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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.🌹

I do think that anyone being able to design, code, or do all the other things that used to require years of technical skill and practice to master is extraordinary, and I mean that without any irony. It’s perhaps one of the most significant shifts in human capability I’ve witnessed. (I am still young, will be 27 in April, so you can say that I haven’t experienced that much at my age, but I’ve been blessed with a curiosity that allowed me to delve deeper into things beyond my culture and reach. One of my qualities or “toxic” traits is that I question things. A lot.)

This shift that AI is fostering makes me think deeply about what’s going to happen next, because at some point, everyone will have access to the same tools, models, and everything else AI is offering. And the things they create will begin to converge toward a center because most of them will be generated by AI using simple prompts without imbuing them with their own inputs. And this leads to more sameness, because the outputs come from the same aesthetic or structure that an AI tool uses. Without personal input, it carries people toward the same thing, and unless this gravity is resisted deliberately, we all end up somewhere familiar.

In my journey of observing the world around me and myself, and since the boom of “vibe coding” (you are letting an AI agent bring an idea of yours to life through code; it’s one of the most groundbreaking things that has ever happened, at least in my journey, and also an element that sparked this essay), many websites started to feel the same way because at the core of each agent there is a specific structure and aesthetic that gets followed. But this goes beyond coding, as I’ve observed it as well in illustrations, in videos, and in many other things that are part of my daily life. I felt this even in the conversations I’ve had with designers, artists, and even with people who have nothing to do with creative work.

The common thread that I’ve found in all of my conversations and observations is that something specific is missing from the things that surround them. And that something is taste, and when taste is honest, it becomes a kind of authenticity.

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Taste to me is discernement while authenticity is the alignment between what you are and what you make. The best way to develop great taste is to simply be yourself, and to stay with yourself long enough that you can actually tell what you like from what you were told to like.

And I believe that shortly, behind everything that is being created, there will be a mechanism that will make things feel different, that will represent taste. This mechanism is the logic that stays behind what we know as generative art.

Generative art is art created through code. A creator writes a set of rules (through a logic/algorithm) and then allows that system to produce the work. The beautiful thing about it is that the system that was created by the artist is the one drawing the line, and every time it runs, it draws differently. It’s the same set of rules, but the variations are infinite.

The artist’s role shifts from making the piece to designing the conditions that produce the piece. They decide the color palette, but not which exact color appears where. They define the forms that are possible, but not which form emerges. They set the boundaries, and then they let go.

The final output is something the artist intended but didn’t predict. Even though many argue that the final output doesn’t belong to the artist but to the machine, I’d say that by shaping the system behind the artwork, they’ve already imbued the piece with their way of seeing. To me, the real art behind “generative art” is the logic itself.

And for those who are not aware of generative art (as I wasn’t until a couple of years ago), it’s been with us for some decades now. Vera Molnár was doing this in the 1960s, writing algorithms by hand before she ever touched a computer, exploring what happens when you introduce controlled randomness into geometric composition. Georg Nees, Harold Cohen, and Manfred Mohr are other artists who, together with Vera, understood that the most interesting creative act might not be making the thing, but designing the system that makes the thing.

Vera Molnar, De La Série (Des) Ordres, 1974. Courtesy of The Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection

More recently, generative art found a new life on the blockchain (it is there where I first encountered it) with projects like Art Blocks, and artists like Tyler Hobbs and Dmitri Cherniak who released algorithms that produced thousands of unique works from a single codebase.

What I’ve started to think about generative art is that at its core, it’s not about technology but about the relationship between a creator’s vision and the system that expresses it. The code is the medium, and taste (what the artist actually wants to share/create, not what it’s supposed to) becomes the message.

And I believe that logic is about to move far beyond art, and it will become the logic of how many things are made.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, but now I believe AI is only accelerating it. The generative process, where a creator designs a system, and the system produces unique variations, will enter industries that have never thought about code or algorithms, and it will change what those industries are capable of offering.

This has already happened in some industries, and the example that feels most immediate to me is fashion.

A couple of years ago, the brand 9dcc (which no longer exists) released a collection of tees made in collaboration with Eric Snowfro (Founder of Art Blocks), in which each tee featured a unique graphic of a Chromie Squiggle by Snowfro, making each shirt 100% unique with the corresponding digital NFT linked to the physical.

Another, and even better example, is what Dani Loftus (one of the most visionary people I “know”) released through DRAUP: a generative digital shapewear collection entitled REDUCE. The collection critiqued the beauty standards created by social media, filters, and even AI-generated bodies. Each piece was generated at mint through a custom algorithm that blended six exaggerated internet body archetypes, randomly assigned voxel sizes that “compress” the digital body, and set unique pattern scales, making every output one of a kind. This is generative art used as a critique, where the logic of the system is the commentary.

“REDUCE”

I see more and more fashion brands following the steps of Dani or 9dcc, where instead of designing a single garment and producing ten thousand identical copies, the brand designs a generative system (a set of rules governing silhouette, pattern, color, and proportion) and that system produces a collection where every piece is a variation. Each piece is part of the same family, but no two pieces are the same.

The design is generated digitally, but brought to life physically, and the person holding the garment doesn’t need to know about the code underneath.

But I’d argue that this generative system also changes the relationship between a person and the things they own because if used in a way that a brand creates only the base and allows for the output to belong to the buyers, the object purchased becomes something more personal as it now carries both signatures: the brand’s taste in the system, and the buyer’s taste in the choices they made within it. The entire exchange becomes a co-creation that changes what the relationship between a brand and its people can be.

When I think the future is generative, I am thinking about one in which creators and brands design systems that allow for an entirely new kind of relationship between people and the things they choose.

And fashion is only one example. The logic can be applied to architecture, to furniture, to digital products, and to many of the things that we don’t even think (today) that they can benefit from such a system.

The generative process allows for customized outcomes at a scale and speed that wasn’t possible before. And I believe that’s what people are going to want more and more, because in this age of artificial everything, they’ll gravitate toward the things that feel different.

This is also where I think one of the most important distinctions of this discussion becomes clear: the difference between a prompt (which asks for an outcome) and a generative system (which expresses a worldview). In other words, prompting is “make me a thing”, while authoring a system is “this is how I see”, making the outcome closely tied to our identity.

This leads me to another element that will be impacted, which is a cultural consequence.

When people start choosing things that come from a particular generative system because the taste encoded resonates with theirs, they will find each other. I would even argue that it will all happen organically, without the need for marketing or audience building in the way we currently understand it.

Think about what a band t-shirt used to do. You wore it, and someone across the room recognized it, and you were instantly sharing with one another a set of values, references, and feelings that didn’t need to be explained. The t-shirt was the signal, while the culture was underneath.

What I’m describing is something similar, but the new signal becomes the generative logic itself. Two people who generated from the same system will recognize each other, even though the output is different, because the aesthetic DNA is visible. The shared origin shows through, even when the expressions are different, in the same way you can hear the same instrument being played in two different songs.

And these clusters of shared “something” will become subcultures, communities, and even movements. I can see it already in what Dani’s collection started. New aesthetic languages that emerge from a system’s logic, embraced by many and expressed individually.

Not one style for everyone, but many styles for many selves, each one carrying the specificity that makes it meaningful. This is what I’d call generative culture. Belonging through shared origin.

The current model of cultural identity is built on sameness. You signal who you are by wearing what everyone else in your group wears, and the logo is the look. What generative logic does is invert that, where the logo becomes the logic, and the system becomes the brand. And through it, belonging is expressed through variation instead of repetition.

I think this will define something about the next era. I think this will change how brands operate, how communities form, and how people relate to the objects in their lives, and through those objects, to each other. I think the shift from mass production to generative production is as significant as the shift from handmade to industrial, opening a space that didn’t previously exist.

I might be completely wrong about this, but I’ve carried this belief for a while now, way before the current AI moment and the conversations about democratized creation that are everywhere today.

It all started with my own feelings, with the things I’ve seen people choosing and doing, with the flood of everything on social media, with the desire to be like X or Y, and with other behaviors that made us distance ourselves from who we actually are.

And when I first started playing with AI more in 2022, these feelings only accelerated because the sameness became more visible, and I started feeling more and more a hunger for difference. When you can see the convergence clearly, you understand intuitively why divergence has value.

When I first discovered generative art and understood the way it works, I started believing more and more in the way it’s going to impact the world, even if it is being narrowed solely to art, and sadly, completely neglected by most people.

The things that can be done today with AI and generative systems are already remarkable. I am not sure what will be possible tomorrow. I don’t know how far things will go. But what I know for sure is that, regardless of how much it evolves and how much better it becomes, the constant will always be the person behind the system. It is they whose taste shapes the logic that shapes the output.

Perhaps one of the greatest lessons generative art taught me is that the most profound creative act is designing the conditions under which the thing comes into existence. Choosing the constraints, what’s possible and what isn’t, and trusting that within those boundaries, something alive and specific will emerge, may be where the real magic actually happens.

I believe this lesson is about to enter every industry and creative discipline, and there will come a time when we look back at this moment and recognize it as the point where creation stopped being about identical outputs and started being about systems that produce belonging through difference. And throughout the journey, we may also realize that it is this very difference that makes us, humans, one. Regardless of how different we are at the surface, at our core, there’s a system that connects us all.

The future is generative because machines will finally make it possible for everything to carry the mark of the person who chose it.

The generative future is not about the machines. It is about the taste behind the logic, the self behind the system, and the hidden I behind every act of creation.🌹

I’d scan my card, swim my laps, shower (not in winters though), and leave. Sometimes I’d see the same faces in the lanes next to me, but we never spoke. I paid the subscription, I got access, and that was the entire relationship.

Then there’s this gym that a friend of my father goes to. It costs three times as much, but he knows everyone’s name. They celebrate each other’s personal records, go out for drinks, and someone he met there even asked him if he was okay when he missed a week because of a family thing.

Both places charge money, and both of them involve showing up to a physical place and moving your body. But one is transactional, and the other is relational.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past weeks about the difference between the two, and mostly because I started to search for new places to spend my time online where I actually feel I am part of, I can be myself, and I don’t need to keep pretending to benefit from spending time on those places.

This reflection made me think about all the things that are part of my life. Been thinking about the things I subscribe to, the communities I join, and the platforms I give my money to. From my own perception and experience, I started to look at others, and the more I looked, the more I started to believe that we’re in the middle of a shift that most people don’t realize yet.

I am calling it a transition from paying to have to paying to belong.

Right now, most of what we pay for online is transactional. You subscribe to a streaming service, you get the library. You buy a ticket, you get the seat. You sign up for a newsletter, and you get the email. The examples can go on indefinitely, but I think these are enough to realize the nature of this exchange, which is clean, simple, and completely impersonal. And I believe it’s designed that way on purpose.

And for a long time, this made sense. The internet was built on the promise of access, and on the idea of building a network (and eventually a community). We had more content, more platforms, and more of everything for less. Free was the default, and if something did cost money, it was because we were paying to remove ads or unlock features. We were paying for the thing.

But the more these platforms “evolved,” the more they started feeling empty.

Some people have subscriptions they completely forget about, or memberships to platforms they haven’t opened in a long period of time. (Fortunately, not myself because I am really careful with these things, and I started becoming even more intentional also because of what I am discussing in this essay.)

Today, I have access to more music, film, and writing than any generation before me, and I feel less connected to any of it than when I used to buy a single album from a record store and listen to it until the CD skipped. I am so grateful that I was still able to experience those things even though I’d say I was born at the transition between what we have today and what I previously mentioned.

The access exists, the world is more accessible than ever, and yet belonging feels almost inexistent.

This observation comes from my experience of being inside the attempt of building something that asks people to care, and I’ve felt the difference between someone who reads your work and someone who feels like they’re part of it. I don’t have a massive following, and I am definitely not writing this from a position of authority on media economics. But I don’t think you need a massive following to feel the difference I mentioned, which is, I believe, where the future is heading.

Paywalls will become more common. We have platforms like Substack (on which many publications live behind a paywall), Vice, and even personal platforms that are putting their best work behind a price (as well as many others). The first reaction most people have is resistance.

Why would I pay for something I can probably find for free? Why would I pay when I can use a tool to bypass the wall and read the article anyway?

I asked these questions myself as well some time ago. And they are right. They can do that. The information is rarely so exclusive that it can’t be found elsewhere or worked around. (Not all of it, though, and not in the form it may be presented by a creator.)

But the people who do pay, the ones who choose to, are paying for something more than the article.

