you may be saying to yourself that this is a weird thing to open an essay with, but it actually isn’t. i mean i’ve watched many things stop behaving like themselves in the past years, but the weather gave me an even bigger signal that something is wrong.

i had a conversation with my best friend the other day. he told me that the biggest problem with our society is the endless and constant chase of money. and i completely agreed, because that’s the root of everything i don’t like about how humanity is now. even the richest people alive still want more of it, more influence, more relationships, more, more, more, and more, even if they already have more than a person could spend across a hundred lifetimes. and this type of behavior bled down into all of us. it made us greedy and cold.

the nature of most relationships between humans these days is a transactional one. we first have to see what the other person can do for us, and only then fully decide whether saying hello is actually worth it. and while i believe that social media has played a role in this, i don’t think it’s the one to blame. we built it in our own image, and now it hands our worst instincts back to us, faster than ever before. the same hunger that burns through the planet burns through our timelines and our hearts. nothing feels how it felt a decade ago. and i am talking about the whole vibe of being alive right now. it’s different, it’s worse, and i was lost inside all of it.

for most of the last decade i was trying to build something for myself. one business, then another, then a brand, then another venture, and so on. all of them failed. i also loved streetwear, art, making stuff, and so many others but i never really found my place in any of it. i was always so restless in a way that i couldn’t even explain, every single time.

and when the ai boom hit, i was there. i’d been playing with dall-e and chatgpt since 2022 and instead of feeling early i somehow felt more lost than ever. even in the past year, everyone started vibe coding, building or creating things, and i kept asking myself what i was even supposed to actually be doing. i wanted to know what my real thing was because that’s the only thing that could succeed. and that was the obsession underneath. this need to make it was my real engine, and it was eating me alive.

then, this year, on the 1st of march, everything changed for me.

Subscribe now

it was a sunday evening, a day after the war started in the middle east, and it scared me more than the war between russia and ukraine ever did, even though that one is right next to my country. this one actually scared me. i was out with my best friend and his girlfriend that evening when my mother messaged me about the war in iran. she’s a doctor, and she told me about certain things being prepared here in romania, which are the kind of measures that only get put in motion when war is actually coming. my mother has been walking with God faithfully for almost two decades, and many years ago she told me about a war that will happen at some point, one that’s written about in the Bible. when i remembered that thing everything clicked for me, as i realized it all has to do with what’s written there, and that it’s actually really, really serious. i then lit a cigarette and stood at the back of his car, smoking and thinking about all of it, as i always did when i was concerned.

“where are you going when everything comes to an end?”

that’s the thought that a clear voice gave me while i was in the middle of that thinking.

and i already knew that when everything was gone, nothing good was waiting for me, because i didn’t live in a way to deserve something good when it all comes to an end. and that thought pushed me toward God, because standing there i understood that only He could actually save me. that was the day when i started reading the Bible more seriously. that was the night when i started wanting to know Him.

the first thing i wanted to let go of was the cigarettes, because it was the worst and most obvious habit i had. for years, i’d told myself quitting was easy, that i could do it whenever i decided to. that’s what i also bragged about. but when i actually tried, i couldn’t. and it was proven again and again.

and yet, three or four days after the real desire to quit took hold in me, it was done. i was actually freed from it. it left me so completely that if i didn’t carry the memory of having smoked, i would swear i never had. it’s still mind-blowing to me. the craving simply wasn’t there anymore. i know my own decision mattered. i know i had to truly desire to be done with it. but i also know that regardless of how much i wanted it i could have never done it alone.

in our chat the other day, my best friend told me that no matter how much he looks, he can’t find a single person without a vice except me. if they’re not smoking, they’re drinking, if they’re not drinking, they’re gambling, and if they’re doing none of those, there’s always something else. but i don’t want to take credit for any of this as i don’t deserve any of it, because without God i wouldn’t have got rid of any of them and this change in myself would’ve been completely inexistent.

other things have shifted as well in my life. in these past months, when i’ve needed help with something, especially with money, it came. that had never happened to me before. not like this. my father always supported me and helped me whenever i needed, but i’ve rarely found myself in situations that kept arranging themselves in my favor, again and again, in ways i only realized after the thing was done. i was truly taken care of, and i don’t have a more sophisticated word for it than blessed. (don’t imagine that i am wealthy. i am not, at least not materially. i am mostly referring to money to survive “another day”, which is more than i could ever want or need.)

this change in my life also changed the way i see the world around me. it is fleeting. everything is fleeting. the success, the money, the house, the cars, the friends, the whole pile of things we spend our lives reaching for. all of it is just passing through our hands, slipping through our fingers as we try to close them around it. none of it stays and none of it holds any weight at the end of the day. absolutely none of it. i always thought of myself as a kind and empathetic person, but i think i am only now becoming an actually kind one, now that i’ve stopped measuring every single thing by whether it helps me win.

and i am more at peace than i’ve ever been. not fully, as i can’t be fully. but more than ever. if the war comes, i am no longer afraid of it. i could go right now and i would be alright. and this is not a small thing for me to be able to say. a few months ago i could not even have thought about it.

this is the most personal thing i’ve ever written, and i almost didn’t. God is unfortunately a sensitive subject, so i know exactly how it can sound. for most of my life i wasn’t open to any of this either. not even a little. so i understand completely if you’re reading this with your arms crossed. i am not asking you to agree with me. i am asking you to be open the way i eventually managed to be open, and out of curiosity, to start reading the Bible for yourself. if you have questions about my experience or any other, feel free to leave them in the comments or message me privately, whatever you prefer. i will talk about it honestly with anyone, wherever you happen to stand on it. (i’ll limit myself to what i understand, know, or have experienced.)

the world is changing, my friends, and as much as i would love to tell you that good times are coming, i don’t believe they are. look at what’s happening in the world. it will only go down from here.

but i am at peace with what’s coming. i found the one thing that isn’t fleeting, right as everything else started slipping through my fingers, and it left me able to face what’s ahead without being afraid of it.

i want that for you too. whatever happens, i want you at peace.

and there’s only one way to find it.🌹

the more of my life it took, the less i saw it happening. if i am looking back now, all those moments of reaching for my phone while taking a short break from work, or even while working at times, or filming first just to “preserve the experience or relive it later” instead of experiencing it first, and so many others, became normal to me, and i completely stopped paying attention to them.

but if the digital became my normal, then what are the things i actually paid attention to or remembered? well, they were the ones when i was completely disconnected from the digital.

i rarely, if ever, talk about a purely digital memory. it has to be rooted in the thing that isn’t my normal to actually remember it. and don’t get me wrong. i didn’t choose this on purpose, but i think we always remember the most the things that break the pattern. and the digital became my pattern.

and it’s weird because in a way i believe we started using all of this to remember everything for us, and somehow it’s the thing making most of my life impossible to remember. we are giving it so much of us, and what we get back is a life we can’t actually recall.

we are at a point where we can save more than anyone ever has, but we are also remembering less than anyone ever has.

i know that i keep coming back to this, but the feed is where most of this lives. the feed is designed on purpose to have no end. it just keeps going for as long as you want to be on it. and most of the posts hold no weight anymore.

everything is being made just for the sake of being made and to fill a spot in the algorithm, and things are usually forgotten the moment we see them. but as i said, this is how the feed is made to work, and i believe that a feed that let you keep things wouldn’t be a feed anymore. it needs you to let go of each thing so you can get to the next one.

so we’ve gotten really good at letting go of everything, without meaning to, because i don’t think we actually wanted this, and we also didn’t even notice that we’re doing it. when we are fed thousands of things at once, we don’t know which one to “save,” or we “save” too many of them, and thus, none of them actually stay with us. and after enough years of that, i think we start forgetting that we know how to actually hold onto something.

this entire reflection and the fact that i was going through (and still am from time to time) everything i mentioned here is what made me ask, if everything digital vanished tomorrow, what’s the one thing i’d keep?

the reason i went for one thing instead of everything is that if i am allowed to save the latter, then i end up saving absolutely nothing, which is the same thing that the thing that gave birth to this question does.

but when i only get to keep one, i actually have to choose, which is the whole point. to me, the thing we’d save is the thing we’d never scroll past. it’s the thing that’s left when everything else is gone.

we’ve built this entire world that we are so addicted to that could be gone in a moment, and we’ve reached a point where only a few people have stopped asking what they’d want on the other side of it.

so that’s what i am asking with this question. we’re living in a time that’s trying to replace everything, but i deeply believe that now we need to put more emphasis on the things you can’t replace.

so i decided to bring to life a wall on which people write down the thing they’d save on a small scrap and place it on it. there are no metrics or order that rewards absolutely anything. there’s no top, no ladder to climb, and it’s anonymous the whole way through. all these ideas were chosen because i wanted to make the only reason to leave something be that it meant something to you.

the wall doesn’t end either. i know this might sound weird coming from someone who keeps talking about finitude and even spent a big part of this essay against an endless thing. but the wall being endless is the opposite of the feed being endless, even though it’s the same word. the feed goes on forever and every new thing pushes the old ones further down until they’re gone for good. it grows so that things get buried.

the wall grows too, but nothing on it ever gets pushed down or covered over or made to matter less because something newer showed up. it stays exactly where it is, for as long as the wall is alive. i wanted it to go on forever for the opposite reason which is nothing anyone leaves ever gets lost. the entire point of it is to stay. the only finite part is you. the act of leaving your one thing is the finite thing living inside the endless one.

so, if everything digital vanished tomorrow, what’s the one thing you’d keep?

i’ve already left mine there.🌹

the culture was already there around me. globally, it was big. in romania, it existed, but not in a way i could really touch. the internet let me find people who were deep into it, people who’d been there since the pelle pelle days. they understood it in a totally different way than what i saw starting to be promoted more and more. i’m sure most of you have heard the word “hypebeast” before. i discovered the culture a little before that took off. in my opinion, the way people embraced that term did a lot of damage to the culture.

i loved sneakers so much, but the only way i ever got to “own” them was as wallpapers on my phone. i couldn’t afford any of it back then, and my parents weren’t willing to spend more than $50 on a pair of shoes. (the first pair of js i ever got was in the 9th grade as a birthday gift from my aunt who lived abroad.)

what i loved more than the sneakers themselves was learning about them. i wanted to know their lore, why a certain shoe mattered and what it meant to the people who cared about it. then i started going deeper into brand lore too, starting with stussy, then supreme, and along the way i also discovered my all-time favorite brand, the hundreds.

at some point, my love for streetwear started to drift away from what got me into it. when i entered high school, i realized i had started to value status more than the thing itself. i was a teenager who wanted to stand out at school, online, everywhere. but my circumstances, and the money i didn’t have to chase that, humbled me. they reminded me why i loved this culture in the first place and that it meant more than whatever my classmates or followers thought of me.

back when i discovered it, nobody around me was into it. there was nothing to show off because no one knew what i was even talking about. i loved it purely, for itself.

to me, the garments and sneakers have never been streetwear’s real thing. they were how you told people you belonged to something, or what you felt about something, without having to explain it. the community, the expression, the connection were the things that made me fall in love with streetwear. the artifacts were just how i wanted to signal that i was part of it.

in bobby hundreds’ book “this is not a t-shirt”, he writes that people usually buy into a brand for three reasons: identity, belonging, and ownership. the first two made sense to me right away. but the third one took more time because you never owned a piece of the brand or the movement. and yet, it all felt like ownership.

i think it felt that way because the movement knew you back. people and brands knew your name. living inside a culture and being known like that is the closest thing to ownership there is. it was never literal ownership but just a sense of it. and it was enough.

and it worked because it was small and a little private. from the outside, you were mostly anonymous, as streetwear never asked you to broadcast yourself to everyone. on the inside, among the people who were in it with you, you were known. there were things only people inside knew. the “if you know, you know” details were about keeping the circle small. they could feel like a wall, but they were mostly an invitation to put in the work.

Subscribe now

i had to do a lot of research to learn and understand things. i couldn’t open chatgpt and have it all handed to me. i had to be there and to pay real attention, to understand it. that friction was the whole point because it kept the numbers low enough for the movement to still know your name.

i’m thinking about this now because we’re living in the exact opposite of that. we’re in an age of abundance where you can make anything and have anything you want, and somehow all of it makes you feel nothing. we spend our time in these infinite spaces because we’ve become dependent on them, even though they leave us empty.

everything feels fleeting, and nothing really has depth. but i don’t think that’s an accident because depth needs somewhere private to gather, and we’ve traded that for reach. now you’re visible to everyone and known by no one. we’re broadcasting ourselves to strangers, but we’re strangers to the people who should actually know us. but streetwear was different. it had an inside.

the funny part is that the same door that let me in is the one that later broke the gate. the internet and a smartphone were what finally gave a kid from romania with no access and no money a way to find the culture. those are the same things that later flooded it and washed a lot of it away.

i call myself lucky because i think i got in at the right moment, when you could still see what was on the other side. and i think what was there is worth building again.

once streetwear got big, everyone was chasing the next release. brands like the hundreds mostly fell out of the conversation because they could never generate as much noise on the internet as a supreme box logo. then we merged streetwear with luxury. it made its way onto runways, and i still feel like it never really belonged there.

to me, streetwear was always a culture that stood against what the world rewarded. once it became what the world rewards, it had to turn into the thing it was originally against.

i remember many years ago the late virgil abloh saying that streetwear was dead. around the same time, bobby hundreds said that for streetwear to die, the streets would have to die first. for a long time i was really confused by these two statements because they came from two people i was looking up to and they were both right to me.

virgil was right that the version of streetwear we knew and loved got eaten. that part was over. but bobby was also right that the thing underneath it can’t die because the streets are just people making meaning from the bottom up, and that has never stopped.

that’s why i believe we need something like it again. but i’m not looking for another movement that big. if something tried to get that big today, people would call it dead even faster than they did with streetwear. i’m not wishing for another giant wave. i actually wish streetwear had never gotten that big either.

what i think we need instead is a lot of small movements with the same reason for existing, ones that keep their own inside and stay small enough to still know your name.

