For those too young for Facebook Events, too unhinged for Paperless Post, and too self-serious for email or text, there’s Partiful: the app that blows up your phone with reminders about the imminent arrival of your co-worker’s friend’s spring picnic. Only TWO WEEKS! Twenty-four hours! Two hours!

The event-invite app was launched in 2020 and allows party hosts to blast invitations to their network, keep track of who’s coming, and send updates to their guest list with a few quick taps. Anyone you’ve been on an invite list with — your “mutual” — can invite you to their next event, whether you know them or not.

“We want to make it easier to get to know friends-of-friends,” Partiful’s website says. The app has been called the “least cringe option to get people to your party” by the New York Times. That’s debatable: As GQ’s Matthew Roberson wrote in an essay called “Stop Sending Me Partiful Invitations,” its aesthetic reads as a “full-body cringe. It feels like a way of corporatizing the concept of hanging out.” Picture a vaporwave interface, motivational emoji, and chatty TikTok lingo — plus the option to “boop” your friends.

You might be familiar with Partiful’s basic app functions. Lesser known, though, is the Partiful founders’ connection to a controversial data-mining firm foundational to the Trump administration’s sweeping surveillance efforts. As a 2017 report from the Intercept details, Palantir Technologies helped the National Security Agency develop XKeyscore, its “widest-reaching tool” that tracks nearly everything a user does on the internet, according to the agency itself. Currently, it supplies tech infrastructure for ICE’s mass-deportation programs and the Israeli military’s bombing campaigns in Gaza. The company is at the front lines of the effort to optimize AI for war.