When you pay for something, your relationship to it changes. One example I’d like to give is a free vs paid newsletter. The free one may sit in your inbox for days without being opened, while the paid one may be read on the morning it arrives (It has nothing to do with the quality of content, but with the commitment that the act of paying fosters). You chose to be there, and that choice, that small act of intention, is the beginning of belonging.

While paywalls may feel like a source of revenue or feel designed to keep people out, I actually believe that from today on, they will be known as filters designed to bring the right people in.

And by the way, this is not a new idea. The mechanism may be of more recent times, but the instinct has been here for a long time.

Think about the speakeasies (secret, illegal bars that served alcohol behind hidden doors, basements, and unassuming fronts) during the Prohibition era. To get in, you had to know where to go, who to ask, and what to say. There was a cost of entry, which wasn’t always monetary. You had to want it enough to find it, and once inside, you were a member of something hidden, of something that existed because everyone in the room chose to be there.

The flappers of the 1920s belonged to a movement where clothes were the signal, but community was the actual substance, and the cost of entry was simply the willingness to be seen differently.

Decades later, when it emerged, streetwear ran on the same logic. Early Supreme wasn’t really about the box logo that may have made it popular among some people. It was about knowing which Thursday to show up, which store to hit, and which friends to bring. It was about the line. The scarcity was manufactured for identity. If you had the piece, it meant you were there. You belonged to a moment.

Stüssy built an entire tribe before the word “community” became a marketing buzzword and started losing its meaning. The International Stüssy Tribe was a network of people across cities and continents who recognized something in each other. Belonging was the product.

Even street art culture worked this way. The art was free and public, but the community was gated by effort, risk, and reputation. There was no way to buy your way in. You had to earn it, and that was the point.

What is happening now (and will start happening more shortly) with paywalls, paid communities, and subscription-based platforms is a digital version of the same instinct. And it’s happening for a specific reason.

The free internet made everything accessible and nothing meaningful.

I don’t hate the internet. I love it. I built my creative life on it. And to be honest, I don’t even think that the internet’s purpose was to be like this. There was a time when the internet was truly there to build a real network (in other words, a community) and to belong to something. It made the meaningful things more accessible. But with time, we made everything free, everything competing for our attention at the same volume, and we lost the entire point of it.

I wouldn’t say there is no signal anymore, as I actually believe there’s too much of it, and it all sounds the same.

And I genuinely believe this is why people will start paying again. This free, ”everything” and “anything” version of the internet made us feel more alone, not less.

Maybe you are feeling the disconnection as well. The constant noise of social media (which is no longer social), the superficiality of most online interactions, and the way platforms are designed to keep you scrolling rather than connecting make us feel lonelier. We are starving for meaning.

And paying to belong is a response to that loneliness.

I see this playing out in places that most people don’t frame this way.

Patreon started as a way to support creators, but the communities that thrived on it were the ones that understood that the real thing they were selling was the Discord servers, the BTS access, and the feeling that you were part of the process, not just consuming the product. The content was not the product.

I recently got more interested in vinyl collecting, and even this act, which seems like a purely aesthetic choice, is community-driven. People go to the same shops, attend the same fairs, and trade the same stories. Belonging is the experience.

When you buy music on Bandcamp, you are supporting an artist directly, and you know it, and that knowledge changes how you listen. The transaction becomes the relationship.

Compare that to Spotify or Apple Music. We have thousands of songs saved, all for free, and I bet most of us are not even listening to half of the songs that we still have in our collection. The access is unlimited, and the connection is zero.

That’s pay to have in its purest form. It’s convenient, frictionless, and emotionally vacant.

The reason why I believe the shift from having to belonging will only deepen is emotional. It has nothing to do with the financial side of things.

We are living through a period of profound superficiality. I don’t mean this as an insult to anyone, but rather as a description of the environment. The platforms we spend most of our time on are structurally designed for surface-level interaction. The metrics on social platforms are not building blocks of real connection.

And humans, regardless of what the algorithm assumes, are built for depth, for the feeling that somewhere, in some room (physical or digital), people know us and we know them.

I am choosing to be here. I value this enough to invest in it. I want to be part of this specific thing with these specific people.

This is what pay to belong offers. It’s the commitment that matters.

Belonging is not requiring exclusivity for its own sake, but the simple, repeated act of choosing to be present. And I think we’re collectively realizing that the free, frictionless internet, for all its wonders, removed that choice from the equation. It gave us everything and asked nothing, which, it turns out, builds nothing.

I don’t have a grand conclusion for this. I don’t think I need one.

What I know is that most of what we have access to is forgettable, and the things that matter most to us are the ones we choose deliberately.

I also know that the most meaningful experiences of my life, whether in art, in friendship, or in community, were never free. They required attention, presence, the willingness to stay when it would’ve been easier to scroll past, and other things that are on the opposite spectrum of money.

If you’re building something, whether it’s a magazine, a brand, a creative project, or a community, I think the question is no longer how do I reach more people? But how do I create something worth belonging to?

Because people will pay for that simply because they want to be part of something that knows their name.🌹

This warehouse is made of 15-second thoughts, of carousel wisdom, and of threads that read like assembly lines. Everything is formatted, optimized, and ready to be shipped. There are no tags or seams seen. Everything is just output. In other words, this warehouse is also known as content.

And lately, the more I am scrolling through a feed, the more I am feeling like walking through a Shein haul where everything is technically a garment, but nothing is actually made for the body. And with each passing day, I truly feel like I was.

And it all started with people’s desires to be content creators, and was made possible by AI who made the factory floor accessible to literally everyone.

Content has become fast fashion.

A few years ago, becoming a creator meant sitting with an idea long enough for it to become yours. It meant learning a craft (whether it was writing, filming, editing, designing, or whatever you may love) because the process itself was the thing. The gap between wanting to say something and being able to say it well was where identity formed. The gap was the apprenticeship nobody talked about.

But then, with the emergence of ChatGPT in late 2022, the gap started to close. I would even say that the barrier was completely removed. Suddenly, anyone could produce a carousel in four minutes or generate a script, a caption, a thread, or any other piece of content before finishing their morning coffee.

And while these tools were becoming better and better, people’s desires to become creators (some because they truly loved it, others because they just wanted to live the lives they assumed the creators they love do, while others for other reasons) deepened as well. The assumption that because you can produce, you should, or the one that output is identity.

Many think that if the machine can write it, then they can post it, and they are a creator. I am sure you know the feeling, as you’ve seen the feeds. The same carousel structure, the same hook formula, and the same “you’re not, you are just” opening line repurposed across thousands of accounts.

This, to me, feels exactly like the Shein model but applied to thought.

Based on my knowledge (if you have more, please correct me), fast fashion works like this:

Take a design that resonated somewhere, replicate it cheaply, strip it of its original context, and flood the market until the original is indistinguishable from the copy. Nobody remembers who made it first, and nobody cares because the point is the volume. Rarely, if ever, is the point of these brands the garment.

Content now, in my eyes, follows the same logic (especially with the constant change in algorithms and the idea that the more you post, the higher the chances are of getting seen).

Take an insight that someone earned through lived experience (or even yours), run it through a prompt, reformat it into the right structure, and post it from an account with a blue check and a Canva aesthetic. Many repeat this daily, as the algorithm doesn’t know the difference, and for a while, neither does the audience.

Before moving on, I need to be honest about something.

I am not a successful creator. I don’t have a large following, sponsorship deals, or a monetized newsletter with 50k subscribers. I am writing this from a small corner of the internet that most people may never find (or some day they will), and I am okay with that. I say this because the perspective I am about to share comes from someone who is inside the attempt.

What I’ve noticed, from where I stand, is that the fast fashion model of content, contrary to what many may think, affects who and what you become while making it.

In my eyes, when you enter the creator economy under the current logic, you are converting your life into material. I am seeing this in my sister as well.

Her morning routine is turning into a reel. Her confusion becomes a carousel or video with a specific title (that title that many are praising). Everything that happens to her, and many others, passes through the “is this content worth?” filter.

If you’ve ever caught yourself framing a genuine emotion in terms of how it would perform (this could actually be a good hook lol), you know what I mean. The current state of the content economy turns people into feeds.

Think about what Shein did to clothing, and let’s forget about the garments for a second, for the impact is way more profound than that. Fast fashion changed the relationship between a person and what they wear.

Clothes stopped being something you chose and became something you consumed. The garment’s only job was to exist long enough to be photographed.

Content does this to thought.

When the algorithm dictates the rhythm instead of curiosity, the ideas become disposable. The algorithm makes us stop asking what we actually think, and makes us start asking what will perform. The distinction between the two is huge.

Deadstock is a term from the fashion world, used to describe brand-new items that were produced but never worn or sold. I first heard it over a decade ago, when I became interested in sneakers, never imagining I’d one day use it in this context.

But lately, the word feels really appropriate. Scroll through any feed long enough, and you’ll find posts that exist mostly because the schedule said it was time to say something.

Underpaid labor, toxic waste, or landfills overflowing with polyester that will outlast the civilization that produced it are things that make fast fashion one of the most exploitative industries on earth. But I assume we all know this.

I am not going to make a 1:1 comparison between a garment factory and someone grinding out Twitter posts, as I don’t think the material itself is comparable. The only thing that makes me think about one another is the logic.

The current content economy has its own form of exploitation. It exploits our attention as much as everyone else’s and also the creator’s time, mental health, and, worst, sense of self.

It creates a system where you must produce constantly to remain visible, where “touching grass” is algorithmic death, and where the platform profits from your output and you receive, in return, the anxiety of metrics.

And like fast fashion, the waste is enormous.

How much content exists right now that nobody will ever see again that was made solely to fill? How many people burned out making things that were designed to be forgotten?

The waste of human attention, both of the viewer and maker, is the part that bothers me the most. Both spend time on something that is so easily forgotten.

There’s a moment in every fast fashion haul video (you most probably have watched one) where the person holds up a piece and says it’s cute for the price. That’s the qualifier. THE PRICE!!!

It acknowledges, almost unconsciously, that the thing is not actually good but just adequate relative to what it costs. And the same qualifier is applied to most of the content today. It’s good for how fast they made it.

I don’t have a solution for everything that I’ve discussed, and I believe none has. But I have something I believe.

If you want to be a creator (a real one, whatever that means to you), the single most radical thing you can do right now is to slow down because the thing that will make your work yours is the texture of your actual experience, which emerges when you give it time.

It can still be AI generated if you work with AI in any form, but the intent behind it and the ways you are using it make it “land” totally different.

The slow fashion movement succeeded because it offered a relationship with what you wear. It was a garment made by someone, for someone with intention. Even though you pay more and own less, in this context, less is more because it means something.

The same principle applies to what you make and what you consume online. Write when you have something to say. Publish the thing when it’s ready, and when it feels like you, not like something that others or the algorithm would want to see.

I know this is hard advice to hear if you’re trying to grow. It’s hard for me to hear as well, as I want to grow too. But more than growth, I value myself more and the people I have around.

I also hold the belief that authenticity and slowness will lead me towards building a community rather than an audience (I may share my perspective on this more in-depth in another essay, but in a few words, the main difference is that a community follows you, while an audience follows your content.)

I also know that every growth guru will tell us that the best time to post was yesterday and 100 times/day at that perfect time. I’ve heard it, and I’ve tried it. I’ve done those things, and the reason I stopped doing it is that I felt losing the connection with myself and the ones around me. I felt the lack of depth in my engagements. It wasn’t who I actually am.

I am still figuring this out, but what I can tell you is that the work I am most proud of, and the one celebrated by most people, is the one I gave time to. And by time, I am not referring to posting once per month, as it’s not about the frequency at all.

What I am referring to is posting or creating when you feel like doing it. I have periods in which I am writing 6 essays a week, because I have the pull to write, and other weeks in which I barely write anything. I stopped forcing myself just because I have to.

There’s a small Japanese concept called shokunin kishitsu. It roughly translates to the craftsman’s spirit, and it means dedicating yourself to your work with an almost spiritual commitment to getting it right for nothing or no one else but the work itself.

And the fast fashion content model produces the exact opposite of this concept: work made for no one, by no one, about nothing, and optimized for a machine.

If you want to create, create. I actually encourage you to do so because creativity is the only legacy we leave behind. But make it yours. Let it cost you something (and I am not talking about money).

The audience for fast content will always be large and always be distracted. But the one for the “slow content” is smaller (for now, because I think the movement discussed in this essay, together with other elements, will make more people chase this), and they will always remember what you made.

Say something that needed saying, in the only voice that could say it. Yours.

