'Cloud Dancer': A Measured Response

Regarding Pantone's decision, and so on, and so forth

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Pantone’s choice of “Cloud Dancer” as Color of the Year has unmoored me. I feel physically ill. I feel sick and dangerous. Pantone’s decision is completely intolerable to me and I don’t know what to do about it. One minute, I’m angry. The next, I’m sad. I forget for a little bit, and then I remember. I placed a 911 call but was too verklempt to say anything.

A swatch of Cloud Dancer:

As you can see, Cloud Dancer is the color of a MacBook charger in its waning days of service. The color of bad news delivered with bureaucratic indifference. The color of congressional insider trading. The color of a person’s thoughts while ignoring war. The color of an email from an exec proposing a live-action remake. The color of the popcorn ceiling in the hotel room of said exec’s extramarital affair. It is the color of the word “exec.” It is the color of a slightly crooked command hook in a college dorm. The color of the humming sound that an overhead fluorescent light makes in a disillusioning job. The color of the familial obligation that pushes you to begrudgingly accept a call. The color of ChatGPT’s blood if ChatGPT could bleed, if ChatGPT could be slashed with a sashimi knife and if milky fluid could come gushing out of its jugular. It is not, as some are saying, the color of a white person. It’s a decidedly nonhuman, anti-human hue. It is, however, the color of the discussions on the subject, as well as the color of the awareness of the context from which those discussions inevitably spring. It is the color of offending by trying very hard not to offend. It is the color of a corporate apology. It is the color of a machine saying, “I hear you.” When the decision was revealed, I knew I would never own a house.

None of that is the problem. It not being a problem is the problem. Pantone, American LLC headquartered in Carlstadt, New Jersey, was correct in this decision. The judges that sit on the Pantone Color of the Year (PCOTY) Committee are rigorously selected and groomed from birth for the task. They have more rods and cones than the average Joe. They’re fashionable. Extremely fashionable. The extremely fashionable judges know what’s coming before your trendiest friend knows what’s coming, I can tell you that much. I briefly met a PCOTY judge once and my self-esteem suffered irreparable harm. The judges die after making their annual selection. They have never been wrong. Much like we can acknowledge that Viva Magenta was the correct decision in 2023 without condoning the thousands of lives lost as a consequence of the ensuing violence, so too can we recognize Cloud Dancer as the correct decision, the only decision, for 2026. That’s what’s intolerable about it.

Cloud Dancer is not merely correct. It is hyper-correct. Inarguable. True. Truth speaks once a year through the PCOTY Committee. That’s a fact. What we, you and I, are left with is our power of interpretation. My interpretation is that we’ve just been informed that we were placed in a padded cell long ago without our noticing it and it’s too late to do anything about it. “Cloud Dancer” sounds like the tragic self-given moniker of a hopelessly delusional individual in a straitjacket. It sounds like an okay novel and a less okay film adaptation of that novel about an institutionalized person living in an imagined alternate reality wherein they can fly. I trust you can imagine this book and the movie and the brief round of arguing it would inspire on the internet. You may fan-cast it, if you wish. I would like Kate Winslet. The PCOTY is in other words: “Shhh…. Shhh… It will all be over soon…”

The color white’s relationship to the grand tradition of human expression predates recorded history, back to our earliest chalk drawings in caves. How fitting it would be for Cloud Dancer, a false white, to close it out! The pale, off-white horse cometh! Those judges, they’re good (RIP). You’ve noticed, I’m sure, that Netflix recently purchased HBO Max. If you think this has nothing to do with Cloud Dancer, you’re a real dunce I’m sorry to say and you shouldn’t weigh in on anything important ever again. Not that it matters anymore who weighs in on what. The jig is up. The project’s beyond saving. It’s all Zoom banter until the camera cuts from here on out, toots. Might as well make the most of it.

In a vain effort to release my frustrations, I have written a passionate letter to Pantone, which is a subsidiary of X-Rite, which is a subsidiary of Veralto:

Dear Pantone, Subsidiary of X-Rite, Subsidiary of Veralto:

—John Paul Brammer

You are free to share this letter on your socials, so long as I am properly credited. It will change nothing and accomplish nothing, but might serve to provide some fleeting catharsis to those who see it, which after all is the only available refuge for us here in the CD-as-PCOTY dimension.

I have since painted my living room, my bedroom, my kitchenette, my friends, and my family Cloud-Dancer-white. I tasted the color directly from the bucket, which briefly induced in me a false revelation, but I’m back to my senses now. As I said, there’s not much we can do. The good news I suppose is the interim can be filled with just about anything you fancy. I recommend lawlessness, violence, patricide, regicide, deicide, hedonism, abdication from responsibility, and inappropriateness. I recommend punching up, punching down, and punching laterally. I recommend a nonstop flurry of sustained physical attacks until you pass out. Repeat as necessary. Attack! Attack! Attack! And have a Happy New Year.