LARPing

Borrowed from live-action role-playing, where hobbyists dress as characters and act out the fiction, the term migrated through internet slang into SF discourse as the AI boom minted a thousand founders whose primary output was posting about being founders. To LARP is to have the costume without the quest: the badge photo, the standing desk, the "building in public" thread, the deck, and no product.

Its power is that almost everything in San Francisco is partially a LARP, and everyone knows it. The pitch practiced in the mirror, the founder mode cosplay, the MTS at Anthropic dropped at a party: the line between doing the thing and performing the thing is the city's central ambiguity. Calling something a LARP is therefore both the deadliest insult available and, frequently, a self-own, since the accuser is usually LARPing too.

The defense, as ever, is shipping. You cannot be accused of LARPing on the day you launch: see taste is the moat for what you are accused of instead.