(Also, I recommend you read this article by Charli Cohen on the way AI is making us think, as in my opinion, a consequence of what she’s addressing is also the way we create.)

Thank you!🌹

Eduard 🌹

These questions have been circling my mind since I wrote a piece about fashion at the end of last month, which is about how we dress for the camera now, how our sense of style is shaped by the need to be seen, how outfits are curated not for their emotional truth, but for their photogenic utility. (Much more is being explored in “Why Did We Make It Content?” which can be read here.) At the time, it felt like an isolated observation. I thought I was only talking about clothes. But when I opened that essay again a few days ago, a thread began to unravel, one that wasn’t about fashion anymore. It was about everything.

Because once you notice it in one place, you start to see it everywhere. What happened to fashion, how it surrendered to the feed, how it became something to be captured rather than lived, is only a micro-version of what happened to the entire cultural landscape. Everything has been in a slow process of transformation, turning from experience, meaning, and expression to artifact, material, and content.

It’s strange to say this because we live in a time when creation is truly abundant. More music, more images, and more writing is released in a day than ever before. It is the trend of “more”, one accelerated by AI, and also ushering in an era of unprecedented output when anyone can generate a song, an essay, or an artwork in seconds.

So here’s the obvious question: if we’re surrounded by so much creativity, how is it possible that it feels thinner? How can something be everywhere and yet feel like it’s dissolving?

My answer is that we may not actually be surrounded by creativity, but by content. And there is a subtle, yet devastating difference between the two.

Some might argue that this democratization is positive, that more voices, more access, more creation must equal cultural richness. And there’s truth in that. But there’s a difference between abundance and saturation, between expression and optimization. When everything is designed to travel quickly rather than land deeply, when everything must justify its existence in seconds, we don’t get more art. We get more of the same thing, dressed in different aesthetics.

You hear it in the way music is produced now. The intro is short because people skip, the vocals come in fast because people don’t wait, and the chorus is pushed to the front because the algorithm rewards nothing but immediacy. Songs are designed for the trend and built for the platform. They’re no longer journeys; they’re simply hooks packaged for fifteen-second attention spans.

Then I look at visual art, the one thing that was supposed to resist this speed we’ve become obsessed with. Art used to be a still point, something that forced us to slow down. We entered a room, and a painting pulled us in. We stopped. We looked. We felt. But now, that stillness is at risk. The image is swallowed by the scroll. We’re no longer arriving at a piece, but passing through it. We consume it in the same way we consume everything else: instantly and unconsciously. Even when people go to museums, the artwork is no longer the main destination; the photo of them with the artwork is. The piece becomes a background to their presence, not a presence they enter.

As someone who first started expressing themselves through writing, I had to reflect on it as well. Writing has undergone the same mutation. Thoughts have become posts, essays have become threads, and arguments have become quotes. In short, reflection has become aesthetic. It’s not that people don’t read; they do. But they read differently, looking for the line that can be shared, the sentence that looks good out of context, the idea that can travel quickly, that can capture attention. Sometimes I wonder how many things are saved and never returned to. How many articles are bookmarked for the feeling of intellectual participation rather than the experience itself? This movement is reshaping literary traditions, and if writers don’t adapt to the times, they risk disappearing. (By adapting, I don’t mean their writing has to change, but the way they are releasing it into the world.)

Photography, design, film, and every other art form carry the same wound. The wound of being repurposed, of being optimized, of being forced to exist not as full expressions of human experience but as fragments designed to survive the speed of the feed. Everything is pressured into efficiency. Everything must justify its existence in seconds. There is no more space for the slow burn, the gradual build, or the work that asks something of you.

It’s sad.

And from this sadness, a question begins to echo in my soul and mind: Are these art forms dead? Have we killed them by turning them into content?

Emotionally, it’s easy to say yes, something precious has been lost. But I don’t think death is the right word. What we’re witnessing is something that has changed so fundamentally that it feels like death. Or maybe it’s closer to a kind of spiritual dehydration, where the life is there, but the environment is harsh, and the roots struggle to find water.

Because when I look closer, I see that these forms are adapting to the times we’re living in. They’re mutating under the pressure of the platforms that host them. They’re forced to compromise, to shrink, to entertain, but at their core, they still carry the same intention they always did: to express something true, to connect something internal to the external world, and to bridge the distance between what we feel and what others can feel with us.

Maybe this is why this moment feels so culturally dissonant to me. We’re witnessing two versions of art running in parallel. There’s the version that lives for the feed (the optimized, compressed, digestible, fast one) and then there’s the version that lives for something deeper. The one that demands presence, attention, and interiority. The one that refuses to bow to speed, that still believes in resonance over reach.

And this reflection made me reach the following paradox: the more everything becomes content, the more we feel the absence of meaning, the thing that content can’t replicate. And when something becomes scarce, we begin to crave it again. It’s so inherently human.

This will become more and more visible. People will seek longer videos instead of shorter ones. They will be returning to vinyl, to books, to analog photographs, to physical spaces where attention feels undivided. They will be tired of art being treated like content. They will be exhausted by seeing everything flattened into the same format, the same pace, the same expectation, tired of feeling like beauty is just another thing to scroll past, tired of the algorithm deciding who they should care about.

I feel this exhaustion. Many people I know do too. And it’s this exhaustion that tells me nothing is dead, not really. It tells me that art is still alive somewhere beneath all this noise. It tells me that meaning is still possible, even if it requires effort. The hunger for depth hasn’t disappeared; it’s just been starved.

And if something can be starved, it can also be fed. If something can be forgotten, it can also be remembered. Culture is cyclical, not linear, and every time something becomes oversaturated, its opposite begins to bloom in the background.

So no, I don’t think fashion is dead. Or music. Or art. Or writing. Or any other form of expression. But I do think we’re living in a moment where their essence is harder to access, not because the forms failed, but because the world around them changed faster than our ability to adapt.

Maybe the real crisis isn’t the death of these forms, but the crisis of our attention, patience, and presence. Maybe the answer isn’t to declare anything dead or alive, but to ask ourselves what it means to look at something without immediately turning it into content. What it means to engage with art without needing to show it. What it means to listen without skipping. What it means to see without documenting. What it means to create without calculating. What it means…

Because if we can do that, even occasionally, then none of these forms are dead. They’re just waiting for us to return to them with the kind of attention that makes them come alive again. The problem isn’t that everything became content. The problem is that we forgot how to see.

And nothing died at all. The door is still open, waiting for us to enter it.

Thank you! 🌹

Eduard 🌹

The Hidden I🌹 (Pronounced “Eye” or “I.” For the Seer. And the Seen.)

And I understand why the collective instinct is to dismiss it. We’re living through a moment where half of Gen Z is trying to escape their screens. “Bathroom camping” became a micro-trend because people needed somewhere small and quiet to breathe. Luxury resorts now sell phone-free holidays as the ultimate privilege. There’s data everywhere showing how deeply people crave presence, groundedness, and real-world connection again.

So now, the logical question may be, how can someone still believe in digital fashion when the culture seems to be moving in the opposite direction?

Well, for me, the answer begins with two elements. One, I am crazy, and two, I believe we are living inside a paradox.

On one side, the desire for physical connection has never been stronger. People are exhausted from overstimulation. Nervous systems are overcharged. The constant flow of notifications, the pressure to always be reachable, the blurriness between online and offline life, and all the other elements that are so overwhelming have reached a breaking point. The rise of digital detox culture, in my eyes, is nothing more than a cultural correction. It’s a pendulum swinging back from a decade of too much.

But pendulums don’t swing to an extreme and freeze there. They eventually settle into balance. And that balance, which is not the extreme, is where the future is forming.

At the same time, the world is talking about slowing down, another movement, known as artificial intelligence, is accelerating beneath the surface, and it is transforming the fashion industry from the inside out. It’s happening quietly, as not many people talk about it, see it, or even realize it, but decisively.

Fashion designers are already working with AI as their new creative partner. Tools like Fashion Diffusion allow them to generate hundreds of fabric simulations in minutes, with textures, draping, and lighting that look indistinguishable from real photography. Zalando now produces the majority of its editorial images using AI, cutting weeks-long shoots into days of iteration. Tommy Hilfiger has experimented with fully AI-generated micro-collections. Entire lines are sometimes conceptualized digitally before a single piece of fabric is even cut. What this means is that the average designer now has access to capabilities that would have required entire teams and massive budgets just five years ago, and consumers are already interacting with fashion that has been touched by AI at nearly every stage of its journey from concept to closet. Fashion isn’t waiting for anyone’s permission to evolve. It’s already moving.

But none of this is the real reason I’m still bullish on digital fashion. The real reason comes from something deeper, something that is more, if not fully, human.

Fashion has always been about identity. About expressing who we feel we are, who we wish we were, or who we want to be seen as. It’s the closest thing humans have to an everyday form of art direction, consciously or not. And in the digital era, where so much of our communication and exhibition happens through screens and profiles and surfaces, clothing as a language of identity is going to transform.

Digital fashion will never replace physical fashion. It was never meant to. What digital fashion is doing is adding a new layer of self-expression.

Everything I’ve observed in recent fashion weeks points toward this shift. Paris Fall-Winter 2024/25 featured sculptural silhouettes that looked engineered for digital rendering. Milan showed bold exaggerations in shape and texture, garments with architecture-like qualities that felt they were born in software long before they became fabric. All of these garments weren’t outfits meant to be worn in everyday life, yet, but artifacts of a world trying to break its physical limits. And when a system reaches the edge of its limitations, it either collapses or evolves. And it’s my belief that fashion is evolving.

But this evolution isn’t only technological, but also cultural, emotional, and psychological layers that I believe are way more significant for our human experience. We are going to reach a point where physical fashion will not be able to fully meet the desire for personal expression in digital spaces. Most people will want more and more to stand out online, but when most of the garments start to look the same, and when every tool allows anyone to create anything, what makes expression unique? Digital fashion does.

It creates a new frontier where imagination isn’t restricted by materials, weight, physics, price, or logistics. It allows for silhouettes that defy the body, textures that shift with emotion, and garments that respond to movement in ways no physical material could. It offers the kind of expression that physical fashion simply can’t achieve alone. I have a saying that true digital fashion goes beyond the body, exploring shapes and aesthetics we once never imagined as wearable.

And yes, even though people are seeking offline experiences more than ever, a trend that will keep growing and isn’t yet visibly spotted by everyone, we are not abandoning digital spaces. Our lives are too intertwined with them. We might step away for weekends or evenings or mental clarity, but we always return because technology, beyond being a tool, is a modern arena of connection, even though it has made us less connected in certain ways.

Which means the question of how we present ourselves in digital environments is more relevant than ever. And that brings me to the missing piece, the part that almost no one talks about enough, maybe because they believe it to be delusional, are skeptical, or any other reason. The reason presenting ourselves digitally will become even more important is that digital spaces themselves are evolving beyond flat screens toward something more immersive and integrated with our physical reality. We won’t be staying only on rectangular screens for too long, as I believe a part of the future is also spatial.

Whether through AR glasses, lightweight mixed-reality lenses, or whatever evolves beyond the Apple Vision Pro, we are heading toward a world where the digital layer blends seamlessly with the physical one. It will be our extension of reality.

In ten years, it will feel normal to wear glasses that project information, art, interfaces, and, of course, clothing. We will wear physical garments for comfort and tactile pleasure, but the aesthetic we choose to present in digital layers may be something different, something fluid, something expressive in an entirely new way. Digital fashion becomes a second outfit, a second skin, a second layer of identity, one that coexists with our physical presence rather than replacing it.

Imagine walking into a cafe wearing a simple black sweater, but to people around you wearing AR glasses, your digital outfit appears layered with shifting textures, generative patterns, or sculptural silhouettes that are impossible to produce in fabric. The way we choose how we appear in different spaces, think professional, social, creative, will be akin to changing a playlist.

If phones replaced desktops and wearables replaced some phone functions, AR will replace the interface entirely. And when that happens, digital fashion will transform from a trend or niche idea into infrastructure, cultural language, and the visual layer of identity in a mixed-reality world.

I am aware that this may sound delusional to some people, but so was the idea that we’d all carry computers in our pockets, or that we’d trust strangers to drive us around based on an app rating. Every major shift in how humans interact with technology has seemed impossible until it became inevitable.