these movements don’t try to scale themselves into the exact thing they were built against. but they also don’t have to stay strangers to each other. the same way so many other movements overlapped with streetwear, these can overlap too. they can recognize each other, point people toward each other, and still never collapse into one big thing.

so i don’t think streetwear is dead. i think it went small, became the many instead of the one, and it is wherever someone is creating something with an inside.

streetwear was going right while everyone else was going left. maybe it’s our turn to turn.🌹

walter benjamin, in the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, wrote almost 100 years ago that once a work of art can be copied without end, it loses a quality he called “its aura, its here and now, the sense that it exists in one specific place and time and that you have to go to it”. and i feel the absence of exactly that every time a piece of art becomes a thumbnail i thumb past. the same emptying happens with music, because why would i buy a song when i can pay $5 a month and have access to an endless catalogue that holds nearly everything ever recorded, waiting for the moment i decide i want it? this is a reflex that, once you catch it in yourself, you start seeing it everywhere, including even in the way we hold people!!! everything has become so reachable that reaching itself has stopped meaning anything.

but the reach on its own explains nothing, because i can have a great deal of something and still love it. so i need to go deeper and think about what exists beneath this accessibility, which may be the thing we “were taught” to want in the first place. we are “raised” to chase money and status, to believe that status arrives with money and money arrives with status and there is nothing past this small circle worth reaching for, and we inherit this so early that most of us never stop to ask whether it even belongs to us.

i’m mostly speaking about my own generation and the ones younger than me, because at 27 i was raised right alongside social media as it became the thing we shaped ourselves around, and the belief that money and status are everything came dressed in that. i see the same desire in people older than me too, though i suspect that for some of them it grew from somewhere else entirely. and to be honest, i don’t think we even care about money and status themselves. we care about them because we were promised they would make us happy, and i genuinely don’t believe they will, so in my eyes we end up living in a mirage. we are actually caring about nothing.

so now i am wondering, how do we start caring again? and the answer that’s been on my mind for some time is finitude. i believe that when a thing ends, really ends, we hold it with a different attention and more intention, and most of the time these aren’t things designed for us. for example, there was a person i met once and never again, and i already know that i never will. the fact that i couldn’t choose it or press play on it again is what made it stay with me for more than 5 years now.

but then there’s something that breaks my own answer clean in half, because these same limits have also made people care about the worst things. when streetwear became really popular here in romania, it did so together with the term hypebeast, and i remember everyone in my generation and the younger ones wanting to be one. the famous supreme box logo tee and many other collaborations were suddenly the most coveted things around. instagram and facebook were full of them. most of the kids wearing or chasing these things didn’t even care about the culture, or even know what they were actually wearing. what they knew was that the harder it was to get, the more they had to have it.

but later this scarcity, and the bragging that came with it, moved from physical to digital. the “nike snkrs” app is an app where you enter a raffle for the chance to buy a limited sneaker release, and winning got so scarce that people stopped bragging about the sneaker itself and started bragging about the fact that they won the raffle. screenshots of “wins” were worth more than the shoe. so here we see how the very thing i just called the cure is also the exact machine that hollowed those kids out and did, in a way, real damage to the culture underneath them.

i used to believe the line ran between natural and manufactured scarcity, but that isn’t it, because almost all of it is manufactured to some degree. so maybe the line is in what the limit is facing. to me, a limit can face toward the feeling, built so the encounter goes deeper, and a limit can face toward the wanting, built so that more people want in. the person i met once faced inward, because i couldn’t wear it or resell it or even hold it up for anyone to see. the raffle, on the other hand, faced outward, because its scarcity could be worn, counted, and converted, which runs straight back into money and status. so maybe the limit was never even the real thing.

i assume most of us have a song we could replay a thousand more times, and it would still mean more to us than most of what we only heard once. so i believe it was never fewness that made me care, but the care itself, and a limit may be one of the only ways care is still preserved in a world that wants to turn everything into something to be consumed. but at the same time, a person can still choose to stop consuming something even without any scarcity, and that is the ideal i wish existed.

Subscribe now

i don’t have a way to reach it, and maybe if i did, that would already make me part of the sickness that wants to break everything into steps to follow, which to me is the exact opposite of caring. the most i’ve come to is that the limits worth anything are the ones that can’t be shown or counted or even wanted, and even those seem to come apart the moment i try to engineer them into being. maybe that means we don’t really create them at all. or maybe i’m wrong about even that. i don’t know yet. but what i do know for sure is that i’ve ended up right where i began, with the one question i can’t put down and am no longer sure has a finite answer:

how do we create limits that help people care again?🌹

the feeling i had on that swing is something i will never forget. sometimes we indeed competed over who could swing the hardest, but the competition was never the reason. i’d have done it even if i never met anyone there or was seen by anyone doing it. it was a thing that didn’t lead me anywhere. all i did was get on, swing, get off, and go home, with nothing left behind. the only proof that it happened was the feeling, which was already fading by the time i walked home.

Subscribe now

do you remember the last time you did something like that? i am not referring to the swing specifically, but to the act of doing something for no reason at all. just to do it.

i personally can’t find a recent example in my own life. almost everything i do now points somewhere past itself. i mean, i rest so i can work better, i walk so i can think, i read so i can use it later, i do this to serve that. the doing is never just the doing anymore; it’s always in service of something downstream.

but the real problem might not be that we do things for a reason. we have always done things for reasons, but what has changed is what the reason has become. it used to be the feeling, or the person in front of you, or even the thing itself. now the reason is almost always some version of being seen and getting validation.

whether we like it or not, social platforms are where most of us spend a big part of our time, and one of their worst influences is that they taught us to think this way. for some time, they were truly social, and being on them was a real joy. but once being seen became the whole currency and “indirectly” forced us to become fluent in it, we started shaping everything we do around whether it will be seen and by how many.

i’ve done it myself, and sadly i still catch myself doing it from time to time. i’ve made things because i’ve been taught that’s what works, and i hated every one of them even as i was working on them. and the worst part is that this obsession didn’t stay just inside the app or while i was working on the thing. it spread into the life i lived once i turned it off, and most of my days had become a narration!!!

back in the day, a well-photographed meal belonged to the brand selling it, and we all knew it. now the same photo belongs to the person at the next table and to me. what used to be a brand’s job has become everyone’s. we’ve reached a point where the moment no longer counts if there isn’t proof of it or a metric to validate it.

there was no proof that the swing had happened, and that was the whole point of it. it happened and then it was gone, and it belonged to no one but me. but now the moment only counts if it’s captured and validated by something that doesn’t even care about you in the first place. i’d even say that the moment we start capturing it is also the moment we are no longer in the thing.

the swing and the scroll are both repetitive, and both go back and forth and arrive nowhere. they are both a loop i could stay inside for hours (theoretically). but one of them filled me up, and the other emptied me. so the difference may not be the motion itself, but rather where it points. the swing pointed nowhere and referred to nothing, while the scroll points at everything except the person doing it.

put it really well in one of our exchanges:

that, to me, is the whole trade.

we keep feeding the thing, hoping that belonging finally arrives, but we’re at a point where the lack of belonging has never felt so deep. and still, for some reason, we stay and keep pointing our entire lives outward at something that does not know we exist and would not even care if we stopped.

i’ve been telling myself that we’ve forgotten how to do things for no reason, and i think i was wrong. the swing was for the purest reason there is, which is itself. the feeling was the whole of it, and it was already complete in the doing!!

so maybe it was never about reasonlessness. what we’ve lost is the capacity to do a thing that refers to nothing beyond itself. a thing that’s just the thing and not a step toward, proof of, content about, or in service of. and i realize the truest reason was always there. so:

do you remember the last time you were on a swing? go find one. don’t film it. don’t tell anyone. get on, and swing, and get off, and let it disappear.

it will be the most reason you’ve had in a long time.🌹

everyone keeps telling me the same thing anyway. you have to pick a niche and define your value proposition. you must become the “ai guy”, “the growth person”, or whatever. essentially, you must be known for one thing only. but i’ve realized that underneath all of it is the algorithm, which needs to know what box to put me in. if i’m doing more at once, i’m giving it too many signals and it gets confused, and a confused algorithm buries me every time. so the advice is always the same: make yourself legible. and i tried that for a long time, and the more i tried the more i hated myself, my work, the platforms, and everything tied to that journey. it felt like being asked to amputate the parts that make me myself.

somewhere around the end of high school, i watched an interview with the late Virgil Abloh and a kid who was showing him the streetwear brand he was building. i was trying to start my own streetwear brand back then. i had a blog before that called sneakintheculture (i was writing about the culture. i wanted people to discover the culture through my blog, thus “sneak in”), but i wanted something more tangible, so i hung on every word. at some point Virgil told the kid he should do more things at once, because each thing pulls attention to the others. those words stayed with me for years, though i only recently realized that i understood them completely wrong.

i thought he meant launch a bunch of projects, cross-promote them, and treat them like nodes feeding each other. so that’s exactly what i did. i started more things than i could keep track of and pointed them all at each other and waited for the thing i now know people call momentum. nothing ever clicked, and i never understood why, until recently.

when i actually look at Virgil’s work, the mediums he worked in kept changing but underneath there was always the same way of seeing. the same vision and approach, reappearing in different shapes. he was being one person in a lot of places at once. and that’s when it landed for me. Virgil Abloh was the niche himself.

the whole lesson in doing more than one thing was never about quantity, but always about building a way of seeing so specific that it survives whatever form it takes. so i realized that what matters more than picking a lane is becoming the thing people recognize regardless of the lane i’m standing in.

the apps we spend most of our time in don’t really care who we follow anymore. they only care about what we’re interested in. actually i think it’s about what they think we’re interested in, because most of what i see is not something i actually want. every time i open a feed i’m welcomed by a “for you” that i never asked for, and i have to take a few more steps to reach the people i actually chose. the social side of these platforms has stepped back so the interest side can run the place.

let me explain how i see the difference between an interest graph and a social one. in the social one, you’re a person. in the interest one, you’re a node. you start being known by what you do, the “vibecoder,” the “growth marketer,” and so on, and the whole job, if you follow the playbook, is to become the cleanest possible version of that node. you keep the type of posts, the format, and the schedule consistent. you see what performs, cut what doesn’t, and keep reiterating. but i have a feeling that you already know this behavior.

i believe the most interesting work has always happened where different worlds collide. and right now i think we’re living in a time where ai is democratizing creation itself. i had so many ideas i wanted to bring to life over the years, but a lack of skills or money always stopped me. ai has collapsed those costs. i can finally collide my ideas and turn them into real things. and as great as that is, it also raises the stakes. if creation is cheap for everyone, then doing many things gets cheap too. cheap output is going to be everywhere. it already is, and we are calling it “slop.” so the playbook everyone’s selling may be exactly backwards. a single lane is the easiest thing in the world to mass-produce now. what can’t be copied is one way of seeing stretched across many of them.

everyone wants to be a creator these days, for good reasons. everyone is chasing the same attention, and the feeds are more than full and so are our heads. we’ve split our attention across too many voices and split ourselves across too many platforms, all to feed something that will never be satisfied. i’m exhausted. and i believe more and more that the person who cuts through is the one who looks like they aren’t even playing the game. the one who just follows their own curiosity and chooses, while most of us wait to be fed.

when Pharrell got named creative director at Louis Vuitton, after Virgil Abloh had the role, Bobby Hundreds wrote something about it that i still remember. he said Virgil’s era ran on an “if i’ve done this, you can do it too” energy, while Pharrell’s was “you can do it, but you can’t do it like me.”

Subscribe now

both Virgil and Pharrell did more than one thing, and both of them are the whole argument i’m making. but those two energies split the internet i grew up wanting from the internet i’m living in. Pharrell’s is the one we’re in now, where the dominant energy is “this is my expertise, you can’t replicate it, so stay in your lane.” Virgil’s is the one i and so many others keep reaching for, where the energy is “this is my world, you’re invited, and you’re allowed to go build your own that overlaps with mine.”

i got my own small taste of it in the handoff from Tumblr to Instagram. back then you followed someone because they were into streetwear and anime and some obscure architecture blog all at once, because they posted blurry photos from their LG, and you liked the way they saw, and you never once asked what their niche was because you followed the person. due to my age and the internet restrictions i had back then, i mostly lived in that internet through dreams and through reading about it after the fact. for a long time i thought that internet was gone for good. i don’t think so anymore.🌹

I’ve spent many years of my life lost in these infinite things. It mostly happened when I entered high school because all I wanted was to belong, and you needed to be on these to belong, and do many things you don’t necessarily want to do, and, well, I got caught in the game. But my perspective on things and life has changed a lot since then, and I no longer care about these things that much, if at all.

What I’ve realized, growing up, is that something that gave me everything gave me nothing I was able to keep. The things I remember most from those high-school years have nothing to do with the places I thought I had to be in order to “belong.”

A feed, for example, is and always was something that handed me a thousand feelings in a few minutes, and every time I walked away, I couldn’t even name one of them. On most days, I cannot remember what I felt, and on some, I’m not even sure I felt anything at all.

But a finite thing does the opposite, because it gives me one thing, and since it’s only one, I actually get to keep it. The Tamagotchi is a gadget I always love giving as an example. I didn’t have a real Tamagotchi as a kid because where I grew up, few people had them, but we had plenty of similar “gadgets.” I had some of these when I was a child. Some didn’t even have pixels, but on each one, you could do only one thing, and whenever you finished doing that, you were done.

I don’t think I’ve ever loved a device more than those since. I think this happened because I was always using them intentionally, on purpose, and I felt that I received that attention back.

Today, I’m not sure how many of us are truly intentional with the time we give to infinite things. We keep telling ourselves that the amount of time we spend on them is intentional, but I think we just found a new definition for dependence. The more a thing can do, the less I seem to value it, and today I care about my phone more than almost any object I own, and yet I know that I am not attached to it at all. By dependency, I don’t mean the dependence that scrolling itself gives you, because that’s the one we talk about the most, but the dependency on the thing itself. I am dependent on what I can do with and through it. The scrolling dependency is secondary to this one. (I have fortunately almost cured myself of it. not entirely though, because it’s not an easy process, but I am getting there.)

