When the president decided that ‘artificial intelligence’ sounded too artificial, he rebranded the whole category as ‘super intelligence’ — or SI for short. This was supposed to sound more aspirational, more American, more winner-adjacent. What it actually did was accidentally hand Slovenia’s entire digital infrastructure a lottery ticket.
The .si domain, Slovenia’s official top-level internet address, suddenly became the most valuable piece of real estate on the web. Venture capitalists who could not find Slovenia on a map six months ago are now bidding against each other for domains like super-intelligence.si and si-labs.si. One startup reportedly paid $180,000 for just-si.si, apparently under the impression that brevity and confusion are the same thing as branding.
The Slovenian government watched this unfold with the expression of someone who just found money in an old coat pocket, except the coat is their entire country and the money keeps arriving in wire transfers. The state agency managing .si domains reported ‘unprecedented’ demand — their word, not hyperbole. Tech entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to Singapore are now frantically registering variations, each convinced they have found the cheat code to startup credibility.
Meanwhile, actual Slovenian businesses trying to register their own domains are waiting in queues behind American firms who think SI stands for ‘Serious Investment’ or ‘Supremely Important.’ The irony is exquisite: a presidential rebrand meant to rebrand an entire industry has instead rebranded a small Alpine nation as the accidental center of the tech universe.
Slate cleared. The absurdity is the point.