But even without AR, there’s a reason digital fashion matters, and that is democratization. The barriers of the fashion industry, such as money, connections, geography, and gatekeeping, collapse in the digital world. A young woman with curiosity and a laptop can design what would have required a full studio years ago. She can experiment, explore aesthetics, create worlds, build a community, and maybe, one day, take over a physical fashion house. I do not doubt that the next groundbreaking brand and creative director will emerge digitally first.

And here’s the economic reality that critics often miss when they question whether digital fashion has staying power. The infrastructure being built right now, the AI tools, and the skills being developed represent billions in investment and genuine commercial activity. Fashion brands aren’t experimenting with digital tools as a publicity stunt. They’re doing it because it saves money, reduces waste, speeds up production cycles, and gives them capabilities they’ve never had before. The commercial case for digital fashion isn’t about selling virtual sneakers for thousands of dollars. It’s about fundamentally changing how the entire industry operates, from design to marketing to consumer experience. The success stories are already here; they’re just not always labeled as digital fashion because they’ve become integrated into how fashion actually works.

So no, I don’t believe we’re heading toward a world where everything becomes digital and we abandon the physical world. And I also don’t believe we are returning to a romantic pre-digital era. I believe we are heading toward an “and” future.

A future where we take digital detox retreats and then return to digital spaces with intention. A future where we value slow fashion and also enjoy rapid digital experimentation. A future where we keep physical garments we love for decades and change our digital outfits three times a day depending on mood, context, or platform.

We are moving toward more balance. And in that balanced world, digital fashion will become essential. It solves sustainability issues. It democratizes creativity. It expands identity. It adapts to technology. It meets emotional needs. It fills the space between physical presence and digital expression. It does all that and much more.

Fashion has always evolved with the tools of its time (sewing machines to synthetic fabrics, to e-commerce). Digital fashion is simply the next chapter. And in fashion’s story, this chapter isn’t about replacing what came before, but about expanding what’s possible.

Maybe that sounds delusional to you, as it does to many. Maybe you think I’m betting on a trend that’s already peaked. But I’ve seen the technology, I’ve watched the runways, I’ve looked at the data, and I’ve thought about human nature. And all of them point in the same direction.

Digital fashion isn’t dead. It hasn’t even started yet.

So yes, I’m still bullish on it. And I think five years from now, you will be too.

Thank you! 🌹

Eduard 🌹

The Hidden I🌹 (Pronounced “Eye” or “I.” For the Seer. And the Seen.)

There are many currencies in the world, and even if we don’t need a new one, I have to admit that belonging has become a kind of currency, too. People change the way they talk depending on who they’re with. They soften opinions, exaggerate interests, hide sensitivities, and sometimes even shift their entire personality just to avoid the social discomfort of standing alone, though I’m not even sure that discomfort is real. Every environment creates its own gravity, pulling us into shapes that match its expectations. Even when we tell ourselves we are independent thinkers, or that we don’t care what others think, something in us still scans the room for the unspoken rules and tries to obey them.

I say all this because I’ve seen it in my own life more times than I can count. The clearest version appeared when I was younger, especially in the early years of high school (ninth and tenth grade). I remember entering the ninth grade with this quiet but persistent desire to fit into some group, any group. I didn’t know exactly who I wanted to be, but I was certain of one thing: whoever I actually was didn’t feel like enough.

So I began trying on different versions of myself, although, if I’m honest, I don’t think any of them were truly mine. I changed the way I spoke, mimicked the humor around me, pretended to like things that didn’t interest me, and hid the parts of myself that felt too strange or too “different.” It wasn’t dramatic. In fact, I barely noticed it happening. It was the kind of self-editing that happens instinctively. And the more I think about it now, the more I realize that I behaved like this because I thought that’s just how the world worked. It wasn’t malice or insecurity. It was simply the belief that if you want to belong, you have to pay the price. And sometimes the price is you.

But something inside me didn’t sit right with that. The more I tried to fit into those groups, the more distant I felt, not from others, but from myself. A heaviness followed me around. I remember walking home some days feeling strangely exhausted, and at the same time relieved to finally be alone. The exhaustion had nothing to do with school. It came from maintaining a version of myself that demanded constant attention. It came from the mask I didn’t even fully realize I was wearing.

Then something shifted. Around the eleventh grade, I had a deep and powerful change, almost an internal rupture, but a healthy one. I started to see clearly that the effort I put into belonging was draining the life out of me. I still don’t know what exactly triggered it. Maybe emotional fatigue. Maybe growing up. Maybe the realization that no matter how hard I tried to belong, something was always missing. I don’t know, and I don’t really care. Whatever it was, it broke me open in the best way. For the first time in years, I simply didn’t give a fuck anymore about being accepted or fitting into anything.

I started speaking the way I actually speak. I did and said the things that felt natural to me. I stopped forcing myself into conversations or trends that didn’t resonate with me. I stopped playing roles. I stopped being a character in my own story and slowly became the author of it.

And the irony of it all is that the moment I stopped trying to belong was the moment I actually did. People started liking me more, truly liking me. I became part of more groups, but this time the belonging felt effortless. It didn’t require shrinking. It didn’t require negotiating with my identity. I was accepted not for who I performed, but for who I was. And to be honest, I also stopped caring about being accepted. Instead of chasing belonging, I stepped back and let belonging come to me.

What happened back then still lives in me today. I am the same person I was in that turning point. I stay true to myself no matter what. I don’t care about trends, groups, or whatever the world considers “in.” If people want me for who I am, good. If not, that’s also fine. My life is no longer shaped by how many groups I can join or how many people I can impress. I am at peace with myself, my true self. And still, the right people always find me. This keeps reinforcing something I now believe at my core:

Individuality is not the enemy of belonging. It is the foundation of it.

Yet society convinces us of the opposite. It whispers that to be included, we must adjust, adapt, and assimilate. We must lose our edges and become a version of ourselves that feels “socially acceptable.” But fuck that. The moment we sacrifice our individuality to belong, we lose ourselves and the possibility of true belonging. We may gain access to a group, but we lose the chance to be loved for who we really are. We may gain visibility, but we lose recognition (and the difference between the two is significant). We may gain social acceptance, but we lose intimacy. The belonging becomes conditional, temporary. And we are never at peace because that belonging isn’t built on truth but on the mask we’re wearing, a mask that eventually weighs more than the acceptance it earns. And when we collapse from the weight of it, only the ones who truly know us will care.

Part of what makes this conflict so complex is that belonging is a primal need. Humans are wired for connection, community, and shared meaning. We don’t want to walk through life alone. Just like competition stopped being about winning and started being about making others lose, belonging stopped being about connection and started being about performance, about conformity. We built communities around sameness instead of authenticity, and sameness is a weak foundation. Without real relationship, real friendship, and real identity, everything eventually crumbles.

But here’s what I want more people to understand: individuality and belonging are not opposites. They’re not enemies. They only appear to conflict because of the environments we try to belong to. If a group requires you to shrink or hide parts of yourself, that is not your group. You’re not belonging, you’re auditioning. And the price of admission is your identity.

Real belonging never asks you to disappear. It never demands masks or roles. Real belonging happens when you stand in your individuality long enough for the right people to find you. It’s something you grow into, not something you chase.

The more we become ourselves, the more we belong to the right things. The people intimidated by our honesty fall away. The environments that required our silence lose their grip. The rooms that demanded our imitation stop interesting us. And they are replaced by a community built on truth. You realize, as I did, that the world is full of people who will resonate with your individuality, but none of them can find you if you’re hiding behind safer versions of yourself.

It took me years to understand this, but now it feels obvious. Belonging is not something you chase. Chasing it is the fastest way to lose yourself. Belonging grows from within, through the simple act of living honestly and consistently as who you are. When you do that, the right people, places, and paths align almost naturally. Nothing needs to be forced.

And maybe this leads us to the deeper truth: individuality doesn’t threaten belonging but illuminates it. It reveals what’s real, who’s meant for you, and where you can breathe, speak, and live without negotiating your identity.

The belonging we crave appears only when we stop abandoning the person we already are. Because if people love us for our masks, we will always fear the moment they slip. But if they love us for our truth, there is nothing to fear.

In the end, belonging built on performance dissolves, but the one built on truth endures. And the people who are meant for you, the real ones, can only meet you once you stop hiding.

Thank you! 🌹

Eduard 🌹

The Hidden I🌹 (Pronounced “Eye” or “I.” For the Seer. And the Seen.)

And I don’t believe it’s a bubble either. The things AI makes possible are so fundamentally groundbreaking that more and more people will want them, not fewer.

Though most discussions are centered around what AI makes possible, about things such as how much faster we can build or how much more we can create. But I believe the real shift is not about productivity. That’s just the surface. If you strip away the outer layers, something else appears underneath: a transformation in identity. Something fundamental is changing in what it means to make anything at all.

We used to live in a world where ideas competed through execution. If you had an idea for an app or a tool, or a project, you needed resources, skills, time, patience, a team, and, most of the time, money. You had to fight for it. The process itself filtered the world: only the ones who cared enough to endure the difficulty made something real. But now the difficulty is gone. (This doesn’t mean it’s easy.)

Anyone can build anything. You can think of a product in the morning and watch hundreds of versions of it appear online before the night begins. Even the things you once believed were extensions of your originality, such as the interface you designed, the wording you wrote, or the style you chose, can be mimicked by a single prompt.

For the first time, the outer aspects of creation have become abundant. And when the outer becomes abundant, it loses power. It stops being meaningful. It stops being the thing that defines you. We are slowly but suddenly entering a world where the inward is the only scarce resource left.

I feel this shift deeply, maybe because I come from the world of art. I know what it means to make something that exists only because of a feeling you couldn’t ignore. I know what it means to create from a place that has nothing to do with trends or inspiration boards or what everyone else is doing. The best pieces of art I’ve ever made, as well as the best ones I’ve ever seen, were never designed to be liked by others. I didn’t care about impressing anyone. They were born from something deeply personal, something quiet, something unresolved within myself. They were answers to questions I didn’t know how to articulate. They were reflections of a wound, or a memory, or a truth the world had not given me space to express, or that I simply hadn’t found the right way to express yet.

In art, inwardness has always been the source. Everything else is just technique. And now, creation outside of art is beginning to follow the same law.

When anyone can build an app, the difference will not be in the app. When anyone can release a new tool, the difference will not be in the tool. When anyone can code, design, publish, or deploy, the difference will not be in the speed or the skill. The difference will be in the interiority of the person who made it.

I think it will take a while until we fully realize this. We will stay stuck for a bit in the mindset of trying to differentiate through features, when features have already become the easiest thing to copy. We will keep thinking like engineers when the world quietly demands that we start thinking like artists. Not because products should become art (though they can and will. There will be apps that are content and apps that are art), but because the sensibility that makes art unforgettable is becoming the sensibility required to build anything meaningful at all.

A good product solves a problem. A great product creates a feeling. And feelings cannot be copied.

The more I observe how the world is shifting, the more convinced I become that the next era of creation will be shaped not by technical ability but by emotional depth. Not by scale or execution or optimization, but by taste, sensitivity, presence, and the inner world of the creator.

Taste is not a superficial layer of aesthetic preference. Taste is the shape of our inner life. It is what we choose to protect, what we refuse to compromise, what we notice that others ignore (and vice versa). Taste is memory, spirit, experience, intuition, and personal history. It is the accumulation of everything that has moved us, hurt us, raised us, or softened us. Taste is the proof that we’ve lived.

And because AI can recreate the outside of things so easily, the only way to create something irreplaceable is to draw from the inside. This is the part no one can steal or automate. It is the part AI cannot imitate, no matter how powerful it becomes. Yes, it can feel by itself in its own way, but it cannot feel like you. It cannot feel for you. AI can generate emotion, but it cannot generate your emotion.

Two people can use the same tools and create entirely different worlds. Two people can use different tools and create similar worlds that still look nothing alike. This is not because of the tools they wield, but because of what they feel. One person carries chaos and longing. Another carries discipline and clarity. Another carries tenderness. Another, hunger. Their products may look similar from the outside, but inside them (in the language, the transitions, the rhythm, or the experience) something completely different will live.

I believe the future belongs to creators who design from that inner place. The ones who speak from themselves instead of from the market. The ones who trust their emotional intelligence more than trends. The ones who understand that technology is the medium, not the purpose. And because the medium is now so powerful, the role of the creator changes entirely. The challenge is no longer building. The challenge is knowing what deserves to be built, and why.

Meaning will be the real innovation. Presence will be the new originality. Taste will be the new competitive advantage. Inner life will become the foundation of every unforgettable experience.