Whenever we talk about being replaced these days, we think about AI, and we say that these new systems and robots, or however you call them, are going to replace our humanity.

I agree that it’s going to take our jobs, as a lot of people have already been replaced, and more will be as this technology gets better. But it also creates new opportunities, so I don’t think that’s the thing to worry about the most. What we should be concerned about is something else, like losing ourselves, but that’s a topic for another essay, because there’s so much to say about it.

I think that before AI became so popular, most of what made us human had already been replaced, and we didn’t even realize it because there was no big movement behind it.

For example, one thing that I think has been replaced, deeply influenced by social media, is the nature of our relationships. When social media was still social, the predominant nature of our relationships was relational. But once it became something totally different from social, the relational nature took a back seat to the transactional one. All this happened before AI was even “a thing.”

The replacement we are focused on is the one in the headline, but I think the most impactful ones are happening inside the news.

“What remains human when everything is being replaced?” is the question my work has been in conversation with for some time now. The more I explore it, the more I realize that I might never have an exact answer to it. I think it’s a question that gets you closer to things that feel like the answer, only to reveal another one, and another, and another, and another. Finite things are one of those, and I believe they may be one of the answers to this question.

By finite, I’m not referring just to the object itself, but also to the experience that forms around it and the one it gives you. One of these experiences, for example, is holding something in your hands for the first time. That’s a feeling you only get once with that thing.

So I made one.

For the past few months, I have been working on a zine. It’s a small printed object that I was always curious about making, but I think I needed a push to finally do it. The tiredness of living inside something that constantly asks for more, but always for less presence, may have been the push I needed.

I wanted to make something that responded to it, and I was keen on making it physical. It would have been much easier to make it digital, and I did think about it, since it would have cost me almost nothing and, in theory, reached more people. But I still wanted to follow the “harder” way and start with something physical. The more I thought about making it digital, the more I could feel the whole point of it draining away. Turning it into another infinite thing would have betrayed what it was for.

My work with The Hidden I is to make you feel something again. It has always been this, though I never knew how to package it in a way that resonated with me. Until now. It's a protest against not feeling anything, something I do because I want people to feel something again. Whether it's me giving that feeling or them finding it themselves, I want it to start taking shape while they're inside it, and by the end to exist clearly in their souls. And zine #0 is the physical, finite embodiment of that.

The zine was made in the first place for myself. I needed to make something like this. I had to. And then I made it for the people who still remember how to spend time with things, and for the people who used to but unconsciously forgot, and for those who feel the absence of it without having a name for what exactly went missing. I think there are far more of us than it may seem from inside the feed.

I want the way you come to holding the zine to carry a little of the same intention as the thing itself. You can find it on thehiddeni.com, sent to you wherever you are, with the delivery free and worldwide (everything is so expensive these days that this "worldwide" gave me the most headaches, but thank God I found a way to do it). If you already live on Farcaster or Orb, and would rather pay me directly in crypto, you can collect it there instead.

If you have any questions about it, feel free to message me anytime here, or in the comments, or on any other social platform (@eduardmsmr on Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, Farcaster, Orb).

Thank you for all your support. I’m really excited about this stage of my journey.

This is the first finite thing I have made, and I look at it as a protest. And if there’s one thing I hope this small finite thing reminds you of, it’s this: don’t be afraid to feel again.🌹

And this is happening at the same time that everyone is telling us to be ourselves. You must be authentic, you must do it your way, and you must remember that “taste is the moat”. I don’t think we have ever talked about individuality more than we do now, and at the same time, I don’t think we have ever been more obedient to a set of rules none of us wrote. I do not think most people are lying when they say be yourself, but I simply cannot work out how we are supposed to be ourselves in the things we make while we are still holding each thing up against what the algorithm wants from us before we even start making it.

The early internet, the one I am old enough to be a little nostalgic for, felt more human than this. It truly felt like people were in it. I started to believe that the internet became less human when we stopped posting what we felt and started posting what we thought would work.

I am not saying that we were never posting something for someone on the other side of the screen we were hoping to reach, but I know that we were doing it much less than we are doing now. We cared more about curating our own expression online than allowing someone or something else to curate it for us, which is what is happening today. The person and the algorithm behind the screen do not want the same things for us. One wants the human side of things, while the other just wants to be fed. And we’ve been taught to want to please the latter more, but it can and will never be pleased.

And now I find myself getting back to taste, which is something I said I am never going to talk about again, but here I am. Taste is the thing we’ve been told will save us. Taste is the last human advantage, the part of us that still chooses, the only thing that cannot be automated. It is inherently ours. And I want to believe that. But I cannot stop asking how much of my taste is still mine. I can’t remember exactly when I started to care more about how a thing performed than about my own personal expression, and this is exactly why I believe that I’ve unconsciously spent years training myself to feel a small spark of yes every time something looked like it would perform. And thus my taste is no longer mine, but what something else thinks others will like. I was looking at taste as being a cure, but I think most of it is just the same sickness, but wearing nicer clothes.

I keep saying that one of the reasons why everything is so fleeting now is because most of the things we create and consume are weightless, but at the same time, it’s a weightless thing that holds so much value in our lives. The metrics we care so much about measure nothing that actually matters, but at the same time, these same numbers that mean nothing are also the ones that decide who gets seen. They are weightless, and they are everything at the same time. You can stop caring about them and still see how a thing you loved was read by no one, while something you made carelessly travels further than you ever wanted it to go. The game is fake, but it also decides who ‘eats’. Both of these are true. And I have done all of it.

I have sat with a way I actually wanted to say something and eventually set it aside because I already knew it would go nowhere, and I focused on the other way instead, which I tried to shape for the feed, and told myself it was the same thing, but it wasn’t. I’ve found myself refreshing a post so many times, watching a number that was not moving, and feeling something close to grief over it, which is an insane thing to feel if you ask me. What I am still realizing about this game is that even if I win, I will be left empty in a particular way that I cannot fully articulate because I don’t fully understand it. I would say “yet,” but I don’t think I ever will understand it, simply because I want to pull back from these things even more than I am doing now.

Part of what pulls me back is a handful of people who are still doing the other thing, which is essentially posting and making things that no “growth” advice would ever have told them to make. These are the threads I want to keep following, and I follow them because I think they are one of the things that remain human when everything else is being replaced. The reason behind making something is one of the last, if not the last, human things a machine cannot copy, and I think that if we paid a little more attention than we do now, we could feel its presence or its absence almost instantly.

The other part is a thing I have understood more slowly. Since I started getting closer to God, I have begun to see how fleeting all of this is, and how much of myself I had been pouring into something that was never able to receive it. The emptiness I could not explain earlier makes a little more sense to me now, because I think it was the honest thing to feel all along. You cannot be filled by something that does not see you, and for years, I kept offering myself to a thing that cannot be pleased and does not care to be, and then wondering why I felt so hollow even after winning. I am not saying this to preach anything, and I do not fully have the words for it. I only know that getting closer to Him changed the light I see all of this in, and once that light changed, the game looked smaller than it ever had.

Subscribe now

I am not going to start a movement, or log off (though I am more logged off than ever), or fix the internet, because I do not think it gets fixed from above, and I don’t think it gets fixed all at once. It is too big for that. But I do think that the change comes in the moments before I post something, when I am reflecting on what I actually feel and what I have learned will work. I think this gap is the place where these two can be told apart. I also think it’s the one where the internet went cold, and at the same time, the only place I have ever found where it gets warm again.

This gap is something I would love for more people to be aware of, because it is only by being inside it that we can choose the version that is more human, in the moment we feel ourselves about to reach for the version that works. It’s one way to realize one of the things that remains human when everything is being replaced.🌹

Being fortunate enough to discover it before this movement happened, I got to experience its true nature a little bit more, and one of the brands that stayed with me the most from the OG streetwear days of the 2000s was The Hundreds, mostly because Bobby Hundreds’ work was the one I resonated with the deepest. A few years ago, I read his book, This is Not a T-shirt, and in it, he wrote that people buy into a brand for three things: identity, belonging, and ownership.

Since then, I have kept returning to them from time to time, but lately, I have found myself reflecting a little bit more on belonging. The reason, I think, is that I have spent a lot of my life feeling like I do not quite belong anywhere. Today, I believe genuine belonging has become one of the rarest things we still search for, as most of what we experience is only a sense of it.

Ownership has always been the “easiest” one to see through. Whenever I spoke about this, I loved to give the example of our social media profiles, as I think it is one of the clearest places where ownership exists mostly as a feeling. We say the Instagram profile is ours. We say the posts are ours, and we talk about our audience, our page, or our archive. But none of it belongs to us. The account can disappear because of someone we will never speak to, for reasons we may never be told, and there is almost nothing we can do about it. What we had was the feeling of ownership, and it was designed well enough that many of us never felt the need to check whether the thing underneath was real.

Now, most of the belongings we have are also feelings handed to us in place of the real thing. The proof that took me the longest to see is that we belong everywhere. We are inside too many things at once. We “belong” to way too many group chats, servers, memberships, communities, private feeds, or subscriber spaces. We treat all of this as a connection, but I think the fact that one person can belong to twenty rooms at the same time is also the clearest sign that none of those rooms is asking very much of them. Belonging is not something I can collect. I cannot be deeply known by twenty rooms. So maybe the collecting itself, the joining and joining and joining, is evidence of belonging’s absence.

One of the worst parts of being inside so many rooms at once is that we start shaping ourselves to fit them. Every new space has its version of what gets rewarded. Slowly, we become fluent in becoming whatever the room wants from us. We mold ourselves because we want a little bit of that recognition, attention, acceptance, or any small proof that we are part of it. To me, this feels like an inversion of what belonging used to mean. Belonging used to be something that arrived after you were known. People knew you first, and out of that knowing came belonging. Now, we perform belonging first. We shape ourselves into the room, and hope that being known will come later as a reward. But it rarely does.

There is a limit to how many people a person can actually hold in their mind. There is a real number, somewhere, of people you can know and be known by, and that number is small. It has always been small, perhaps for a reason. I am not talking about acquaintances or people whose names you recognize. I am talking about the people who do not need you to constantly explain your shape.

Subscribe now

The internet, with its endless feeds and networks that count their members in millions, asks us to belong at a scale that has no relationship to that number at all. It asked us to belong to crowds, and belonging to a crowd is an entirely different thing from belonging to a smaller and more meaningful space. So we learned how to do the only thing that scale allowed us to do. We learned how to appear. We learned how to speak in the language of the room. We learned how to perform the signals of belonging without receiving the substance of it. Maybe this is why so many places feel full and empty at the same time.

Group chats have appeared in my recent essays more than I expected them to, and I find myself returning to them again here because, strangely, I think they are one of the few genuine social places left online. I do not mean the group chats you join because you want to get something out of them. Those are just a different kind of marketplace. I mean the ones that exist for no reason other than that a few people wanted to keep being in each other’s lives.

One of the most important traits of a group chat like that is that it cannot scale. If too many people enter, it stops being what it was. Its ceiling is intentional, and it is the reason it works. It remains small enough for everyone to still fit inside everyone else’s mind. That smallness is not beside the point. That smallness is the point. A group chat like this feels real because of the limits it has.

So this is where I think we are. We belong to everything and are known by almost nothing. I do not think this can last forever. I think more people will get tired of this simulated belonging. They will start leaving the rooms that never knew them. They will stop adding themselves to things just because those things are open, and they will begin to understand that one real room can be bigger than twenty rooms.

The future of belonging, the way I see it, is not bigger networks, but smaller, meaningful ones. They are places where we do not have to hide behind a curated version of ourselves, because the people inside know us well enough to notice the difference. The crowd could never see both the good and bad days, because the crowd was only looking at the number beside our name, and never at us. The tiredness that more of us will feel, and that I already feel, is the thing that made me understand the difference between being seen and being counted. It is the thing that told me I had spent so much of my time in rooms I did not belong to, rooms that were never going to know me back.

We are moving into a time when more and more of what surrounds us can be made by something other than a person. Everything can be generated, simulated, optimized, and produced without a human anywhere near it. Because of that, the things that cannot be simulated will become more valuable. Being genuinely known by another person is one of those things. No system can do it for us. It cannot be scaled, automated, generated, or optimized. It can only happen the slow way, in a small room, between people who actually hold each other in mind.

This is the place I want to return to, because to me, the small is where belonging was always real. When so much around us no longer is, the real is what will matter most.🌹

The first layer, to me, is the easiest one to see because it is the one I have been living with the most. It is almost impossible now to curate what you experience online. Most of the things we consume are things that an algorithm thinks we are interested in, not things we are actually interested in. I, at least, have never chosen “For You.” Everything I do online teaches the algorithm something. My “refusals” are useful data. The things I scroll past teach the system what to show me next. Choice has been replaced with an appearance of choice, which is a more sophisticated version of no choice at all. But this is something that is often discussed, so I will not stay here long, as I also do not think it is the deepest part.

Something deeper than that happens when we make something. While we think the algorithm is not influencing our making at all, I would say that it has been living inside it for a while now. For a long time, there has always been a second voice in the process whenever I was creating something. That voice was telling me how I should package the thing, how the first two or three seconds should hook, what the thumbnail or title should look like, how the caption should open, and so many other things that had nothing to do with what I was actually trying to make. The voice was the translator that took whatever I was trying to make and translated it into the language the system can read.

But I hated so much the way I was doing it that I completely stopped doing it and told myself that if anyone resonates with me, it is because they resonate with how I actually create things, not because of the way they were presented on a social platform. I do care about how I package a message, or how I present anything I make. But I want to shape the algorithm around my own vision, not have the algorithm shape my vision around its preferences. I, like many others, have been fortunate to realize this early in my journey, but many, after a while, even forget that there was a version of what they were making before the translation. The original has become the translation.

The part that frightens me the most when I sit with this has nothing to do with dopamine or time spent on platforms. What frightens me is that the algorithm has started shaping our thinking. It is influencing what gets made before the making happens. It knows what we would think before we think it. And once the algorithm becomes an upstream of thought, it becomes an upstream of life.

