untitled / study

i grew up on the internet that felt like a bedroom mirror. messy, reflective, sometimes cruel, but mostly honest. i didn’t log on to become a “creator.” i logged on to see what everyone else was obsessed with that week—what songs they looped until 3 a.m., what shoes were being customized with sharpies, what new corner of the web looked like freedom. somewhere between those tumblr scrolls and the first time i hit “refresh” on instagram, something inside the internet changed shape. the walls got clean. too clean. like someone came in and bleached the weird out of it.

the first time i noticed the bleach burning was when likes started to mean rent money. suddenly everyone had a brand deck. you couldn’t just post a thought without wondering if it fit your aesthetic. whole cultures built on spontaneity and stolen screenshots turned into moodboards for products we couldn’t afford. the spontaneity died quietly, drowned in its own analytics. virgil said the youth should always be allowed to break things, but the new internet only lets you break in ways that still look good on camera.

the original sin of social media wasn’t vanity—it was optimization.

optimization killed accident. it killed ugly drafts and emotional rants and half-finished photosets that meant something only to five people. it made everything look the same. even rebellion started using the same fonts. i miss when artists weren’t scared to post something embarrassing, because that’s what made it human. the early 2010s web let us exist in public without performance metrics. you could be anonymous and still deeply personal. there was a raw safety in that—like shouting into a void that occasionally shouted back with empathy.

when i look at effie’s music now, i see that ghost of the old internet—hyperpop distortion, korean glitch-femme aesthetics, lyrics that feel like diary entries whispered through a distortion pedal. she’s not asking permission to sound messy. she just is. maybe that’s what’s been missing from the feeds: the willingness to be unpolished, to let the world hear the feedback loop between heartbreak and hope. there’s something sacred about noise when it’s honest.

the irony is that the platforms that once promised connection have become surveillance mirrors. they show us our own face until we forget what it looked like before the filter. and still we keep scrolling, because beneath all the ads and algorithms, we’re hunting for proof that someone else still feels the same. that maybe the internet hasn’t gone completely sterile yet.

so this page is me leaving a note in the hallway. a quiet rebellion. a small digital room built from borrowed images, open tabs, and the leftover spirit of virgil’s “free game.” i’m not here to sell you anything. i’m here to remember what it felt like when remembering was enough.

i think about how artists like rihanna and a$ap rocky were once just moodboard kids with tumblr accounts—posting outfits, covers, songs, not because they were brand assets but because they wanted to belong. they were crafting identity in real time. you could trace their evolution through pixel trails. now that kind of becoming happens behind NDAs and stylists and marketing calendars. we lost the raw footage of becoming.

the only way back, maybe, is to make small things again. pages that breathe. mp3 loops that live in the background like ghosts. screenshots saved without guilt. saving itself is radical now—proof that art still matters when no one is watching. this room is for that.

if everything online has turned to static, i’ll learn to speak through the noise. not to be heard, but to remember what a real voice feels like.

everything on this page exists for study, for care, for remembering. if it disappears, that’s fine too. nothing digital ever really dies; it just waits for someone else to look hard enough.