We will no longer judge products by what they do. We will judge them by how they make us feel. And that feeling will come from the person who designed them, from their worldview, their care, or their sensitivity. This cannot be faked or outsourced. You have to become someone who feels deeply, who pays attention, who is willing to look inward and stay there long enough to hear what actually matters. The new world makes building outward easy. It makes looking inward the real work.

And the ones who do that work, the ones who let their inner world shape their outer creations, will define the next era of culture, art, and technology. Not because they are better at using tools, but because they are better at listening to themselves.

I stopped thinking a while ago that the world needs more things. Now I believe it even more. The world doesn’t need more things. It needs things with more soul. And soul cannot be replicated. Only revealed.

If you are building anything, please let me know, as I would love to check it out and support it in any way I can!

Thank you! 🌹

Eduard 🌹

The Hidden I🌹 (Pronounced “Eye” or “I.” For the Seer. And the Seen.)

There are moments when I smile and I can feel the distance between the expression and the emotion that should live inside it. And it’s not that the smile is false. It’s that it’s carrying more than it should, the remnants of fear, the weight of memory, the echo of all the times I had to appear fine before I truly was.

This is exactly where Eccedentesiast began: in the tension that exists between sincerity and survival. I have never set out to hide myself behind a smile, but it became something natural because I realized how easily one can become an armor. And with time, it wasn’t even about concealing pain anymore, but about how to live with it, about how to hold it softly enough so it wouldn’t harden me.

The world has never been louder and yet somehow never felt emptier. This is the feeling I kept circling as I created this project. We’ve built entire architectures of connection, but so often they feel like they are made of glass, transparent enough to see through, and fragile enough to break at the slightest touch. We call it closeness, but most of the time, it’s simply performance. I’ve seen (and I’m sure you have too) people measure their worth by visibility, confuse validation with intimacy, and edit their truths into consumable fragments. I’ve done it too. It’s almost impossible not to, when everything around us rewards presentation over presence.

That’s when I began to understand the paradox. Hiding isn’t always deception. Sometimes it’s protection. We learn to curate, to polish, to fit the moment. But the more I tried to perfect the reflection, the more I lost the texture of what was real. Authenticity became another costume, the kind that still earns applause but leaves you cold when the lights fade. It felt worthless. It felt pointless.

Through creating Eccedentesiast, I started noticing the small rebellions against that numbness, the ways love and kindness still manage to survive. I kept thinking about the coded ways we move through life: scanning, optimizing, predicting, filtering. And yet, despite it all, the human heart still resists simplification. It refuses to become “efficient.” It still trembles at beauty. It still hesitates before cruelty. It still wants to be known.

Through each piece of this project, I explored many layers: the fear that disguises itself as reason, the desire that hides behind restraint, the shadows that refuse to disappear. And this exploration made me see a pattern: we are all shedding something (old beliefs, old expectations, old skins) that once protected us but now suffocate us. Shedding isn’t graceful at all. It’s awkward, and most of the time, lonely. But maybe this is exactly what it means to grow. To outlive the versions of ourselves that the world once applauded. I believe that sometimes, the most growth comes not from becoming new but from unbecoming the old.

I found a lot of comfort in the idea that imperfection is a form of truth. Light doesn’t destroy shadow but completes it. Every scar, every fracture, every hidden ache is a line in a map of becoming. To deny them would be to erase the journey.

And so, Eccedentesiast became more than an artwork or a song. It became a mirror that doesn’t flatter, but forgives. It is a creation about learning to smile again, not as disguise but as reconciliation, a smile that no longer hides pain but acknowledges it. One that says, yes, I’ve been there too, and I am still here.

As I look at the world now, I see how deeply we crave that kind of tenderness. We live in an age of constant exposure, yet what we miss most is sincerity. We know how to show everything but feel very little. Maybe the cure isn’t to perform authenticity louder, but to practice gentleness quietly, to treat connection not as a currency, but as a conversation between fragile, unfinished people.

Love and kindness might seem like small things in the face of all this noise, but I have come to believe that they are the only things that still cut through it. They are acts of rebellion in a time that profits from indifference. They slow down the speed of consumption, they re-humanize the world, and they remind us that meaning is something we share.

If Eccedentesiast has something to say, it’s that in a world that measures everything, we must still dare to feel. To choose compassion when it’s inconvenient. To love without transaction. To stay kind, even when kindness feels naive. And to smile, not because the world is perfect, but because we still believe it can be gentler.

At the core of Eccedentesiast are six pieces of art I’ve created over time, each reflecting a different emotion or behavior we face in today’s world. Their names are L’âme Codée, Vespertilio, Anima Velata, Ecdysis, Luce e Ombra, and Désir Voilé. Together, they form the puzzle that is Eccedentesiast. You can click on each title to explore its story, understand its meaning, and see how, woven together, they complete this larger reflection.

Eccedentesiast can be explored, experienced, lived, and felt below.

If you wish to stay close to this journey, you are welcome to subscribe to my channel, as I will be sharing more pieces, films, and reflections there in the near future.

Thank you for reading, watching, and feeling Eccedentesiast!🌹

With love,

Eduard🌹

With and through AI, anyone from anywhere can create almost anything, in the shortest time that has ever been possible. (This is the worst AI will ever be. A small reminder to myself.) The distribution channels are already there, especially social media. What once required skill, patience, money, and years of refinement can now appear in seconds and reach millions simultaneously. The canvas has expanded beyond imagination. But what saddens me is that the larger it grows, the smaller our sense of orientation becomes.

Everywhere we look, something is speaking, showing, selling, sharing. Every app we open demands our attention like a child tugging at our sleeve. The speed of creation has outpaced our capacity to perceive, and it will only get worse from here. We no longer suffer from a lack of imagination but from its overproduction, which makes me wonder what will happen to genuine imagination and creativity themselves. What used to be precious (the image, the song, the text) is now mass-produced by machines that never tire. The world has become a mirror maze of content, and it’s becoming harder to tell what is made to mean something and what is made just to exist.

This is why I believe curators are, and will become, more vital than ever. Creation will no longer be the defining creative act; selection will replace it. Curators will be the ones shaping the experience of the world. For many, curation is just about taste or style, but to me, it’s also about discernment. It’s the ability to recognize what deserves space in a time when everything is fighting for it. The curator is the one who preserves. They give rhythm to the flood. They decide what is worth living, what deserves to stay, and what can quietly fade away.

The idea of the curator once belonged to galleries and museums, institutions that told us what counted as art. But in the digital world, that role has dissolved into the collective. Everyone holds the power to curate, and everyone curates. The playlist you build, the images you save, the people you follow, the books you underline, the way you dress, the things you delete… these are all acts of curation. They define the boundaries of your inner world. They tell you who you are. Every saved post and every ignored headline are a micro-decision that sculpts your perception. We are no longer passive consumers of culture; we are living curators of it. And whether consciously or not, we are editing our own lives.

The problem is that most people curate without realizing they are doing it. They scroll, share, bookmark, and repost, but they don’t filter. The result is a kind of spiritual clutter, a consciousness filled with fragments that don’t belong to it. True curation begins the moment you stop accepting everything that arrives and start choosing what stays. It’s the shift from passive to active attention, from being carried by the current to guiding the direction of your own tide. And the act of choosing is sacred, because what we let in becomes what we are made of.

AI has forced some of us, and will soon force most of us, to rethink what it means to create, but it will also make us rethink what it means to care. Human value now moves toward discernment, because everything can and will be generated in this new world. Machines can imitate taste, but they can’t feel the gravity of a decision. They can sort, but they can’t sense why one thing moves us and another doesn’t. At least not yet.

A curator’s power is emotional intelligence, which I like to define as the capacity to recognize sincerity in an ocean of simulations. The algorithm can show you what’s trending or what you might be interested in, but only a human can decide what’s true, and, more importantly, what’s true to them.

This shift, in my opinion, will redefine culture. We are entering a time when curation will become the new literacy, an essential skill for living meaningfully in a world of abundance. Just as reading and writing once shaped civilization, curation will shape the next one. Those who learn to filter with care will build the future; those who drown in the flood will simply drift.

Curation creates context, and in the coming years, context will be the currency that determines value, not production.

Yet context alone is not enough, as behind every act of curation lies identity. You can’t know what belongs to you until you know who you are. The most powerful curators, the ones who define eras, movements, or aesthetics, are always those whose choices reflect a deep inner coherence. Their taste isn’t something manufactured; it’s something revealed. Their curation is an extension of their perception, a mirror of their emotional landscape. While for most it may look like they are collecting trends, to me it feels more like constructing meaning. In that sense, authenticity and curation become inseparable. To curate authentically is to filter reality through the lens of your own truth. And the clearer that truth becomes, the more refined your sense of what matters will be.

AI makes individuality the rarest form of intelligence. It can remix and reproduce endlessly, but it cannot originate preference. It cannot have lived experiences. It doesn’t grow up listening to a song that changed its life. It doesn’t remember the first book that made it feel seen. It doesn’t carry the emotional memory that makes a person stop and say, “This one means something.” And that memory, which is personal, specific, and human, is the foundation of all great curation. It’s what allows us to see differently, to connect the invisible dots between art, feeling, and time.

This is why I believe the next generation of big creators will be curators first. Their strength will lie not in producing more, but in perceiving better. Scarcity and context may become the new currencies. The ability to shape culture will belong to those who can weave coherence out of excess, who can recognize what deserves attention and what deserves to rest in the background.

And this isn’t just about art or design or fashion or anything else you might think of. It extends to everything: businesses, friendships, technologies, and even daily routines. Everything will depend on curation. The skill to choose what enters your ecosystem will define the quality of your life.

Curation, however, is not elitism. It’s care. It’s the ability to protect the sacred from the superficial. To choose with attention is to honor what’s real, as much as it is to refuse to let algorithms decide the texture of your thoughts. It’s an act of rebellion against the automation of emotion, because in the end, what’s at stake is consciousness itself. The more the world automates, the more we need curators who can feel. The more information multiplies, the more we need editors of meaning. The more artificial the world becomes, the more human sensitivity will be required to guide it.

To curate well is to understand what’s worth remembering. It’s to accept that not everything must survive, that not everything deserves attention, and that wisdom often lies in the restraint of saying no. It’s to shape silence around what you love so that it can be heard more clearly. It’s to see with empathy, to recognize beauty where machines only see data.

Curation, in its purest form, is a moral act. It is how we decide what kind of world we are helping to preserve.

And maybe the real task of our time is to curate not just content (though it feels like everything has become content), but reality itself, to look at the infinite feed of possibilities and say, “This is what I choose to see.”

Because what we choose becomes what we build, and what we build becomes who we are.

The algorithm will keep amplifying, but the curator will keep remembering. And in the age not of AI, but of AE (artificial everything), memory will be the only thing left that’s truly real, and curation, the only remaining wisdom.

Thank you!🌹

Eduard🌹

The Hidden I🌹 (Pronounced “Eye” or “I.” For the Seer. And the Seen.)

Not dramatically like a house burning down, but like waking up in a familiar room and noticing the furniture has been nudged an inch every night for years. Nothing seems wrong at a glance, and yet the air sits differently in the lungs. The mirror is still on the wall, the light still spills across the floor at the same hour, but something sacred in the arrangement has been traded for something faster, shinier, easier to measure. I keep asking myself when a garment stopped being a letter and started behaving like a post.

I remember when a collection felt like a season in language, as one designer’s way of naming a year of seeing. You could sense the time that had congealed inside the seams: the arguments in the studio, the tears, the euphorias you can’t admit to in interviews, the private references that only become legible months later. There was a quiet pact between the maker and the wearer that this wasn’t only about covering the body, or even about iconography. It was about designing a small architecture for feeling. A coat was more than just a silhouette. It was a room you could step into and carry out into the weather, the street, the life you were trying to live with some dignity.

Now, when I look at fashion, I feel the scroll in it (I’m talking about most fashion, not all, for there are still brands that preserve the message of this reflection). The cadence of the feed has colonized the cadence of the cut. We’re refreshing each page instead of turning them. Drops function like notifications. The runway debuts like a teaser trailer for the next teaser trailer. The energy that once gathered around a single look (one that could hold you for months) gets atomized into moments that pass like confetti. I don’t want to romanticize the past. I want to indicate the present’s insistence that the only valuable thing is the thing that can be posted again tomorrow.