Subscribe now

This is why some of us are no longer fully inside our own lives, because everything we experience is being filtered through the question of whether it could become content. We walk into a beautiful room, and a part of us is already seeing how it could become a post, while another part is trying to actually be in the room. Or we finally go to a place we have been wanting to go to for so long, but we are not fully present there because a part of us is concerned about filming everything, about what could be extracted, about how this experience could be turned into content.

This is one of the things I mean when I say something has been done to us on the inside. The problem, in my eyes, has nothing to do with our behavior or our attention, but with our presence. We no longer have the capacity to be inside a moment without simultaneously thinking about how we can export and package that moment for others to see.

There has been a lot of talk, especially in the past year, about how personal branding will matter now more than ever, how documenting your work and showing the human, or the human life, behind the craft is what separates the people who will build something successful from the people who will not. In a way, I agree with this. The person matters, as they always have. The work can become more interesting when the human behind it is felt. I am not against it, but what I am noticing is that this idea, taken seriously and applied at scale, has turned us into people who are constantly producing ourselves. The line between living and presenting is so thin that most of us cannot find it anymore. And this makes me wonder how many of us are still actually living the lives we are documenting.

I often go to the forest or take long walks alone along a path at the foot of a small mountain in my city. I love taking pictures while I am there of the landscape, the animals I see, or the plants around me. I do it for myself because after I live the moment, I want to make sure that I can also capture it on my phone. I could do much more than that. I could film, narrate, and turn the whole experience into a small piece of content with a thoughtful caption, and I know exactly what that piece of content would look like, because that second voice is still present. But I do not. I rarely share the pictures I have taken. My experience did not happen for the content. The content may happen because of the experience. The difference is small, but it is everything.

I am not sure if this is a meaningful example for you, but this is one of the places in my life where I notice it most.

Underneath all of this, there is something that holds the whole diagnosis together, which is the idea that content is fleeting. We know it is designed to disappear, and so we do not spend time with it. We are pushed to scroll fast past something because we know that the next thing is already loading, and the next thing after that, and the next thing after that, and so on, infinitely. I look at this as being more of a problem of caring than of attention. We have stopped caring about the things we encounter because there is no point in caring about something that is already on its way to being gone. Really? Caring for a thing takes time, and time spent with just one thing is the one thing this environment is engineered against. So the dynamic of our time spent on socials becomes seeing things, reacting to them, and sometimes even being moved by them, but not caring about any of it for long enough to leave a mark on us.

And once that becomes the rhythm of how we engage with what we see, we start choosing what to do based on whether it can become content. I am not saying that this is always happening, or that it is always conscious. But it still happens often enough that it changes the shape of a life. We may do things because of the posts the thing or experience can be turned into. The way we feel becomes split into partly truly feeling it and partly feeling it because the feeling is shareable. And I think that the question of content now coming before living is the deepest harm of what social media has become.

I am sure I am not the only one feeling this, and I see it on socials very often, even when it is packaged differently. You can hear it in the way people talk about being tired. That exhaustion is one of the things I notice most.

This is how I see the current state of social media impacting our lives. I am definitely sad, and not pleased with it, and I think that a refusal to everything that is happening will come to life. It will not happen all at once, or in the same place, but it will be spread out, made by different people, and it may look small and unimportant for a long time before it becomes obvious that it was the whole point. This is how I see the future of social media being shaped.

There will be apps that have no algorithm. These are apps where what you see is what the people you chose to see have actually shared, in the order they shared it, with no invisible voice deciding for you what you would be interested in. The simplicity of this sounds almost embarrassing to describe, because it is what social media claimed to be. And it was. Thus, returning to that simplicity, after everything we have learned about what the alternative does to us, will feel like a relief. The absence of the algorithm will be the feature.

I foresee small social apps built around a single intimate behavior instead of trying to absorb everything at once. The screenshots I have on my phone are some of the most personal things on it. They have nothing to do with an audience or a metric. They are little fragments of my identity, and put together, they are almost all of it. The current platforms we have try to be everything for everyone and end up being almost nothing for anyone. So I believe the next ones will be small on purpose.

Group chats will be a much larger part of this future. Group chats can also be private channels or subcommunities on various social platforms. Even if they do not look like platforms, group chats are some of the most social spaces left online, and they are social precisely because they are not designed to scale. You cannot grow a group chat beyond a certain size without it stopping being a group chat. The people in them are people that you actually know, and who actually know you, and the knowing is the whole point.

The underground will shape this in the same way that it has shaped almost every meaningful cultural shift before it, even if we do not want to admit it. The people who have refused what social has become will form their own tribes around what they actually believe in. They will design their own places without waiting for anyone to give them one. And today, this is easier than ever because AI has almost fully democratized creation. Anyone can now code their own home on the internet in a few days without anyone’s permission. This has happened before, in different forms, through streetwear, street art, and whatever surface was available at the time. The surface is new, but the instinct is the same.

The future of social will also be increasingly IRL, and this may actually be the hardest part to argue for because IRL is more difficult than URL, and most people will not choose the harder one unless something has gone wrong with the easier one. But something has, and I do believe that the friction of these IRL social gatherings is what will make them matter even more. The connections that survive the friction are the ones worth having, and people are going to start choosing friction over the weightlessness of the frictionless.

Alongside all of this, I think the way we post will be more intentional and random at the same time. Intentional in the sense that we will post when we actually feel like posting, not when the algorithm rewards it, and create when we actually have something to say, not when the feed demands it. Random in the sense that we will share things that fit no brand and serve no narrative. Intentional and random can feel like complete opposites, but to me, they are the same posture in different clothes.

What the algorithm did, underneath all of this, is take our caring and hand it back to us, pointed somewhere else. We now care more about what someone who does not even know or care about us thinks of something we made than about the thing we made, or we care more about the metrics a thought has achieved than the thought itself. We have even reached a point where we care less about the one person who has been moved by what we put into the world, and care more about the 10k who like it without reading it, because 10,000 > 1. But it is not.

The caring and the direction we have been taught to point it in is the thing I would like us to feel our way back from. I do not know exactly what the way back looks like, and I do not trust anyone who claims they do. But I think it starts with remembering that the number on the post was never the post.🌹

Most of the things made today are made for the sake of being made. Whenever I am reflecting on this matter, I am always thinking about social media first, as it is the place where most posts are made just to be put out there.

But, to be honest, the more I explore this world (both digital and physical), the more I realize how most things made today are made just for the sake of it. Though all this behavior is deeply shaped by the demands of how social media works. Thus, the root is social media.

The algorithm rewards volume, at least in theory, and volume hollows things out. There are only a few people able to put out a lot of real quality. Someone with a team of X people can release five really well‑made pieces of content a day in a way a single person usually can’t.

I know AI democratizes creation, and a single person can now produce just as many pieces in a day, but anything truly qualitative still demands time. AI’s role in creation is also part of why things feel so ephemeral.

When everything is made, nothing weighs anything. This is why we scroll through something and forget it in the same minute.

Everything has become weightless. There are only a few people who still stay up for something. The mainstream now is a flat surface where you slide across an endless feed of stuff that only makes us think it means something.

Every single person who has spent a lot of time in such an environment eventually starts feeling a strong desire to belong to something the feed cannot satisfy. And I would say it cannot do that because it is just a surface. It can become a door for the few willing to design those doors and the others willing to notice their handles, but for most, it stays a surface.

This is what brought me back to the 1990s, because I think the future is found in that past, belonging to the people building doors again and those willing to step into the world they are protecting.

I wasn’t there for any of this. I was born in 1999, and everything I know about these scenes comes from reading, digging through old interviews, photos, and documentaries, and tracing the stories of the people who actually breathed life into them.

In the early 90s, on two sides of the world, a handful of people built the template for what underground belonging actually looks like, and most of what we now call streetwear and street art emerged from it. I often compare those things with group chats, because there was no intention behind these people, or eventually their brands, to build a marketing strategy or to fit into a content category. What they designed was giving people a “clubhouse,” as we will see later.

Around 1990, in Tokyo, Hiroshi Fujiwara started a brand called GOODENOUGH. He had been a kid obsessed with the London punk scene, then with New York hip-hop, and he had spent years carrying records back to Tokyo. By the time he started GOODENOUGH, with graphics heavily shaped by SK8THING, he was making things for the people in his orbit.

Three years later, he co-founded a shop called NOWHERE in the back streets of Harajuku with two younger friends, Nigo and Jun Takahashi. The neighborhood was so off the main drag that locals nicknamed it Ura-Harajuku, which translates as “underground Harajuku.”

NOWHERE is where Nigo’s BAPE and Takahashi’s UNDERCOVER were first sold. Around the same time, there were also Shinsuke Takizawa, who started NEIGHBORHOOD in 1994, and Tetsu Nishiyama, who would soon start WTAPS in 1996. These were just a bunch of friends, each doing their own thing, helping each other along.

When Nigo started BAPE, he made only a few dozen t-shirts a week, sold some, and gave many away to creatives and stylists around Tokyo. What I love about his approach, and only later realized, is that he made sure to send the t-shirts to the people he wanted to see them on, and those people wore them in front of the people they hung out with, and the brand grew by word of mouth. He was clothing his scene.

A year after NOWHERE opened, on the other side of the world, a British kid named James Jebbia opened a small skate shop on Lafayette Street in lower Manhattan. He called it Supreme. The clothes were laid around the perimeter of the room so skaters could ride into the store with their backpacks on.

What we know today as models, back then, were just the kids who hung out there. Justin Pierce, Harold Hunter, Peter Bici, and Alex Corporan are some of those kids to whom Jebbia gave stickers, and they put them up around the city themselves. Years later, Corporan said something I’d want printed on a wall:

“James gave us a clubhouse. And when you have a house like that, everyone wants to be in the house. But we didn’t let people in like that.” And this is the whole thing.

A clubhouse is something that has a door and people inside it who recognize each other. You cannot algorithm your way into a clubhouse. You have to show up, and the people inside have to know you, and that knowing is the thing the brand is actually selling, even though it is technically selling t-shirts.

The same thing was happening in street art, which had started earlier than streetwear and is often seen as one of the foundations for the movement, as many of the OG streetwear brands were shaped by street art.

In 1989, a kid named Shepard Fairey was at art school in Providence, working in a skate shop, and he made a sticker of the wrestler Andre the Giant as a stencil joke for a friend. He printed a few, gave them to the skaters he hung out with, and the skaters put them around the East Coast as they traveled. Over the next few years, the same image evolved and, restripped, became OBEY.

In LA, OG Slick was painting buses and the concrete walls of the Los Angeles River with the K2S crew, and from there walking straight into clothing, designing for 3rd Rail and FUCT.

In New York, the older generation Fairey and Slick had grown up watching (Futura, Keith Haring, or Dondi), who had already shown what this looked like a decade earlier, with Haring being a great example. He chalked the empty black ad spaces in the subway, making art for the commute, free, before any gallery had figured out what to do with him.

The common thread between each of these stories is a small group of people who actually cared for something. The line between the maker and the buyer and the friend was almost invisible. At NOWHERE, the customers became the next wave of brand founders, and at Supreme, the customers were the team. And I got to experience something similar when I was at a vernissage organized by an underground digital art gallery. When I was there, I couldn’t tell which one of us was the organizer, which one was the artist, and which one had walked in off the street to see the show. We were all the same thing.

This is what I believe people will start to want again. It’s not a vibe or nostalgia they will desire, but something that carries weight, that demands showing up from them.

Subscribe now

Today, most brand purchases are made to be seen by people who don’t even know your name (or, in other words, by an algorithm). But tomorrow, I think, more and more people will buy a product because it gets them into a specific clubhouse. The weight will move from the logo to the small room and the small economy of people who actually know each other. The product will become a key, and the lock will be a community of 50, 200, or 1000 people who care about the same narrow thing with an intensity the mainstream no longer knows how to produce.

People will fight for those rooms more than they fight for almost anything else right now. Everything else is fleeting and weighs nothing. And what people sense (even the kids born straight into this era of flatness, who don’t have anything to compare it to) is that something is missing. Posting is not the same as belonging, an audience is not the same as a community, and being seen is not the same as being known.

The good news is that the underground still breathes. It never went anywhere. It was always under our noses. Think about the group chats with intentionally chosen members, the small in-person rooms, or the brands made by people who would rather give half of their stock away than sell to someone who does not get it. It is the same thing it was in Tokyo in 1990 or on Lafayette Street in 1994, but now it feels more scarce than ever.

And maybe that scarcity is what makes it matter. The few rooms that are real are real precisely because they are not for everyone. They are also harder than ever to find, which may be the only reason finding them still means something.

I know I keep talking about this, and the genuine reason I keep coming back to these rooms is that I am trying to figure out how to build one, and how to be the kind of person who deserves to be inside one.🌹

Even today, I am part of some group chats. Some belong to communities (sometimes the group chat is the community), others formed around creators whose work I love and whose people I’ve ended up around, and some just exist for their own reasons. But this is today.

In the past, especially when I was in high school, I used to be part of many more groups. I remember the ones that lasted for a long time, made of only a handful of us, where we shared memes and discussed things. Others were more ephemeral (though some lasted longer than anyone expected). The latter were usually started for a specific reason, such as going on a holiday. A couple of us wanted to go together, invited other people we wanted to be there, and those people invited someone we didn’t know as well. These chats often outlasted the holiday by years. I’m still in some of them (though not active anymore). And I also became friends with the “someones” I didn’t know.

If I look at my whole journey, the time spent in group chats easily outweighs, or at least matches, the time on social apps. I spent more time in them when I was younger. I made friendships that lasted, had many discussions that shaped me in various ways, and saw, shared, and laughed about many things with other people online.

To be honest, group chats, even today, to me, are one of the best social experiences one may have. There are a few that may be on the same level, and maybe just one that is above all, which is the IRL one. (To be honest, I don’t think anything digital will ever catch up to the IRL)

Subscribe now

But group chats are one of the closest experiences to the IRL one, and maybe closer than anything else the internet has ever produced (yet?). I’ve been trying to figure out why, and the closest I’ve gotten is this:

When I am scrolling Instagram, I am not really choosing anything anymore. The connection is passive, and because of that, it is fleeting. I am being shown things. I may have joined the platform intentionally years ago, but now I am no longer choosing to be inside it in any active way apart from posting and supporting my friends now and then. Apart from these moments, something else is doing the choosing. The feed decides what passes in front of me, and I drift through it, and almost nothing requires anything of me.

