ll be a hit at all the dinner parties.
We’re already seeing great results with our pool of test users and we have our engineers to thank. It’s resulted in sky-high benchmarks when it comes to available topics for small talk or passerby interactions. No more isolated diatribes that leave you unable to rejoin the conversation. Even within our HQ, Mindhump is powering our meetings beautifully. Because of a wide array of knowledge, we find ourselves succinctly self-aware of our product’s place in the world thanks to endless projections on how to avoid pitfalls in the future. We know exactly how to avoid being company X or company Y, before we ever even begin a new project. Meetings will conclude with so many disparate ideas that we have almost zero idea what to do with all of them.
More knowledge, less friction.
Getting here was no easy task. A bit of transparency on our part: we went through so many different ideas for identities. Mindsmash. Mindscrew. Mindpipe. Mindbomb. Mindhit. Mindcrack. Mindwax. Mindlay. Mindsuck. Mindhead. Mindbust. Mindnut.
But after understanding what our new mission was — and the legal grey area around some of them — the other options faded away. We needed something lightweight. Less penetrative. With more touch-and-go utilization for a life on-the-go. When we arrived at Mindhump, something about it just felt right.
So we’re saying a heartfelt goodbye to our past innovations, and ushering in a new experience. A brand new chapter.
More knowledge, less friction.
We’re so excited about this new journey and we can’t wait to bring you with us. To bring you over the hump with us.
Pynchmie Asunder
CEO, Mindhump