The strange part is how gently the shift happened. It arrived as pragmatism. Brands told themselves exactly what platforms “told” us: stay visible, stay present, don’t slip between the cracks of attention. The calendar accelerated, and the cycles multiplied. The capsule became the micro-season, the micro-season became the content window, the content window became “whenever we can extract one more entry from the timeline.” Clothes began to behave like clips. You can still feel it in your hands (fabric is still fabric, and the cut can still be convincing), but the difference is in the feeling that intention was swapped for performance. The garment has to audition for a sponsored post before it’s allowed to be a garment.

I think this is why so much of what is made now is technically competent and emotionally anonymous. It’s not that designers don’t care as many of them, especially the new generation, care deeply. It’s that, in my eyes, caring requires the courage to go quiet, to disappear from the chatter long enough to hear your own work. But in the world we live in, silence is punished by the metrics. Disappear and you risk irrelevance. In the same way, you can speak constantly and risk emptiness. The industry solved this paradox by producing more. More is louder, and loudness can masquerade as meaning for a little while.

There’s also the comfort (dangerous though it is because it feels so rational) of measuring the wrong thing with perfect precision. We measure impressions, reach, engagement, conversions, and time-on-page. We measure absolutely everything. The heat map has become the heartbeat. When a dress is judged primarily by its ability to generate a spike, the quality that wins is not depth but volatility. The image that lingers loses to the image that flickers the hardest. These are the perfect conditions under which art withers into “content.”

Fast fashion simply adopted this logic most honestly. The problem, though, isn’t confined to the obvious offenders. Even the rarefied corners have learned to stage themselves like channels. Even the houses with libraries have begun to speak in clips. And lately, with the rise of generative tools that can produce infinite variants in infinite moods, the temptation is stronger. If an image can be made in seconds, why spend months coaxing one true feeling into form? If a thousand looks can be conjured overnight, perhaps we can release ten of them tomorrow and let the tide do the talking. But in my eyes, the tide only drags.

I am not against generative tools at all. I have never been more excited about the emergence of a new medium in my life. They are not good or bad; they are not the killers of feeling. It is we (the humans behind them) who define how and what they are. It is the intent with which we use them that defines what can be done through them. If used the right way, you can coax one true feeling into form much faster than ever before. But few use them this way.

I also want to say this plainly: I don’t think velocity is evil. It’s thrilling to feel culture move. I love a sharp drop or a surprise release. Energy is part of fashion’s power. It always has been. What hurts me is the substitution of energy for essence. It’s like mistaking the spark for the fire, and congratulating ourselves on how bright the room feels for a second, never noticing the wood is still cold.

What I miss is the risk that isn’t performative, the risk of making less. The risk of refusing to explain a collection to the algorithm before it’s ready to be seen by a person. The risk of disappointing the calendar because the work isn’t honest yet. I miss garments that arrive as questions no one had the right words for until that sleeve, that shoulder, that strange pocket taught us how to ask them. I miss the long conversations between seasons, the way a motif could migrate and mature, how a silhouette could repent, how a color could return after years like a friend who had to leave to be loved. Sadly, we are living through an age of contentification, and as a consequence, the world is full of replication, iteration, and only reminders.

Maybe this is why I keep looking to the margins with such stubborn hope. When I see or meet (though rarely meet, because of where I live) young designers drafting on floors stained with chalk, I recognize a sincerity in creation that feels like oxygen. They are trying to say something that can hold them together. They speak about fabric the way poets speak about breath. They ask whether a garment can be a memory, not just a trend. And when they show their work, there’s a tremor in the room that no metric can register, one that most of us have felt when such a garment touched our skin.

This is what I want fashion to be again. I want it to go back to being art. It still is, though we’ve overshadowed its essence with a spectacle required to justify its cost, a constant push notification dressed as “culture.” What I desire is not something that moves mountains. I only want it to move us. To make it possible to feel more human in a T-shirt, not more visible in a story.

Fashion feels lost not because it has forgotten how to make, but because we have been taught to perform survival as visibility. The antidote will not be louder campaigns or newer tools. It will be intention returned to its rightful place at the center of the work. It will be slowness as respect. It will be designers allowed to vanish and come back with something that can hold. It will be the courage to treat a garment as a sentence again, one that doesn’t need to go viral to be true.

What I’m asking for is not a step backward, but a step inward, to remember that the point of all of this (the shows, the stores, the screens) is a moment in front of a mirror where someone recognizes themselves more clearly than they did the day before, and then walks out into their life carrying that clarity like light. Content cannot do that. Garments can, when we let them.

There’s a strange symmetry forming between what’s happening to fashion and what’s happening to everything else we make, mostly digitally. The algorithms that trained us to think in posts have also trained brands to think in drops. The same acceleration that floods our feeds with images now floods our wardrobes with garments. Creation itself has been flattened into output, regardless of what we may create. What matters is no longer what it means, but how long it stays visible before the next thing replaces it.

Many people say that the new general currency is attention. On the same note, I like to say that the new aesthetic currency is frequency and that attention has become the raw material from which both influence and profit are extracted. The design of a garment (like the design of a post) is now measured by its ability to stop the scroll. Somewhere along the line, the feed became the runway. Shows are no longer attended but refreshed. A look is successful not when it moves the room, but when it moves the timeline. The runway image, divorced from the garment’s tactile life, performs infinitely better than the garment itself.

And so the cycle continues:

Fashion becomes Image. Image becomes Data. Data becomes Strategy.

When the feed hungers for novelty, brands feed it fabric. Every collection is an algorithmic offering, a way to keep the rhythm going. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Zara releasing thousands of SKUs a month or a heritage house dropping capsules between collections, as the tempo is identical, and only the price of entry differs. Both are caught in the same gravitational pull toward endless visibility.

Even the words we use echo the digital world: drops, releases, archives, capsules, collaborations. They’ve always been part of the fashion dialect, but what’s happening now has given them new meaning. Fashion speaks like an app now. Every moment is framed as an event, and every event is designed to generate engagement. It’s no coincidence that the fastest-growing fashion brands are the ones that mastered content production first. They replaced the act of selling a garment with the act of selling pace. They sell the feeling of being current, of not missing out on the next post or the next look. The product becomes a portal into belonging, a way to say: I am here. I am updated. I still exist.

But from my experience, existence that depends on visibility is exhausting, and fashion is showing the same fatigue that social media creators have shown for years. The burnout is everywhere, not only among designers but among consumers. We’ve designed a system where the audience and the artist are trapped in the same loop, each refreshing the other. Consumers demand more because brands taught them to. Brands produce more because consumers expect them to. The algorithm keeps whispering: If you slow down, you’ll disappear. (This isn’t true for all consumers or brands, but for most.)

It’s hard not to see the parallels between this and what’s happening in the digital world. The rise of AI image and video generation tools has only intensified the flood, and this is the worst it will ever be. Suddenly, anyone can produce infinite, polished, fast content. And the fashion world mirrors this with its own machine of replication. Fast fashion, to me, is the physical embodiment of generative output: infinite iterations of existing ideas, made to mimic authenticity while costing almost nothing to produce. Novelty has been automated. We’re drowning in variations of what once felt alive.

I don’t mean that technology itself is the enemy, as to me, it never is or will be. The problem is the absence of intention behind both the input and the output. In both digital and physical spaces, we’ve started to confuse abundance with creativity. The faster we can make something, the less time we give it to mean something. The same logic that produces infinite AI images of “avant-garde couture gowns” is the logic that produces racks of cheap dresses inspired by last week’s runway. Both are simulations of imagination. Both trade the soul of craft for the illusion of constant evolution.

What was once a conversation between the hand and the fabric has become a negotiation between the feed and the algorithm. What was once about touch is now about reach. Even the act of wearing has been reprogrammed as we no longer dress for the mirror but for the camera. Our closets have turned into archives of content, and the outfit we choose is often the one that photographs best, not the one that feels most like us. The private intimacy of style has been replaced by the public performance of aesthetic identity.

Even though it’s a subtle shift, I believe it matters. When fashion becomes content, it loses its capacity for mystery. Content must explain itself instantly to capture, retain, and perform. But fashion, at its best, was always a form of slow revelation. You had to see it move, to touch it, to live with it, to let it breathe. Now, it’s compressed into pixels and distributed at the speed of relevance. We look, we like, we scroll, and somewhere in that chain, the garment never gets a chance to become real.

It’s eerie how seamlessly the philosophies of content creation have merged with those of fashion. We now talk about drops the way influencers talk about uploads, about engagement, the way marketers talk about views. Even creative directors are treated like content creators, expected to “build their brand” and post BTS moments to maintain the feed. The studio has become the set. The atelier has become the content room.

And, akin to content, fashion now lives in the rhythm of disposability. What is posted must soon be replaced; what is worn must soon be forgotten. The same dopamine cycle drives both. Each new garment or post is a promise of significance that dissolves the moment it arrives. The archives of the internet and of fashion are both built on the same paradox: the desire to preserve what we’ve already designed to be forgotten.

We used to create to express something internal. Now we create to maintain an external pulse. The question has changed from What do I want to say? to What do I need to release today? The rhythm dictates the meaning. The schedule dictates the soul. And when creation becomes a schedule, it is no longer creation. It becomes maintenance.

Fashion mirrors the internet now, not just in its output but in its ontology. Both are infinite scrolls. Both are haunted by the fear of irrelevance. Both are powered by an economy that thrives on acceleration and anxiety. Both reward noise over nuance. And both, ironically, began as acts of human expression, before expression was rebranded as content.

And this is what hurts the most: they were both born from the same desire to show who we are. But the more we try to show it, the more we forget how to feel it.

How did we get here? How did something built on meaning become machinery for metrics? The answer isn’t simple, but to me, it is painfully human. We designed systems to help us be seen, and then forgot to ask whether visibility was ever the same as value.

Being perceived became synonymous with being alive. This is the subtle confusion with which the transformation began. Proof of existence became the reaction it received. Likes, follows, and views have become tiny affirmations that we are still here, that someone out there is still looking. Fashion, too, fell under this spell: the belief that artistry could be replaced by performance. And this happened because the world rewards what it can measure, and the immeasurable (taste, intuition, sincerity, significance) slowly fell out of currency.

Capitalism did the rest (I don’t want to get political here at all, but I can’t deny its impact). Once visibility became value, scale became virtue. The more visible, the more viable. The system began rewarding speed, replication, and predictability, which, to me, are the very “qualities” that kill originality. Fast fashion became not a symptom, but the logical outcome of an attention economy translated into cloth. The cheaper the garment, the faster it could circulate; the faster it circulated, the more it sustained the illusion of cultural presence. Virality became the business model.

Patience started to disappear as well. The kind of patience that allows an idea to mature before it is shown. The patience that lets a seam be undone and redone until it speaks. The patience that protects a vision from being exposed too early. All of that began to look inefficient and unprofitable. “Momentum” became the sacred word, and momentum has no loyalty to meaning, as it only cares about motion. The very silence needed to make something true was reinterpreted as failure.

There’s also this psychological exhaustion of perpetual performance. When your work, your image, and your identity are fused into one stream, there’s no room left for the unknown. The algorithm hates ambiguity. It wants clarity, category, and consistency. It punishes the experimental. Fashion, which once thrived on ambiguity and evolution, has learned to speak in perfect captions. You can’t be misunderstood if you don’t say anything that hasn’t been said before. So brands began repeating themselves (aesthetically, conceptually, and eventually even emotionally) because repetition guarantees recognition, and recognition guarantees engagement. It feels like we’ve domesticated creativity.

We’ve also inherited a culture that confuses immediacy with intimacy. To feel close to something, we now believe we must have access to it. We want the BTS, the drop preview, the live stream, the process shots. Every mystery must be transparent, every thought pre-explained, every collection documented before it’s even finished. But the result is an absolute paradox: the more access we have, the less we wonder. What was once sacred has become just another post in the feed. The mystery that once nourished fashion has been traded for the convenience of familiarity.

Technology only amplified these tendencies. It revealed our hunger to fill every silence with something. The same way we refresh timelines to avoid stillness, brands refresh collections to avoid irrelevance. Both are terrified of the pause. Yet the pause, to me, is where meaning gathers, where culture catches its breath, where depth and emotion are found and turned into form. Without it, everything blurs. Everything just exists instead of living.

Another layer beneath this is fear, particularly the fear of being left behind. It’s a collective anxiety that shapes both creators and audiences. Designers fear irrelevance while audiences fear exclusion. The industry has weaponized this fear through scarcity (which is 100% fake). Scarcity was once created to mean care. Now scarcity means panic. We no longer cherish what is rare; we chase it. We no longer preserve what we love; we consume it before it disappears. The very mechanisms that were meant to make fashion special now make it frantic.