A group chat is different. When I join or make one, I think about whether I want to be in it. And once I am in, my behavior completely changes. Even if I am not engaging at all times, I feel the urge to read, to stay as present as possible in ways that may not be that tangible initially. There is a constant connection, even at times when nothing is actually happening.

One of the core questions behind many things I create is, what remains human when everything around us is replaced? Group chats are definitely one answer to that.

I don’t have a single vivid moment from any of the group chats that I can point to and say, that’s why these matter. If you asked me for one, I’d always hesitate, and I believe it’s because they work by producing a continuous field you get to live inside.

Last week, I wrote about the summers I spent at my grandmother’s place when I was a kid (also, that’s where I made my first social account), and they are a perfect analogy to my experience with group chats. The same thing that stops me from isolating one perfect day at my grandma’s place is the thing that stops me from isolating one moment from any group chat. Everything blurs into something bigger than any of its parts. It’s a whole experience that would not have happened anywhere else.

I also think that group chats are, and will be, one of the few places (maybe one of the only digital places) that bots and AI cannot get into.

AI has been an important part of my life for the past few years. I create a lot with it. It has helped me many times, also blurred my thinking in many aspects (I allowed it to do so and thankfully I realized it before it was too late), sharpened it, allowed me to explore things I otherwise wouldn’t, and brought to life many more experiences in my journey.

As much as I love AI, I will never deny the fact that it has gotten into almost everything, and how annoying that is. And I am mostly referring to my online social experience. I feel like most of the public-facing surface of the internet is now partly synthetic, and increasingly it doesn’t matter whether you can tell.

But a bot or AI cannot recommend its way into your group chat. No algorithm surfaces it to a stranger. You have to be invited by someone who knows you, who has your number or handle, and who decided you belong there. That alone changes everything. The only AI that gets into a group chat is the one someone chose to bring in. It’s something added on purpose for the people there to enhance the experience they have. Once it stops fulfilling its purpose, it is either ignored or completely removed. The synthetic here is something that joins through a private link, while every other place has a public link available, which makes the synthetic so ubiquitous.

The intentionality that protects a group chat from algorithms is the same intentionality that makes it feel like a real social place. And I think that intentionality could extend beyond group chats as well. I truly believe that we could build, choose, and stay in spaces the same way. But that’s a thought for another time.

Most of the group chats I am part of, if not all, are not impressive from the outside. By the world’s standards, they wouldn’t make a good product. They are, by design, not for everyone. But for the people in them, and I think for many others as well, they are the best product there is.

They are where I have actually been social on the internet for as long as I have been on it. And when I think about it like that, it becomes hard to ignore.

The most valuable social experience the internet has ever produced was the smallest one.🌹

I would wake up, my grandmother would make me some sandwiches with butter and jam and ‘coffee’ (this is how she called milk with Nesquik), and I would watch Cartoon Network while eating those. Once I finished I would go outside, where I would spend almost the entire day.

I wasn’t even eating!!! I played football, rode my bike, and did so many other things that made me tired. And when school started and I had to leave, I was so so sad because I had to say goodbye to this place for such a long time.

And what I am realizing now, at 27, while writing this in the same room where I was eating those sandwiches and watching cartoons, is that the village had edges, and almost nothing in my life does anymore. (The only thing grounding me lately is the Bible. Apart from it, nothing gives me greater joy than those moments did.)

I’ve shared a note a few days ago on the idea that “old >>> new” and in a way I think it is not fully right. What I actually mean by this statement is that certain things, objects, or ways of doing things used to end on their own without me having to decide to stop. And the ending was part of what made them what they were. The summers spent at my grandma naturally ended, a roll of film always ended, and so many other things ended. These things had a shape that actually fit a person, and I think we’ve lost a lot of that, and we are paying for it in ways we don’t fully talk about.

I have tried to explain this to myself because it has been something I’ve been turning over in my head for a while, and I needed to write it down. I felt the need to share it with you because it might help you as much as it helped me.

When I was in primary school (in the 5th-8th grades), I had classmates and other kids in school who had iPhones, BlackBerrys, iPods, and other gadgets that at that time, for a kid who was dreaming only about his summers at Vulcan, were marvels. I remember the iPhone 3GS which I still think it’s one of the best designed phones ever. Or the iPhone 4… Do you remember its flawless design???. Or the BlackBerry Bold. I was so in love with it!! My deskmate had one and I still remember asking her to allow me to surf on it.

Eventually in high-school, in the 9th or 10th grade (I can’t remember exactly), I got my own iPhone 5s as a birthday gift. I used to have an HTC before, and when I got this one in my hands its weight felt so different. And when I think about that phone now, and compare it to the one I currently have, I can’t believe the difference in what they do to me. The 5s was a device with a few apps because it didn’t have a big memory, and it was small. I was mostly using it to talk to my friends on WhatsApp, take a few photos, make calls, and sometimes scroll social media or create, but not as much as I do with the phone I have today. I agree that there were different times, but I also believe that together with technology these apps evolved as well.

Subscribe now

Film is another example and it’s one of the best. A roll of film holds a finite number of photos. You take the picture, you don’t see it, you wind the film, and you move on. And when the roll is done, you stay in front of those x number of things and decide which one was the best shot. Then you give the roll to someone to develop, you wait, and whatever comes back is what comes back. You couldn’t make any edits, or edit yourself or the thing into a better version. And that was the real art. The limitation was the thing that gave the output its magic. You had to choose, you had to commit, and what you got was the honest record of what you chose.

Writing is another one, and this is probably the one I feel the most personally, because it touches the work I do. When I write on paper I think differently. I have no idea why but this is how my brain works. The pen moves slower than my thinking, and somehow that slowness lets the thinking catch up to itself. Ideas arrive that wouldn’t have arrived on a screen, and I don’t know how to explain that except to say it happens, every time.

There are times when I sit down at my laptop and everything flows. I have such a huge inspiration that I don’t even need the pen and paper. I simply write or record and transcribe the raw draft of what goes through my mind. But I still value the paper more because the page is not inviting me to infinite rewriting, which is not the same thing as thinking. Sometimes it is the opposite of thinking.

And then there were the gadgets from the time before the smartphone ate everything. The iPod, the Walkman, the Tamagotchi, and so many others. In Romania (or where I grew up, to be more precise), though, we didn’t really have gadgets like the Tamagotchi in their original form (they themselves were not that popular), but we had gadgets that looked different on the surface while at their core being the same.

Why I’ve always loved these devices is because they didn’t come with a big ecosystem trying to pull me deeper. There was a boundary and it was respected. And the only time you took the thing out of your pocket was when you wanted it, and you put it away when you were done.

I keep noticing this when I scroll. Most of what passes my screen doesn’t feel like it was made because someone wanted to make it. It feels optimized and shaped by something other than the person who posted it. Like the creation has been molded on the algorithm instead of vice-versa. And right now, on some platforms, this behavior becomes even more present because the platforms are paying people based on the metrics they get. There is a whole economy built on this. But I keep asking myself:

Why would I want to create something I don’t even want to create just to chase something that doesn’t even mean something to me? Why would I keep doing something that is making me tired of my own craft?

And I know that I am writing this on a platform, on the internet, that it lives on an app, and I carry a smartphone and I use the internet every day of my life. I mention this because I am not writing this from outside the thing I am describing. I am inside it and I know I am.

And I’ve never thought that the answer is to reject technology. What I think is that we should be more aware of what these tools are doing to us while we use them, and allow ourselves to choose the finite version of something instead of the infinite one.

I say this because I’ve been inside it. I’ve felt the pressure to post a certain way, to create x amount of posts per day, to keep a rhythm that served neither myself nor my work. I was treating my essays, my visual art, like content instead of writing or art. I started making things I didn’t want to make, because I had been taught that was what worked.

Remember how I told you that at the end of each day at my grandma’s I was tired?

Well, all these social hacks and following what the algorithm wants made me exhausted. Which is different. Consumption exhausts us from the outside, and it’s something anyone can see immediately as it is defined by the endless scrolling. But creation can become exhausting as well, and it’s worse. When something you create stops being yours, it makes you feel exhausted from the inside. And this one takes longer to notice, because you may also tell yourself that you are still doing what you want, just adapting it a little to fit the algorithm.

When I realized this, I started changing things. And it has happened a while ago. For example, I’ve been on Instagram less (on my phone, actually, I went from 10 hours a day to only 4. I’m still spending a lot of time though on my laptop because that’s the device I use the most for creation). I still open it sometimes to see my friends or support the people I love, but then I leave. I don’t consume the way I used to and I don’t miss it.

I have a similar behavior with most of the other platforms. I write more on paper. I let the essay be the essay and not a content strategy. I post what I actually want to post, the way I want to post it. Some weeks that’s a lot, while others it isn’t. I am building something slower, something that’s not meant to be scaled. I want to focus more on the depth of things. And that’s intentional. If I wanted to go fast, I would do something else entirely. Something that I am not so connected with.

And I think more of us need to hear this permission. You are allowed to do the same. You don’t have to keep up. You don’t have to make things you don’t want to make to please something that you don’t even care about in the first place. You don’t have to consume everything that is put in front of you just because it is put in front of you. You are allowed to choose the finite. You are allowed to pick up the pen or put down the phone or leave the app or make the slower thing. Less is more.

I always knew my time at grandma’s woul end every September. And yet, it was still the best part of my year, every year, without fail.🌹

We started at 11 am and finished around 5 pm. I had made my plan the day before: once I got back home, I would take a shower and then go straight to work, which included scheduling some calls and working on a piece of art I'd gotten inspired by last week (you’ll find it at the end).

I came back home at around 5:20 pm, and by the time we managed to empty the trailer and eat something, it was already past 6 pm. So I skipped washing and went straight to work. I started working on the piece, and in between, I was exchanging messages with my sister on WhatsApp (we are still using it in Romania).

At 6:53 pm, I noticed that my message was not being sent. I looked at my connection and saw that it was gone. I had no internet. Instead of 4G/5G it was showing “E” (EDGE), and whenever that appears, it never works. Then my signal bars dropped from 5 to 1. I checked my Wi‑Fi, and it was gone as well.

I restarted my phone twice, restarted the Wi‑Fi, and did everything else that came to mind to fix the problem, but I was not successful. The people I could have asked about what was going on were not at home, and when I tried calling them, it didn’t work. I couldn’t reach anyone on my phone. I couldn’t even play on it because most of the games require an internet connection, so it became useless.

And the whole situation stayed like that for seventeen hours.

The first thing I felt was anger. I kept picking up the phone, turning the screen on, checking if something had changed. I did the same thing with my laptop. But nothing had changed. And every time I checked, the anger sharpened.

And just to clarify, I am not someone who doomscrolls. I used to do that when I was younger, but fortunately, I was disciplined and unattracted enough not to do it anymore. For example, I had never had a TikTok account. I made one a couple of months ago just to share my work there because of the distribution. I open it, I post, and I close it. I have no interest in consuming what’s being fed to me there because I don’t find, and never did find, any benefit in it. It would take too much time for me to curate my algorithm there, and I am afraid it would be too toxic for me to do so.

I used to spend time on Instagram Reels (which many argue is the same, but to me, the difference is that Instagram was already curated, so they feel a little different), and on YouTube Shorts, because there I have three different accounts, each one of them dedicated to a specific interest of mine. So I am always watching what I want, but still, I stopped doomscrolling even if it was “qualitative” content because I don’t find it beneficial for my health. I am still doing it from time to time, I have to admit, but I am working toward removing it completely.

The only things I aim to use these socials for are curation/inspiration, learning, connecting with friends, meeting new people, and using them for distribution (though I am not a fan of the game and don’t think it serves my work, but this is the world we are living in, unfortunately).

Apart from these, I have no interest in using these platforms. The reason why I am telling you this is that I want you to realize that if someone who’s not so addicted to doomscrolling has felt these things, imagine what someone who is addicted feels. This is something I’ve been thinking about deeply.

Then, after anger, came desperation. I was desperate because I wasn’t able to work. I was desperate because I couldn’t respond to messages, I couldn’t engage with people, I couldn’t read, and I couldn’t do anything I used to do daily. It felt like reaching for a glass of water and finding it empty every time.

But at some point, I decided to stop and look beyond these feelings, to truly understand what existed underneath. And what I realized is that there was something even more profound than any other thing I was feeling, which was dependence. I felt like my life depended on that signal, like I couldn’t function without it. I didn’t fully know what to do with myself in a room with no connection to anything outside of it. That realization was worse than the disconnection itself.

I felt disappointed in myself. I couldn’t believe how much I had given over to something I am not even sure does me that much good. I couldn’t believe how lost I felt without that signal. So I eventually sat with it and understood that there was nothing I could do to change the situation, only my approach. So instead of blaming x or y for what was going on or sitting in those feelings, I decided to turn what looked like something bad into something good for my soul.

I went to my Apple Books app (I was afraid it wouldn’t work either) and continued reading the only book that I will be reading for a while, called Through The Bible by Zac Poonen. This book is an explanation of Scripture, and it’s been very enlightening to me. I recommend everyone to pick it up and give it a read, ideally in parallel with the Bible, because this is how you can truly understand its worth.

Then I talked to my grandma. The TV wasn’t working either, so her “noon” activity wasn’t possible, and we spent time together. She told me stories about my grandfather, who passed away almost two decades ago, and who is someone I loved deeply and still miss in ways I don’t always allow myself to feel. She told me things from the past that I hadn’t heard before, memories that she carries, and she answered my questions about the past.

And even though I didn’t resonate with everything she said, just sitting there and listening to her voice without being distracted by anything else was enough. More than enough. I still have these chats with her from time to time, but in most of them, I am always distracted by something on my phone or laptop, so just being there fully present with her felt magical.

Then I took a bath, prayed, and slept earlier than I have in months (between 10 and 11 pm). And when I woke on Wednesday morning (well, technically it was around 12 pm when the signal came back), I realized that the world hadn’t ended. Nothing urgent had happened, and the people I wanted to reach out to the day before were still there. They hadn’t gone anywhere.

The hours I spent disconnected were some of the most peaceful hours I’ve had in a long time (though only after I decided to approach the situation differently). And that peace unsettled me, because if those hours were peaceful, then the thing I’d been so desperate to get back (the access to everything) wasn’t giving me peace in the first place. I was chasing something that wasn’t giving me what I thought it was giving me. And I think a lot of us are doing the same thing without realizing it.

I think we need to disconnect more. And I don’t mean that as a trend or as one of those “digital detox” things that people post about afterward (which defeats the whole purpose, if you ask me). I mean it as a genuine act of remembering that there is more to life than the internet. The people in front of us are more real than the people in our feeds, and a conversation with your grandmother about your grandfather is worth more than anything a screen will ever offer you. I really believe that.

And I know it sounds simple. But I also know how hard it is to actually do, because I felt the withdrawal. I felt the anger, the desperation, and the need. I am someone who thinks about these things constantly. One of the purposes behind my work is presence, stillness, and attention. So if I’m this dependent, I have to ask:

How dependent are we, all of us? How much of our inner life have we handed over to a signal?

And here’s where I want to go somewhere heavier, because this experience made me think about it, and I think it deserves to be said.

Subscribe now

My hours without connection were uncomfortable. But there are people in the world right now for whom disconnection is a weapon used against them. There are countries where governments shut down the internet to silence their own people. There are war zones where families lose connection for weeks or months.

They can’t reach each other, they can’t call for help, and they can’t even tell the world what’s happening to them. Their discomfort is survival. Mine was just trivial. I felt the need to say this because I think sometimes we forget how privileged we are to even be frustrated about losing signal for a night. Some people would do anything to have the connection we take for granted.

And this made me think about Satvik and the team behind Offline Protocol. I’d love for you to read more on their website or ask Satvik directly (he’s really kind and for the people). From my understanding, what this protocol does is build the infrastructure that allows people to communicate without needing the internet, so that during blackouts, wars, or censorship, human connection continues.

They’re building for a reality most of us are privileged enough not to even think about. And the fact that something like this needs to exist should tell us everything about how fragile the connection really is and how precious it is when we have it.

Sitting with that awareness clarified something for me. The things that allow us to stay in touch with our people, truly in touch, are the ones worth building, protecting, and caring about.

And this brings me to something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, especially as someone who makes things and puts them into the world.

Everything we see online from these “social media gurus” (or at least what I am seeing) is about building audiences, optimizing for reach, and chasing metrics that tell us how many people saw what we shared. And I understand the logic behind it, I do. I’ve even chased those things as well because I thought that’s what was going to make me succeed. And this made me hate my journey so much. I even hated what I was creating because it was made to serve the algorithm.

But at some point, I ran into this idea that all you need to succeed is someone, not everyone, which changed everything for me. And let me explain what this idea means.

Finding one person who genuinely shares your passion for your craft (really genuinely) is more valuable than a hundred people who are following you but are passively scrolling past your work. That “someone” will bring in another someone who’s just as passionate. And that someone will bring another. And another. And this is how a community (not an audience!!) starts taking shape.

These are people who will go through the ups and downs with you, who care about the things you care about because something in what you made spoke to something inside them. And this connection that’s built person by person rather than metric by metric is the one that actually lasts.

I am using social media for distribution, and I am telling everyone to do so. It’s the world we are living in. But we shouldn’t let metrics become the meaning. Nothing is going to happen if we miss a day. The world keeps turning, and your people will still be there. And most of the things that matter the most don’t even need a signal to exist.

And I want to end with this because I’ve been sitting with it throughout the whole essay.

We want to be dependent on independence. I think that’s the aspiration, or at least it should be. We desire to be free, to be sovereign over our attention, our time, and our inner life. We want to choose what we engage with instead of being pulled by whatever shows up next, and we want to not feel like something essential has been taken from us when all that was taken was a connection to a network.

But the truth is that we are dependent. More than ever before. Dependent on signals, on platforms, on the feeling that we’re missing something if we step away for even a moment. Dependent on the world.

These hours without connection taught me that the thing I was afraid of missing, I was already missing. Everything I am standing for was all right there, waiting for me to stop looking at a screen and notice.

Maybe we all need to lose signal for a while. Not to wish disconnection on anyone, but to remember what we find when we do lose it.

And before ending, the piece I was working on before I went numb…🌹

At some point in the conversation, she asked a question (not me directly; it was just asked) that I didn’t have the answer to. I told her that I’d think about it and that I’d write about it, because this is how I think and frame my thoughts the best. But everything kept moving so dense in my life that the question went to a place I’d love to frame as being somewhere between intention and forgetting. It was written there in my notes, so I knew that at some point I would get back to it.

And today, I am trying to find an answer to perhaps one of the questions that so few of us are asking, and which I may not have asked myself if it wasn’t for that call:

Will AI be an originator of our taste or a reflection of it?

I know that in February, I wrote that I was done talking about taste, as I feel the word is losing its meaning, and I simply want to move on. But this question brought me back, partly because I made a promise on that call, and partly out of curiosity, because I truly want to understand what we’ve allowed AI to be in our lives and who’s the actual originator of taste.

So here I am again.

The more I’ve been thinking about an answer to that question, the more it comes down to how we engage with it. Let me try to explain what I mean.

Subscribe now

Let’s suppose we are looking to create an image of a house. We go to an AI tool and type “house.” Just the word house. We need to remind ourselves of this because it is important. The tool generates something. It can be a modern minimalist box with floor-to-ceiling windows, or a farmhouse, or something we’ve never seen before but that looks like everything we’ve seen everywhere lately.

We gave the tool a word, and we allowed it to fill in every detail for us, such as the style, the color, the material, and even the feeling. All of it came from the tool, shaped by whatever data it was trained on. It decided for us.

Now, let’s suppose we type “black house.” A single word here makes a significant difference. The “black” is ours. It came from somewhere inside us, such as a preference, a memory, or a feeling we have about what a house should look like. We brought something specific to the table, and now the tool is working with our direction instead of filling in the blanks on its own.

In the first search, I would say we let AI originate. In the second, we let it reflect.

And I think that’s the whole thing, honestly, though, as we’ll see later, it’s not. The question my friend asked may not really be about AI as a technology but about us. About how much of ourselves we bring to the interaction. When we show up vague, the tool has no choice but to decide for us. And when we let it decide for us enough times, those decisions unconsciously start to feel like ours. We start to mistake the tool’s taste for our own.

But when we feed it with something like a color, a direction, or any other thing that we feel, the dynamic completely shifts. The tool becomes a mirror. It takes what we give it and helps us see it more clearly, or shapes it into something more tangible than what we could have made alone.

But what surprises me is that we are only now asking these questions, when this isn’t new at all. Social media has been doing this for years. (I know I keep bringing this into my essays, but I think it’s a truth that needs to be spoken more.)

If I think about Instagram, or Pinterest, or any platform with a feed shaped by an algorithm, I find the same behavior. We open the app looking for something, and the algorithm shows us things. But these things are popular, things that people like, or anything else but random. And slowly, without noticing, the things the algorithm shows us start becoming the things we want. Our saved folder starts looking like everyone else’s saved folder. Our taste starts converging with whatever the platform has decided is worth showing.

We search for “house” instead of “black house” every single day on social media, and we scroll without specificity and absorb without choosing.

AI is doing the same thing, albeit embodied differently.

Social media shapes taste through exposure, as it shows us things and lets repetition do the work. AI shapes taste through interaction as it responds to us, generates for us, and feels more like a collaborator rather than a feed. And I would argue that this intimacy makes it harder to see where we end and where the tool begins.

But earlier I told you that there may be something more to just searching for “black house.” This is the part I spent the most time with.

Even when we bring the “black house,” AI’s output still carries its own weight. The tool generates options, and those options are never neutral. They’re shaped by training data and by what the model has learned is “good” or “fitting” based on millions of other inputs. So even when we are specific, the result will have the AI’s touch on it. Things may not be as we envisioned them. There will be elements we didn’t ask for and suggestions embedded in the output that we didn’t initiate.

And this is where the cycle can start again, even for people who are intentional about it.

When the output isn’t what we actually wanted but is close enough, we have the choice to either stick to our original vision and push the tool closer to it or absorb the difference and let the tool’s suggestion become part of our direction. Sometimes the tool shows us something we hadn’t considered, but that genuinely resonates with us. But other times, we’re tired, or the output is good enough that we let it slide. And that slide, repeated over time, is how the tool turns from reflection into originator. I’ve experienced this myself.

I’ve been using AI for a few years now, and I’ve learned to analyze every output it gives me because I want to separate what’s mine from what the tool introduced. Sometimes I find something in the AI’s response that genuinely clicks with what I was trying to express, and I integrate it. But other times I see that it’s pulling me somewhere I didn’t intend to go, and I come back to my original direction. This has taught me to be more patient and to allow things time, because the answer to “is this mine, or is this the tool’s?” is not always easy.

Not everyone does that. And I don’t say that with judgment, as the tools are designed to make it easy not to. They are smooth and fast, and they almost always give you something that looks right. Moving on feels more natural than questioning it.

After all these thoughts, the question made me go beyond AI and social media and consider influence itself.

People influence our taste. The city we live in influences our taste. The music we heard growing up, the books we’ve read, the friends who showed us things we’d never seen, all of it shapes what we like and what we choose. There has never been a moment when our taste was purely ours, untouched by anything external.

So the question that started this reflection, “Will AI originate our taste or reflect it?”, may have uncovered the real question for me:

How much are we willing to let any of these forces, whether AI, algorithms, trends, the desire to belong, or the people around us, shape what we call ours?

And I don’t think anyone is a saint when it comes to this. I’m certainly not. There are things in my taste right now that I’m sure were placed there by something I wasn’t paying attention to. I’m still in the process of sorting through it, of figuring out which preferences are mine and which ones were inherited or absorbed.

With all of this being said, I think we’re getting closer to the answer to the initial question. And to be honest, it’s not the clean one I was hoping for.

I think AI can be both an originator and a reflection of our taste. The only thing we can do to ensure it is more of the latter is to focus on the things that are undeniably ours, such as our experiences, the things we’ve lived through, or the choices we’ve made that had nothing to do with a prompt.

Everything that happened before any tool got involved is our foundation. And when we bring that to AI, when we lead with what we know about ourselves rather than asking the tool to fill in who we are, then AI becomes a reflection. It takes what’s already there and helps us make it more tangible.

That’s the best version of this relationship, I think. Not AI as a replacement for taste or as an originator of our taste. But AI as something that helps us see what we already carry within, and as the tool we use to turn what’s ours into something real.

And thus, the answer to my friend’s question may be that it depends entirely on us. On how much we bring, on how much we’re willing to notice, and on whether we choose the black house or just type “house” and let the tool decide.

I still don’t have a cleaner answer than that. But I think this is the most honest one I have.🌹

The Wostok watch, in its pristine form, is the watch I am wearing daily. It is a mechanical watch, and now the time it measures is mine, not his, and that asymmetry may be the only proof I have that something was transferred. At first glance, I thought the object itself was transferred, but what actually got transferred was weight.

Thanks to my grandfather, I also own a newspaper from the 1930s. It’s an original copy of Universul (a popular newspaper at that time in Romania), and it’s from the day it announced the death of King Ferdinand I. I have no idea how it was preserved in such good shape for nearly 100 years. Most of the things are still legible, even the emotions that live on those pages, which represent the gravity of an entire country learning that its king had died. The reason why it was preserved for so many years is that it mattered. That event was heavy enough to hold onto.

These are objects that carried meaning because I, or my father or grandfather, and other people before them chose to preserve them. They didn’t perform well or reach an audience. It wasn’t about that. The person holding them understood instinctively that some things are worth keeping and that the act of keeping itself is a form of respect.

And the more I think about the difference between something that has weight and something that merely exists, the more I realize what we’ve done to that difference.

There was a time when the things we made carried the full cost of their making. As much as I want to include the time involved in the creation of something (think about sculptures which may have taken months or years to make, or a letter that once sent was gone and you couldn’t revise it after the fact or check how many people opened it), I think the intent and emotional weight with which they were imbued mattered even more. Or let’s not even talk about the times when those crafts were popular.

Let’s find ourselves in the times when we just started living hybrid lives, in which social media was still social, and where we would actually commit to breathing life into something.

We wanted to create it because we believed it deserved to exist, and we accepted that it might reach no one, and that was absolutely fine. The value of the thing was never determined by its reception. But now, that economy of meaning has collapsed.

We now create endlessly because the system demands continuous output. We don’t have more to say, but we are forced to do so. The algorithm doesn’t care what we’ve made. It only cares that we made something today, and that we’ll make something again tomorrow. The metric is frequency, and the measure of a thing’s worth is how many people saw it, how quickly, and whether the numbers justified the effort.

And so most of us comply. We create for the sake of creating, and evaluate what we’ve created by checking a counter that tells us nothing about meaning and everything about reach. Look at the things mostly discussed by gurus. They don’t “teach us” how to add more weight and depth to our creations, but how to shape our message to reach more people. Most of the time, the depth with which we reach people is more important than the breadth of people we reach. Something that may have changed someone’s life and a piece of content that was forgotten in three seconds receive the same units of measurement: likes, views, impressions, and other metrics.

From my experience, the most profound things humans create tend to follow one of two patterns (I may be wrong, or there may be others as well). Either they arrive in a flash because we were ready to receive it, or they take a long time, built slowly with craft and intention, layered and revised until they hold everything the maker needed them to hold. And both of these require something that this continuous production makes impossible: a relationship with what we’re making.

So I’ve tried this game as well. I wanted to get better at social media, to get more views, more followers, more attention, and more of the weightless things. And what I’ve realized is that I had to force myself to create those things; I was always distracted, and I didn’t care a lot about them. I didn’t have a relationship with any of those things.