And yet, underneath this noise, beneath the surface layers, I sense that this fatigue is masquerading as fascination. We are fascinated by how fast things move, but deep down, I believe we are tired. We scroll through collections we’ll never touch, through images that dissolve as soon as they appear, through lives that seem full but feel hollow. The same ache exists inside fashion, a hunger for depth that the system cannot provide. You can see it in designers’ eyes when they talk about their tenth (exaggeration) collection of the year. You can see it in the way garments try so hard to impress and rarely invite. You can see it in the way audiences cheer and then forget by morning.

This is the new cultural mechanism: a cycle that feeds on its own anxiety. Fashion and content creation have become coping mechanisms for a society terrified of silence. We make to prove we exist, and in doing so, we lose the very intimacy that made creation worth doing in the first place. And it’s all momentum that drives it. No one person invented it, but everyone sustains it. The algorithm doesn’t even need to be coded anymore; we’ve internalized it. It runs in our instincts now, disguised as ambition, relevance, or care.

And yet, there is still a possibility of reversal, not a revolution of tools, but a revolution of intention. Because what brought fashion here is not technology or commerce alone, but the forgetting of why we make. And that forgetting can be undone, because the human spirit, when it remembers what it loves, has always been capable of pausing the machine.

Somewhere, and at the same time everywhere, there’s a new generation of designers who are creating for reasons that have nothing to do with algorithms. They are not trying to dominate the culture; they are trying to understand it. They speak in textures, in gestures, in experiments that might never scale, and they seem entirely at peace with that. They don’t give a fuck about marketing decks or engagement metrics.

Their work doesn’t emerge from the fear of missing out, but from the curiosity of finding in. There’s a humility to it, a willingness to fail in public if it means remaining honest. Many of them don’t have access to factories or PR budgets. What they have instead is intimacy, which, paradoxically, is what makes their work so expansive. It feels human. It feels alive. It feels like a campaign.

Some of them use technology as another form of fabric, something pliable, something that can hold emotion if handled with care. They blend physical garments with digital layers to explore what memory looks like in code. They collaborate with AI to test the edges of imagination. Their collections look like essays written in thread. Each piece feels like a paragraph from a private language, something you might not fully understand, but instantly feel.

This gives me plenty of hope, because it proves that meaning is something that migrates, not disappears. When the mainstream forgets, the margins always remember. This is where I see the pulse of fashion returning. Not in the noise of global campaigns, but in the whispers of individuals designing micro-worlds of sincerity.

What I love most about these designers is that they treat garments not as products, but as companions. They talk about clothes as if they were stories. They ask who will wear them, not how many will buy them. They wonder what memories will cling to the fabric, what seasons will leave traces on the sleeve. They design for continuity, not consumption. You can sense it when you see their work. Their collections aren’t meant to flood the feed as they’re meant to find their people slowly, organically, maybe even accidentally.

And they do find them. It may take longer (which is normal), but they do find them eventually. You can see it in the small communities forming around these brands, which bring together people who collect not because of price or prestige, but because something in the work mirrors them back to themselves. This is the kind of ecosystem fashion has always deserved: one where value isn’t manufactured through scarcity, but discovered through resonance.

This new wave doesn’t need to (and it won’t) overthrow the industry. It only needs (and it will) to remind us what love looks like. They will be the ones re-rooting the “old.” They will be the ones bringing fashion back to its human scale. They will be the ones proving, once again, that relevance doesn’t require speed and that intention can be its own kind of innovation.

Sometimes I think the most radical thing a designer can do today is to make less. To refuse the calendar. To release when it feels ready. To stand by a piece long enough for it to evolve in the hands of those who wear it. To let a garment gather years the way stories gather meaning. To treat fashion as a dialogue between the living and the made.

Even though it may not feel like such (or we aren’t there YET), people are, or will be, hungry for that again. They will be tired of the feed. They will be tired of clothes that expire faster than the trends they chase. They will want to feel something when they get dressed. They will want their garments to hold stories. And slowly, they will find the creators and designers who can give them that.

I think about this often when I walk past someone wearing something that looks lived-in, not styled, something that looks like it belongs to them, not the brand. It’s the kind of moment that reminds me that fashion, at its best, has never been about being seen first, but about being seen truly.

I believe that the new generation of designers understands that instinctively. They know that to create something real in an unreal time is an act of resistance, that to make beauty in an economy of distraction is a form of rebellion.

Maybe what fashion needs most right now isn’t another disruption, but a return. A return to why it ever mattered. Before fashion was an industry, it was an impulse: to adorn, to express, to connect, to feel. That impulse still lives beneath everything (the algorithms, the business models, and so on), and it’s just waiting to be remembered.

Sometimes I believe we forget that fashion began as one of the earliest human languages. Long before we wrote or built cities, we dressed (to protect, to belong, to declare something.) Every garment was a sentence, and every thread was a thought about how we wanted to exist in the world. And somewhere along the journey, we started to dress not to reveal who we are, but to prove that we still matter.

But mattering is not the same as meaning. Mattering is external (granted by others), while meaning is internal (built through care, memory, and intention). Fashion used to operate in the realm of meaning. It told stories about who we were at that moment in time and who we were becoming. It chronicled shifts in emotion, in class, in culture, in longing. It reflected our private evolutions in public form. When it functioned as art, it held the same responsibility that art holds: to make us more conscious of ourselves. To make us see the invisible threads between us.

That’s what I want for it again. I want a fashion that moves at the rhythm of life, not the rhythm of content. A fashion that allows for silence. One that doesn’t demand constant explanation. One that gives space for a collection to simply exist.

Because in the end, that’s what fashion has always done best: hold time. Every piece we’ve ever loved carries traces of where we were, who we were, and what we hoped to become. A worn collar, a faded print, or a repaired seam are all signs of life continuing.

The future of fashion, if it’s to mean anything, won’t be built on constant novelty. It will be built on attention, on the way we attend to what we already have, to the stories embedded in our clothes, to the makers who still believe in the quiet craft of care. It will ask us to dress for the moment: for this moment, this body, this day. To wear something because it feels like us, not because it looks like a trend.

And maybe, when we begin to live like that (choosing presence over performance) fashion will remember its original soul. It won’t need to shout to be seen. It will breathe again. It will hold us the way it used to: gently, meaningfully, like a second skin that doesn’t try to define us, only to remind us that we’re still here.

Because fashion, at its core, was never about the garment. It was always about the person inside it, about the human desire to turn feeling into form, to make something visible of what lives within. When that feeling returns to the center, fashion becomes what it was always meant to be (and what it is at its core): art that we can inhabit. Art that walks, breathes, and listens.

I want that world again. I don’t want a quieter industry; I want a more conscious one. I don’t want fewer clothes; I want deeper stories. I don’t want faster cycles; I want longer lives.

Fashion needs to move closer. To meaning, to emotion, to us. It doesn’t need to be louder to be alive. It only needs to be true. And maybe the simplest way to begin is by asking, every time we create or choose to wear something:

Does it make me feel more present?

If the answer is yes, then fashion is still alive.

Thank you!🌹

Eduard🌹

The Hidden I🌹 (Pronounced “Eye” or “I.” For the Seer. And the Seen.)

An NFT (a non-fungible token) is a unique digital certificate that points to a specific work that lives on a blockchain. It could be a photograph, an animation, a poem, a recorded moment, a document, almost anything you’d want to preserve and point to with clarity. Its value is bound up with provenance: a public record that says you own that piece. That ownership is not the casual kind we feel when an image sits on our phone or inside a social media gallery. Lose the phone, close the account, and those files can vanish from your daily life; onchain, the record persists. It’s not that blockchains make things immortal (nothing is), but they create a durable, shared ledger that remembers where a work came from and who holds it now.

A coin, in the context of what’s unfolding right now, is different. It’s fungible and liquid, like interchangeable units that behave more like a tradable chip for participating in a creator’s world, or even inside a single post’s momentum. If NFTs are a way to hold an artifact, coins are a way to move inside a current.

What pushed me to finally write this is the shift I’m watching on Zora and inside The Base App. In both of them, posts aren’t only posts; they can be “coined.” You publish something and, under the hood, a small economic system spins up. People can buy in or exit in a few taps, and value begins to move where attention already lives. If you’ve never touched any of this, imagine a simplified version of buying a stock: you enter, the price moves with supply, demand, and mood; you leave when you like. The twist is that here the “company” isn’t a distant corporation but the creator or even one of their posts. The surface experience is surprisingly simple: your feed becomes a place where culture is not just seen; it’s tradable. Crucially, the plumbing routes a share back to the origin, so value doesn’t evaporate into a platform ceiling. It returns to the person who started the spark.

When these creator coins appeared, the takes arrived just as quickly. Some declared NFTs dead. Others said coins would never work and were just a fad. Some argued coins were exactly the unlock that would pull the next wave of people into crypto. I don’t want to litigate every opinion. I want to share how I see the future, because after sitting with this for a while, I don’t think we’re choosing between two rivals. I think we just gained a second gear.

For me, NFTs have always been about intention. When I mint an artwork onchain, I’m hanging it on a wall (not a wall with nails and paint, but a wall you can stand before, revisit, argue with, love). When someone collects that piece, they aren’t buying me as an idea or placing a blind bet on hype. They’re choosing a specific work and saying, “This matters to me, and I want to carry it forward.”

Creator coins are honest about velocity. They’re tuned for participation, discovery, and movement. When I “coin” a post (whatever that post is: a sketch, a fragment, a backstage moment), I’m opening the window and inviting the street in. People jump in because they feel the heat. They jump out when the song changes. A market forms and dissolves around a moment. That does not replace the slow center of the art but rather surrounds it. If the NFT is my album, the coin is the tour, the live energy that funds the studio, and tests whether a motif deserves to become a track.

This is where the anxiety often appears. If every post is a market, “won’t everything turn into speculation?” Sometimes, yes. Markets tend to overheat. But speculation isn’t new to art, as it used to happen further away from the artist, behind galleries and private rooms and opaque secondary markets that rarely sent anything back to the origin. What’s different now (and meaningfully better, in my view) is that the financial layer is programmable in a way that can intentionally route a share back to creators, even when the action is fast and chaotic. Whether you prefer quiet rooms or loud streets, the direction of value matters.

There’s also a craft to these systems that’s easy to miss if you only see the memes. The newer coin architectures are just like designed instruments. Liquidity pools can spin up automatically. Fees can be captured programmatically and split to the right recipients. Creator-level coins can sit beside post-level coins, so a body of work accumulates gravity over time rather than each post living and dying alone. I’m not romanticizing the plumbing. I’m saying the plumbing changes the surface: it turns the feed into an instrument, not just a scoreboard.

So what does all of this look like in a creator’s actual life? For me, it’s a division of center and surface.

At the center, I keep the work sacred. That’s where finished pieces live as NFTs; where editioned experiments that still feel like final statements belong; where specific moments I’ll want to stand beside a year from now can be held. When I mint an NFT, I am asking for “witness”. If you collect it, we’re entering a longer conversation. It’s less about “will this rip?” and more about “does this deserve to last?”

At the surface, I embrace coins as honest energy. That’s where a work-in-progress, a behind-the-scenes fragment, a prompt, a question, a thought, a sketch can live as a coin. The coin lets people back me in smaller, quicker ways. It converts attention into runway without pretending that every spark is a finished sculpture. Some nights the surface will overheat; some nights it will hum. Either way, it’s real. It’s the street outside the gallery, and some nights the street is where the culture actually happens.

I don’t consider one morally superior. They optimize for different truths. NFTs preserve provenance, specificity, and time. Coins amplify liquidity, discovery, and momentum. Lately, I’ve been treating them as two answers to the same question:

How do I hold this moment? If I want to hold it still so we can see it clearly, I make it an NFT. If I want to let it move so we can feel it fully, I coin it.

There is also a human threshold difference I care about. NFTs ask more attention, intention, often a higher price, and a longer relationship. Coins lower the barrier to saying “I’m here.” Two taps, a small stake, a chance to swim with the current before deciding whether to take something home. I don’t want to shame either behavior. The collector who wants the album and the participant who wants the live set are both part of the same night. As a creator, my responsibility is to be explicit about what each thing means in my world so people can choose their way of being close.

I also want to make a short pause and express gratitude to Zora and Base for repositioning the social surface so that earning can happen where attention already is. They’re not just turning posts into tokens, but also building new economic mechanics (content coins, creator coins, reward flows, liquidity scaffolding) that hold the surface together.

But there’s a question I assume all of us are asking and one to which we already know the answer: Will this culture always behave well? Of course not.