And I stopped doing that. And the worst thing I’ve realized in this act of endless creation is that everything becomes content. They are all equals. The word itself is the tell. A painting, a poem, a photograph, a story, or any other thing we create has become one thing only: content. We’ve stopped calling them by what they actually are.

And to me, content has no hierarchy. All those things that I’ve created to please an algorithm have no weight. They only existed to fill a feed, and the feed is designed to be infinite, which means nothing inside it can ever be heavy enough to stop us.

We used to place value on intimate things, on objects or memories that belong to us. These were things that had weight because we recognized them. We didn’t need anyone's approval or recognition to say they are valuable. We turned even those things into content. I want to give you an example that I am constantly using when I am discussing this topic, because it’s personal, and can easily be turned into successful content, but I choose not to.

Subscribe now

I have a baby brother, he’s one year old, and I love him more than I can describe. And I know that if I posted a picture with him, paired with the right caption and emotional framing, it would perform. Or if I post some of the videos that I have with him from his growing experience, they would perform as well. People respond to this kind of content, and it would show in the numbers. I cannot prove it, though, because I will never do that. The moments I spend with him are mine. I have moments I’ve saved for myself, but I am not going to release them online. I’ll show them to my friends if they ask, and that’s all.

There are a few other reasons why I’m not doing it, but one of them is choosing to let an experience exist without turning it into content. I believe that the moment we start thinking about the shareability of something, we’ve already changed our relationship to it. We are no longer within the experience but stepping outside of it. The pressure to show your private life, to be more personal, to show the human behind the work have turned into culturally relevant framings now.

And now, if something isn’t culturally relevant, we treat it as though it doesn’t count because it won’t perform and circulate. The private has been demoted, and it’s lost its standing. And in its place, we’ve built a culture that only recognizes value when it’s visible, measurable, and confirmed by strangers.

But the thing I keep returning to is that the sacred didn’t disappear. It just became equal to everything else. A thousand years of devotion pressed into clay or a memory we make with our family, or anything else that has weight, sits next to something that existed for three seconds, and the distance between them has collapsed. We flattened meaning, and we placed everything on the same surface, we called it all the same, and no one noticed.

There’s still a lot more reflection to be done around this topic, and through all of it, there is one thing that I keep wondering:

what does it mean that nothing weighs more than anything else.🌹

I also wanted to turn this reflective process into something I could see.

I called it Æquale.🌹

Most of the events I’ve attended that included art were in completely different contexts. Conferences or private events where art was present, or exhibitions placed inside venues that actually served another purpose. But this one felt different because it was only about art.

I don’t know why, but I had built a lot of expectation around this event. I expected people to show up, and I expected them to come to see art. Thinking more deeply about it, I believe that this expectation was sparked by a hope that exists somewhere in me, that people are still truly appreciating art and the artist. That these are not just something they encounter, but something they actively seek.

What happened felt different. Most of the people who came were actually leaving a theatre play that had just ended. As they passed through the exhibition space, they looked at the artworks, stayed for a few moments, some of them, and then left. There were around fifty or sixty people.

And even while watching them pass through, I still had the hope that some would stop and gaze at these works. And my hope was fulfilled by a few people who stopped and were genuinely curious about what they were looking at. They were asking questions. They were interested in how things were created. They wanted to talk to the artists. There were more artists exhibited, but six of us were invited to the vernissage, and for a while, we were engaged in conversations forming around the works, the process, and the art itself. That felt so refreshing.

And the number of people who just stayed for a couple of minutes, or not even at all, stopped mattering. The fact that there were a couple of genuinely interested people was all that mattered to me in that moment.

At some point, a person wearing two camera bags on his shoulders entered the theatre. He approached me and my friend, who was also exhibiting, and told us that he wanted to come earlier, but he had been at another show that would never be played in that city again. This made me curious about the person behind the appearance.

The more I spoke with him, the more I realized he was someone who genuinely cared about art and about artists. He was older than me, maybe in his fifties or sixties, and the way he spoke about art, people, and how things are now compared to before, carried a certain weight. Each generation, in its own way, feels this same thing, which is this lack of importance that people give to art and to artists. I was already aware of it. But hearing it from him, in that moment, made it feel much more real.

After that conversation, I started walking through the theatre alone. At some point, I went upstairs, and from there I could see the digital screens glowing with the exhibited works, and around them, the physical space, the architecture, and the historical objects from another time, all sharing the same room. I just stood there for a while, looking at the bigger picture.

Subscribe now

It made me think that perhaps this is where things are heading. Not one replacing the other, but both existing together. Some of the artworks on those screens could only exist in digital form. And yet people still chose to come to a physical place to stand in front of them. Even if just for a few moments, they chose to be there.

This event was an experience I am really grateful for, and one that made me think a lot about art, people, and attention. It made me reflect on more things than just what I’ve shared with you today, but I still need to digest them until I can put them together coherently. Until then, I hope that through my work, I can bring more awareness around the importance of art and artists in our lives.

Before ending, I’d like for you to experience the work that has been exhibited at this vernissage, and what it represents.

The Camera No One Remembers is a piece inspired by Constantin Brâncuși, one of the greatest sculptors in history. He was born in Romania, and in 1903, he left his village and walked to Paris to follow his dream. There, he refused to work with Rodin, who was considered the greatest sculptor of his time. Two things worth mentioning about Brâncuși: he always dressed like a peasant, and he always carried a camera to photograph his own work, because he believed no one else saw it the way he did. His whole life was a rejection of performance in favor of essence.

What did that camera look like? This is the question the piece began as. I couldn’t find any records of it. I searched until I started believing that perhaps the most important camera in the history of modern sculpture simply has no trace.

So I built it from imagination, reconstructing it in code, making it rotate slowly in the darkness of his studio. And beneath the camera, almost invisible, pulses an attempt to embody his immortality. His ethos and vision were with me throughout the entire process of creation.

But this piece is also a question directed at the present. We live in an era obsessed with over-perfection and over-editing, one where performing the act of creation often comes before the creation itself.

Brâncuși never announced his process. He just worked, photographed, and showed what he saw. His camera was never remembered, but his vision was never forgotten.

He reminded me that nothing grows in the shade of someone else’s idea of you.🌹

I’ve seen many people adjusting themselves, performing the right things, adopting the right references, and laughing at the right moments. I still clearly remember some people from my high school who were having this behavior, and they were so cringeworthy and obvious. While some of them got really close to being part of these groups, none of them really got in. And the worst part of it all is that each one of these people had spent so much energy and time trying to become something they weren’t that they had drifted away from whatever they actually were and from the groups they actually belonged to.

And I am thinking a lot about this now because that specific dynamic that I was so familiar with in those times turns out to be one of the most important things to understand about where we are now. The same hunger to belong to something that isn’t yours, or the willingness to hollow yourself out in pursuit of an identity that was never going to fit anyway, are things I find so prevalent today. And I mostly see it happening because of the way we allow social media to influence ourselves, not because of social media itself. What we’ve allowed to shape is an entire economy built around human vulnerability.

We used to follow a person, but right now most of us are following a topic, and there’s a huge difference between the two.

When we are following a person, there is accountability between you, even if it’s never spoken. We’ve chosen to give them our attention, which means they can earn it or lose it. They can disappoint us, surprise us, become someone we didn’t expect, or reveal something that changes how we see them. The relationship, however passive it looks from the outside, has actual texture. It has a history, and it can evolve or break.

When we are following a topic, none of that exists. We are not loyal to anyone but to the feeling the topic produces in us, which means following whoever is currently producing that feeling most efficiently. The creator is interchangeable, and what matters is the content. And what matters about the content is only whether it delivers the interest we came for. The moment it stops delivering, we move on.

This is the architecture that we allowed social media to build and normalize over the years. What started as a genuinely social thing, people connecting with people they knew or the feeling of finding others who saw the world the way you did, slowly became something organized around interests rather than around people. The platforms learned that interest kept people engaged longer than relationships did. There is more emotional involvement in a relationship than in an interest, and that’s exactly why interest won. It’s easier to serve.

And so the design shifted. Algorithms started being optimized for topic instead of person. “Friends” and “following” took a back seat to “for you,” even though we’ve never asked for it. The feed stopped showing us what our friends were thinking and started showing us what our interests demanded. And this is how social became a vehicle for interest, and eventually, for many people, it disappeared almost entirely.

And what replaced it was the simulation of community. What I see today is mostly an aesthetic of shared interest and of the feeling of being surrounded by people who care about the same things, without any of the friction and vulnerability that make community real. We can spend years inside a niche, consuming everything produced about it, feeling like we belong to something, and never actually know a single person. Never be known by one. (This is why I believe community has become more of a buzzword these days, because there are only a few people or brands truly building communities. Most of them are just building audiences and calling it something else.)

I felt this in myself. There were moments when I was creating just because something needed to be posted. I was curating not based on what actually resonated with me but on what I thought might resonate with others. Each time I did it, something felt slightly off. I hated what I was doing because I couldn’t find myself in the work I was producing. I kept going back and changing things or abandoning them because the alignment wasn’t there. I believe that if we create something that is not connected to our why, we are lying to ourselves and to anyone who encounters it. And the best thing can never come from a lie.

What I was experiencing in those moments was a small version of what those kids in high school were doing. I was adjusting to belonging to something that wasn’t mine and performing an identity the platform preferred over the one I actually had. The same mechanism is at its core.

And the way this mechanism works is by gradually replacing who you are with what performs well, and this is something that concerns me far more than any particular technology. It happens slowly, through thousands of small decisions, each one reasonable on its own, until the accumulated weight of them has moved you somewhere you didn’t consciously choose to go.

This is where AI enters the conversation, though I won’t go too deep into it here because I’ve explored this in my previous essay, which you can read here.

Subscribe now

Share

The short version is that I don’t think AI created this interest economy. It didn’t teach us to follow topics instead of people, or to pre-edit our inner life for an imaginary audience, or to measure our expression in metrics. Social media did all of that, and it did it years before AI became what it is today. The architecture and behavioral patterns were already formed. What AI does is make the interest economy total.

Social media shifted the balance from social to interest, and AI completes the shift. Any subject we care about can now be served to us endlessly at a scale that no human can actually produce. The niche we loved because it felt like ours, because the people in it had found each other around something that still felt real, can be saturated overnight. Belonging, expression, and connection become content categories that can be generated infinitely, on demand, by machines that have no stake in any of it.

And this is where the scam becomes a cultural symptom.

At its core, a scam is the manufacture of the appearance of value with nothing real underneath. It works by understanding what you’re interested in and delivering exactly that, without any of the accountability, history, or actual substance that would normally come with it.

In a social-driven culture, scams are harder to sustain because people ask questions. Who is this person? Have others dealt with them? Can I trust what they’re saying? The social carries a built-in friction that makes deception more difficult.

In an interest-driven culture, those questions stop being asked. You’re not there for the person, you’re there for the topic. And if the content delivers the interest you came for, the absence of a real human behind it barely registers. The for you culture trained us not to ask who this is long before AI made creation cheaper, faster, and more convincing than ever.

But the version of the scam that worries me more than the financial one is what happens to our relationship with the topics we actually care about when we’ve been consuming them from no one. We can spend years feeling informed, engaged, and culturally alive, and something essential is still missing. It becomes harder to name the longer we go without it. Our relationship to the things we care about slowly hollows out. And that hollowing has a deep impact on culture itself.

And I’m not talking about culture as content. I’m talking about culture as the thing that actually forms between people when they encounter each other authentically over time.

One way to see culture is as accumulated shared meaning. It emerges from people who have negotiated that meaning together through proximity, disagreement, and relationships that carry weight and consequence. Belonging is one of the most fundamental human needs, and it cannot be manufactured by serving someone the right content at the right time. It has to be built through the actual experience of being known and knowing others over time, through the friction and vulnerability and occasional discomfort that real community always involves.

An interest-driven culture accelerated by AI erodes exactly this. When we follow topics instead of people, we are consuming without connecting, and what we feel is just a simulation of belonging with no substance underneath. And over time, the appetite for real connection doesn’t disappear because it’s too fundamental for that, but the habit of substituting it becomes so ingrained that the difference stops being felt.

The people who live entirely inside this logic become driven by what they see others achieving, or appearing to achieve (because we are living in the age of artificial everything), and they are always chasing the next interest or the next identity that promises belonging, never arriving at anything that holds. This is the culture forming at the end of the interest economy.

While I agree that a great deal can be built within that culture, I don’t believe anything that lasts can be built.

The more AI can serve our interests, the less our interests need a human to satisfy them. Any topic, any aesthetic, and any niche we’ve built our identity around can now be generated and delivered at a volume and speed that no individual creator could ever match. The topics become infinite, and creators become optional. This is also what I believe to be the logical completion of the interest economy.

And this is exactly when the scarce thing becomes the person.

Their particular way of seeing, their particular history, or their particular set of contradictions that no model can replicate because they emerged from an actual life being lived will matter more than the content itself. The person who is creating from a why rather than a what becomes the thing that cannot be automated. The one worth paying attention to.

We spent so much time learning to follow topics instead of people. We are about to enter a period where that habit will be tested in ways we haven’t anticipated, because the topics will be everywhere. The real people will be harder to find, and more necessary than they have ever been.

A machine can serve the interest, but a genuine person cannot be replaced by one.

And I think that is the thing worth understanding now, before we’ve lost entirely the ability to tell the difference.🌹

I want to be clear that this essay is not against AI or social media. I am a huge fan of the developments in AI and also grateful for the good things social media brings into our lives. I use both every day. What I am focusing on more and more is how I use them, staying aware of the ways they can reshape my thinking, my relationships, and the culture I belong to and want to help build.

This essay was written while reflecting on the few relationships I have left today, coming from someone who used to hang out with different groups of many people in the same day and didn’t have time to go out with all of them. Social media changed us. AI is accelerating that change. But deep down, we are still the same. And the why behind these essays is simply to acknowledge the things that matter most in times like these.🌹

This is one of the conversations happening right now that I keep running into, and I think it’s incomplete. I totally understand why people feel that way. Whenever you scroll on the non-curated feed (it’s called “for you,” and I don’t think it’s actually for you, because the content shown there is what the platform thinks you are interested in, not what you are actually interested in) of today’s social platforms, most of the things you see are similar.

This absence of texture and weight doesn’t make things feel real anymore. And it’s happening across visual, textual, auditory, and any other forms of content. There are many things you are reading where the words are totally fine, but you can’t really feel the person behind them.

I totally get the conversation around this, but I don’t think AI created this feeling. I think we just weren’t paying attention to where it actually came from. And I keep coming back to it.

I remember when I first got on social media. It was through Facebook mostly. I explored a little bit of Myspace as well, though I got there late, when most people had already moved on (the reason I was late is my age). And what I remember the most about those times is how little I thought about the platform itself. I posted something because I wanted to, and also the way I wanted to, without being stressed or concerned about the way the platform sees the post and whether or not it will perform. I used to share photos as they were without agonizing over whether the lighting was right, or the caption was optimized, or whether the image needed to be edited before it was worthy of being seen. I didn’t care about those things at all.

I joined communities on Facebook and other platforms, mostly around streetwear, and the people in those spaces were genuinely there because they cared about the same things. The connections felt real in a hard way to describe now, because we’ve gotten so used to the version of connection that replaced it.

Nobody was farming metrics or thinking about engagement rates. The idea of being an “influencer” the way we know and praise it today wasn’t as popular or praised or even seen as it is today. There were people with large followings back then as well, but they weren’t seen as brands. They were still people.

What shifted between then and today was that social media gradually started to become more driven by interest rather than the social aspect that made it so embraced in the first place. This transition taught us to think about everything we do in terms of how it will be received, and it happened so slowly that most of us didn’t notice.

But at some point, the question stopped being “do I want to share this?” and became “how should I share this?” A plethora of other questions, such as “how should I write the caption?” or “should I post it as it is or does it need better editing first?” or “will this land?” started emerging as well.

It wasn’t only our behaviors on social media that changed, but there was also a fundamental shift in how a person relates to their own expression. And it happened years before anyone was talking about AI the way we do today.

Over-perfection, manufactured authenticity, or the feeling that everything is too polished to be real are behaviors that people now associate with AI, but they were already the default mode of social media for a long time. People were already performing things they didn’t feel or do, and were already editing and filtering and optimizing every piece of themselves until the version they presented online barely resembled the person they actually were.

Social media created the pattern, and AI just makes it faster, cheaper, and more scalable. It allows more people to produce the same kind of hollow content at a greater speed and in a much greater volume. It lowers the barrier so that anyone can create at the pace the algorithm demands. But the demand, the weightlessness, and the architecture were already there.

The way I think of it is this: social media is the skeleton, providing the structure, the incentives, and the behavioral patterns that shape how we create and think. AI is the amplifier, making everything louder. But it is not the author.

What really concerns me, though, is what social media did to our brains. The way it has affected our perception, perspective, and our own thinking is one of the worst consequences of it, and it can be felt in many areas of our lives.

There’s a difference between changing how people behave online and changing how people actually process their experience. Social media did both, and we mostly talk about the first one, which is mostly visible in the dopamine loops. But the shift I think about a lot is the way social media reorganized something interior.

When you spend years in an environment where every thought is a potential post, you start pre-editing your own experience. You start having a feeling and, almost simultaneously imagining how you’d describe it to an audience. You start living slightly outside yourself, watching your own life through the lens of how it would translate into content. And this becomes so automatic that you stop noticing you’re doing it. Everything about your inner life becomes organized into tasks.

I see it in the people around me, too. The conversation has shifted almost entirely to the how. How should I edit the video? How should I write the caption? How, how, how, and again, how. And with every how, they move a little further from the why, which is the thing that actually gives weight to their creation. It was the reason they wanted to make the thing in the first place, the only part of the creation that actually matters.

There have been a lot of moments in my personal journey as well where I was packaging something for social media, just trying to get what everyone was chasing: attention. But something inside me just didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel like the thing I was about to release was actually mine, and I started hating it more than loving it. And every time, I’ve gone back and changed it (either in the process or after it was already finished) because I wasn’t content with what I was doing.

It didn’t feel aligned with the why I was making it in the first place, and I’ve always said to myself that I want people to love my work for what it actually is, not for what they want it to be. I have a saying that if you lie, the right thing will never happen, and that’s why it’s not worth lying. The same thing I feel about content. If it’s not aligned with the why, we are lying to ourselves, and those who see it, and the right thing for both sides will never happen.

What made me understand how deep social media’s influence goes was exactly the fact that the pull toward over-optimization was strong enough that I had to consciously resist it.

There’s this whole culture now of building in public, of sharing more and more of your life, of turning every experience into something distributable because people have to see the “human” behind it. I understand the logic behind it, and I have nothing against the people doing it, but I think there’s a lot of toxicity in the idea that everything should be shared. What is mostly happening is that sharing something makes experiences feel more real or more valuable when they have an audience.

Some things are meant to be private and better experienced when no one knows about them. And I think we’ve moved so far from that idea that it sounds almost radical to say it.

Subscribe now

Share

I have a baby brother, he’s one year old, and I love him more than I can describe. And I know that if I posted a picture with him, paired with the right caption and emotional framing, it would perform. People respond to this kind of content, and it would show in the numbers. I cannot prove it, though, because I will never do that. The moments I spend with him are mine. I have moments I’ve saved for myself, but I am not going to release them online. I’ll show them to my friends if they ask, and that’s all.

There are a few other reasons why I’m not doing it, but one of them is choosing to let an experience exist without turning it into content. I believe that the moment we start thinking about the shareability of something, we’ve already changed our relationship to it. We are no longer within the experience but stepping outside of it. And the thing that taught us this instinct is social media, not AI.

I am not writing this against AI because I am genuinely excited by what AI makes possible. The way it’s democratizing creation, allowing people to create things they couldn’t before, I think that’s truly beautiful. I use these tools, and I think that, like it or not, this is just going to keep happening.

And I am not writing this against social media either. I use it every day, and I share my work there. I would even say that without social media, you wouldn’t have read this either.

What I am writing about is neither for nor against anything. It’s an observation that we are having the wrong conversation.

We are blaming AI for problems that social media planted in us years ago. Whenever we talk about over-perfection, loss of the human touch, or the erosion of real thinking, AI should no longer be the first thing that comes to our mind. All these things came with the platforms that taught us to perform our lives instead of living them. AI just made them more visible.

And the saddest part of it all may be the fact that we got so used to it that we needed a new technology to come along and amplify the problem before we could even see it.

I think understanding this matters because it changes where you look. If you believe AI is the problem, you fight the tool and resist the technology. But if you trace the problem back further, then the work becomes about paying attention to the patterns you’ve absorbed and noticing when your thinking has been shaped by systems that were designed for engagement. And it also makes you ask whether the way you experience your own life has been subtly rearranged by platforms that rewarded you for turning it into content.

People need to be thoughtful about how they use AI. There’s no doubt about this. There are really harmful ways to use it, and there are ways that distance you from yourself. But the same is true for social media, and it has been true for much longer. And so the real question may be:

How much have we already let social media shape us without noticing?

And I think the real work that must be done, the one that actually changes something, is about staying close to your why and your personal how, regardless of the tools you are engaging with. Because this may be the only way to understand when something doesn’t feel right and find the courage to go back and change it.🌹

Fast forward a couple of months, and taste became the word. Feeds have become full of “taste”. Regardless of the topic I may be exploring or conversations I engage in, the word taste will always make its way there. Everyone suddenly has something to say about taste.

I included, but this may be the last thing I write on taste because I am starting to hate the word. I am starting to hate what it’s becoming and how it’s being used. I believe taste is on its way to becoming one of the most overused, most hollow, and most hated words in our cultural vocabulary, right alongside community and authenticity.

These were all words that once meant something deep (they still do, but only for some) and now mean almost nothing because everyone says them and almost no one “lives” them. From my observation, most of the things people are calling taste (Pinterest boards, curated feeds, or font choices) are actually preferences shaped by algorithms, choices that were never really chosen. The word is getting louder while the thing it describes is starting to lose its color.

And in all this talk about taste (taste as the new competitive advantage, taste as the thing AI can’t replicate, taste as the moat, taste as the edge, taste as this and that) I think we’ve completely lost sight of the only thing that actually matters: the person behind it.

We talk about taste as if it exists on its own, but I don’t think it floats in the air. It lives in a human being, and it is the expression of a self (of how that self sees, what that self values, and what that self has lived through and decided to care about).

When we talk about taste without talking about the person, we strip it of the only thing that gives it meaning.

Pierre Bourdieu spent decades studying taste, and what he found was that taste, as most people experience it, is social rather than personal. In “Distinction”, he showed that what we call our taste is largely shaped by class, education, and cultural environment. He called it habitus, which is defined as the system of internalized dispositions that makes our socially conditioned preferences feel natural and chosen.

For Bourdieu, taste was always a mechanism of social distinction, a way for groups to signal belonging and maintain boundaries. The upper classes used “refined” taste to differentiate themselves. Everyone used taste, consciously or not, to mark who was in and who was out. What felt like personal expression was, in large part, social reproduction.

I resonate deeply with this, as I cannot say I agree or disagree because who am I to do this with one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century??? But when I look at how things work, his framework makes too much sense to me to ignore it.

Taste has always been shaped by forces outside us, like the environment we grew up in, or the things we were exposed to. All of this was already doing the work of constructing our preferences before we ever thought we were choosing them.

What’s changed since Bourdieu’s argument is speed. The social conditioning he described happened slowly, over years, through upbringing and gradual cultural exposure. I look at it as being something generational, as you inherited taste the way you inherited an accent.

The internet industrialized that process, its impact being most evident through social media and AI. The algorithm only needs weeks to shape our habitus as it shows you what everyone else likes, and slowly you begin to like it too. AI accelerates this further, as it mirrors your existing patterns back to you faster than you can examine them. It generates options based on what’s already popular, and you select from a menu that was written by the system, not by you.

While the choosing may feel like taste, I would argue that it’s not, because the thinking never happened.

Today’s question is whether you have good taste. But if taste is the expression of a self, the real question is whether you’ve done the thinking that produces it and whether you’ve sat with your own preferences long enough to know which ones are actually yours.

Subscribe now

Share

I define thinking as the capacity to reflect, to subtract, and to sit with uncertainty until you arrive at something that is yours and not a reproduction of what was handed to you. And to me, that is the real moat. The real infrastructure is thinking. taste is just the output.

And thinking is the thing that’s under threat, because the tools we use every day are doing so much of the thinking for us that we’re losing the muscle for it.

At times, I am talking about the way these tools have domesticated us, and people call me crazy, but I do believe that this is the reality. These tools tell us what to post, when to post it, how to frame it, what will perform, and they are completely influencing how we think about what’s worth creating in the first place. They are outsourcing our thinking, and while we think what we have is taste, what we actually remain with is compliance.

I believe most people today don’t have taste in the way they think they do because the conditions for developing it have been systematically eroded. The result is a taste that looks personal but is actually a reflection of the system. It’s one that was assembled from parts that were handed to you, that feels like being completely yours. The saddest thing about this is that most people can’t tell the difference, because the system has become so good at making its outputs feel like your inputs.

And I know this because I’ve lived it.

I haven’t grown much on social media, and the main reason is that I’ve never followed this algorithmic playbook. I’ve never chased trends, and I’ve never optimized my content for what the platform wants to reward. I’d be lying if I said I never tried, as I did, a handful of times, and I hated how it made me frame everything I was putting out there. Maybe that was the biggest mistake of my life in terms of reach and numbers, but it gave me something I value more:

the people who are around me are there because something I was making resonated with something in who they are, not because an algorithm served me to them. That’s a different relationship entirely.

I’ve been going through a similar thing with AI. I started using it in 2022 with an early access to Dall-E, then I started using ChatGPT on a daily basis more than I was using any other program, and later I started using more AI tools. What I’ve noticed is that in a way, it was reshaping the way I think. Whenever I gave a prompt I had to think for a few times about the way I am writing it in order to have a better output (not always the output I desired).

More than this, it always offered suggestions, all of its responses were structured, and it made certain kinds of thinking feel effortless and some others completely unnecessary. When I realized this, I knew that I had to choose between molding myself to the tool or molding the tool to myself. I decided to create with AI on my own terms, to make it serve my thinking rather than replace it. It is a harder process, but it’s more rewarding because I am not only preserving my thinking, but also enriching it.

I am still in the process of being fully free of these influences, as I find myself at times still being shaped by things I haven’t fully identified yet. I am still working to subtract, and to fully find which preferences are mine and which were placed there by something else. This is ongoing work, and I have a long way to go, but I believe the work is possible. For all of us.

What I mean when I talk about taste, the version I actually care about, is the things you would choose if no one were watching. The preferences you would hold if there were no algorithm, trend, or social signal to suggest or reward you. The thing that remains when all the layers of influence are removed.

That taste exists, and it does in everyone. But a work of removing rather than adding is required to uncover it.

This is the thing that only a few people in the taste discourse are talking about. Most are discussing what taste produces, but only a few are discussing who’s doing the tasting, which is the human being underneath.

We’ve been so focused on the output that we’ve forgotten the source.

The word taste might be on its way to becoming meaningless, and that may be a loss. Though, looking at the past, words get hollowed out all the time (community or authenticity are the best examples), and there is a familiar cycle forming:

something real gets named, the name gets popular, the popularity drains it of meaning, and eventually the word becomes something superficial used for attention or other purposes that may have nothing to do with its real meaning.

Taste is following that exact trajectory, and I think it will get worse before it gets better. More people will use the word, and fewer will mean it. It will become a credential, and even a section on someone’s website. And the thing it once pointed to will become harder and harder to find underneath all the noise.

But the thing itself can’t be made meaningless. The person behind the seeing, choosing, and caring is still there. Underneath the algorithms, social conditioning, and the years of absorbing other people’s preferences as our own, the human is still there.

The work of finding ourselves, of peeling back the layers until we reach the preferences that are actually ours, is still possible. It has always been, and it just requires one thing that everything around us is designed to prevent:

Thinking. For yourself.🌹