There will be mania. There will be ill-considered coins. There will be things that feel like spam, and moments that feel like magic. But I don’t like to measure a medium by its worst use case. I prefer to measure it by what becomes possible when people use it with intention. And what’s possible here is a healthier division of labor: the coins fund the heat, while the NFTs hold the heart. It’s like letting the tour pay for the studio, and letting the album prove the studio was worth paying for.

If you’re coming to this from the outside, I’d suggest entering this world as you would a city you’ve never visited: start with the museums, where everything is slower and artifact-first, then walk into the festivals and side streets where things move fast and the rules are looser. Both are part of the same place. Both are culture. And when you’ve felt both, you can decide what kind of closeness you want on any given day.

I’ll personally be living in both. I don’t want to choose between attention and intention. I want to marry them without confusing them. I don’t want to declare one “better,” but to understand what each is for, and to use them in ways that honor the people on the other side of the screen, those who keep showing up to look and to feel.

Thank you!🌹

Eduard🌹

The Hidden I🌹 (Pronounced “Eye” or “I.” For the Seer. And the Seen.)

There’s something both liberating and terrifying about living in a time when anyone can build almost anything. You open your laptop, type a few words into a tool, and suddenly you have a logo, a website, a script, a product, an app. (Of course, it’s not actually that easy. It’s far easier than before, just not effortless.) We’ve entered an era where the act of creation itself has been democratized. And the more I reflect on this democratization, the more I become afraid of losing something subtle yet essential, something that often gets lost in abundance: purpose.

When everything is possible, very few people stop to ask why they’re doing it. When the world hands you infinite choices, it quietly takes away your direction.

Every day, I see people racing, chasing trends, trying to make something viral, copying what worked for someone else last week. There’s this collective rush toward what might work instead of what truly matters. And what I’ve realized is that when everyone follows the same signals, no one really stands out. You can feel it even in the digital air: repetition, mimicry, a lack of soul. It feels as if the world is producing a thousand echoes but very few original voices. And this keeps me wondering…

What if the real way to stand out now isn’t by chasing, but by staying still long enough to listen? What if the only thing that can’t be automated or copied is the thing that comes naturally to you, the one you already do without effort or permission?

There’s something that lives in each of us that we can’t help but do. It’s not a job title or a skill but rather a way of being. Maybe you always find yourself helping, organizing, or turning chaos into calm. Maybe you’re drawn to beauty, or you can’t help but connect people, or you find meaning in telling stories. It doesn’t matter what form it takes. It’s the thing that returns to you no matter how many times life changes. The thing that refuses to leave. The thing you love the most. Your calling.

For me, that thing has always been people.

I love being around them, supporting them, seeing them come alive when they do what they love. I love helping people believe in themselves again, especially the ones who forgot how. Maybe it’s because I know what it feels like to need that kind of support and not have it. There were moments in my life when one kind word, one small act of belief, could have changed everything. And I think that’s why I keep giving it away now, because I know how much it can mean. The best part is that it comes naturally to me. It’s part of who I am, of what I love to do, of what I’m passionate about.

Every project I’ve ever designed, every idea I’ve explored, has had the same heartbeat beneath it: empowerment. It was never presented as a slogan or a mission statement, but as a quiet, persistent need to lift, to help, to remind others that they matter. It’s in the way I talk to people, in the things I design, even in the reflections I write here. That instinct has never left me. It’s the thing I can’t stop doing.

But love alone doesn’t build a life. We all need stability, to care for our families, to have a home, to live with dignity. And that’s where the real challenge begins:

How do we turn what we love into something sustainable without corrupting it? How do we build a bridge between our nature and our livelihood?

I can say that finding the answers to these two questions has taken most of my time. I’ve searched for them relentlessly. I still am, though I believe I’m closer now than ever before. I’ve always been doing smaller things, pieces that maybe belonged to a larger whole, fragments of the bigger work I’m meant to create. But they were never the ones that could bring me true stability. I knew I needed something bigger, something more complex, yet simple at its core, something that could bring every piece together. The final puzzle. The real bridge.

And after a long time, I believe that bridge might be Zyra (formerly known as Y, pronounced “you”. Some of you may remember it as that.) Zyra hasn’t been released yet; I’m actively working on bringing it to life. So I don’t know for sure whether this will be the actual bridge, or just the piece that takes me closer to it. (But how can I find out if not through trying it, right?)

The idea of Zyra started as a question: Can empathy be built into architecture?
Could I design a space where people feel supported simply by being there, where artists, dreamers, and creators could breathe again without competing for attention? I dream of designing a digital home that rewards authenticity instead of performance, where presence matters more than popularity.

Zyra is my attempt to turn my nature into a system, to take what I love and translate it into something that can live in the world, sustain others, and sustain me too. And while Zyra is the largest manifestation of that vision, it isn’t the only one.

The smaller things I create (the thoughts I share, the reflections I write, the garments I design, even the conversations I have) are all part of the same constellation. Each one is a small way of living my nature out loud. The products may differ, but the purpose is the same.

What’s interesting is that the more technology evolves, the more I find myself valuing what can’t be digitized (and I believe more people will start to as well). Technology can write, draw, compose, and code, but it cannot care. It cannot feel. It cannot understand the fragile complexity of the human dream.

That’s why I believe that in the world we’re now entering, our most valuable asset won’t be our speed or skills but our sincerity. The world is about to be flooded with infinite creations. What will make ours matter is that they come from somewhere true.

And truth can’t be faked. At least, not for long. It lives in the details, in the tone, in the care. People can sense when something is made from love and when it’s made from fear. They may not always articulate it, but they can feel it. And that feeling, that pulse of humanity, is what keeps them coming back.

Sometimes people ask me how to find what they love, or how to turn it into something tangible. I never really know how to answer in a neat sentence.

But I think it begins with noticing what keeps calling you, the thing that returns even after you try to walk away from it. You’ll recognize it by the way it survives your doubts. It’s not the thing that feels glamorous, but the one that feels inevitable. You’ll know it because when you do it (or even just think about it, or explore it), time truly disappears.

Once you find that thing, the work becomes about building the right container for it, a structure that allows it to flow outward without drying up inside you. For some, that container is a studio. For others, a classroom, a platform, a practice, a series of conversations. It doesn’t really matter what form it takes, as long as it protects your instinct instead of draining it. The goal isn’t to industrialize your passion but to give it a body that can walk.

There will always be a tension between love and money, between the purity of the impulse and the realities of living. But I’ve come to believe they don’t have to cancel each other out. You can build something that supports your life and stays true to your heart, as long as you keep returning to the core question:

Does this choice nurture what I love, or does it distort it?

If it nurtures it, it will likely nurture others, too. If it distorts it, no reward will make it worth it.

The more I create, the more I realize that fulfillment isn’t the reward for doing good work, but the strategy that makes good work possible. When you build from fulfillment, your energy regenerates. When you build from fear, it burns out. One path nourishes; the other depletes.

The world may call one “practical” and the other “naive,” but I’ve learned the opposite: the most practical thing you can do is protect the source that keeps you alive. We live in an age obsessed with speed, visibility, and scale. But maybe the real art, the true value now, is to stand still. To go deep instead of wide. To refine instead of multiply. Stillness may be the new competitive advantage.

While others sprint to keep up with algorithms, you can anchor yourself in something that doesn’t move: your truth. Because when trends fade (and they always do), what remains are the creations made by people who meant it (the true trendsetters).

So if you’re reading this and you feel that quiet call inside you, the thing you can’t stop doing, don’t ignore it. Pay attention to what you already give away without realizing it. That’s your thread. Follow it gently. It might start small, almost invisible, but if you keep following it, it will lead you somewhere honest. And honesty, I think, is the new frontier.

I often say that the next revolution may not come from innovation at all, but from alignment, from people who do what they would do anyway, and find a way to let it feed both them and the world. The future doesn’t belong to the fastest makers, but to the truest ones. The ones who remember that in a time when everything can be built, being yourself is the most radical thing you can do.

Because the thing you can’t stop doing might be exactly what the world needs more of right now. And perhaps the real work of this era is simply to build a life around it, so you can keep doing it, again and again, until it turns into something that outlives you.

Thank you!🌹

Eduard🌹

What’s been expressed in this article is simply the thoughts of someone who loves exploring the world around them, questioning the things they read, see, and experience. I don’t consider myself a successful person (not yet, at least), so please don’t take these words as advice. See them instead as my way of thinking, as a new perspective. Question them (please do, actually) because that’s how more conversation is created, which leads to new perspectives, and eventually more value for all of us. Thank you!🌹

The significance of this photo will become clearer as you read this reflection.

This reflection began with a post I’ve seen from Eliora on Farcaster, that felt simple at first, but I could hear the weight beneath it:

“I get so mad when I see a really cool design only to find out it’s AI.”

Frustration, disappointment, even betrayal… feelings carried in just a few words. I asked why, and the answer opened a door into a deeper unease:

“Because my mind tricked me into believing a human made it, and most of the time gen-AI designs use actual man-made art often without the artists’ consent. It’s basically stealing.”

There it was. A fear and a truth I’ve seen echoed in many corners of the creative world: that what looks like magic is built on something taken. That which appears new might actually be an echo of someone else’s labor, someone else’s vision, stripped of context and repackaged by a machine.

But the conversation didn’t stop there. She added something more nuanced, more human:

“Two truths can coexist. The way I see it, what you call stealing is ‘inspiration.’ Artists take inspo from different sources — it could also be other artists. What I’m talking about is people’s work being fed into AI models for the sake of non-consensual reproduction. To me, that’s not inspiration, it’s extraction. It does not feel ethical in any way, shape, or form.”

That distinction stayed with me. It made me think about the difference and the battle between inspiration and extraction. One implies transformation (the way artists have always borrowed, remixed, absorbed, and reimagined). The other implies hollow reproduction (art without consent, stripped of the human tether that gave it meaning in the first place).

I couldn’t shake her words, because they represent the exact fault line we’re all walking now. A fault line that runs not just through art and technology, but also through trust, authorship, and even what we choose to call human.

And maybe that’s why the statement “I get so mad” hit so hard, because it wasn’t just about the image on the screen. It was about the sudden rupture of belief, the expectation that behind every creation there is a creator, a pair of hands, a story, a life. To discover otherwise feels like a kind of deception.

That tension is everywhere now. It’s in the museums deciding whether to showcase AI works (they’ve already started, and they will continue). It’s in the studios debating whether to integrate AI tools or resist them (they will, because everyone else will, and it’s business, after all). It’s in every viewer who pauses before an image and wonders: Who really made this? (We’re not fully there yet, but I’d say that in less than six months, we’ll be asking ourselves this question about 99% of the media we see online.)

I’ll admit: I agree with them. At least partly.

Yes, much of today’s AI art is built on datasets scraped without consent. Yes, it’s easy for people to flood timelines with hollow imagery, using the work of thousands of artists as raw fuel. And yes, something is unsettling about realizing that behind a striking picture there may be no story, no struggle, no human presence. Just a prompt typed into a machine.

I understand the disappointment. I understand the anger. But at the same time, I don’t fully agree. Because for me, AI was never theft. It was a doorway.

My art has been exhibited internationally over the past. And I only create visual art with AI. That might sound like a contradiction to some: How can you call yourself an artist if the machine does the work? Well, for me, AI was the first medium that allowed me to fully unleash and express visually what had always lived inside me. Before that, my only medium was words. Textual art. It still is.

When AI image-generation tools emerged, I didn’t see them as an easy shortcut. I saw them as a language I could finally speak. They gave shape to emotions, visions, and fragments I carried but could never release with my own hands. I had tried before, with other tools, and always felt clumsy, muted, incomplete. But with AI, I realized I could finally express myself visually. Everything changed.

And the proof of intention was in the response: people resonated with the work. They didn’t care whether it came from oil paint, a camera lens, or a neural network. They felt something. They connected with the story, the image, the presence. Isn’t that what art has always been?

So here’s where I diverge: I don’t believe the act itself is inherently theft. Yes, if you type out a quick prompt, take the first output, and post it online, that can feel like theft, or at least hollow. But if you truly want to create a piece of art and not just content, then it isn’t theft at all. Because it’s not the machine alone that makes the art. It’s the human who shapes it, refines it, and imbues it with intention.

For me, that means using five or six different tools for each piece. Iterating, layering, reshaping until I know my touch, my intention, is present in the work. And intention is everything. If your aim is to exploit, to mass-produce, to extract without care, then yes, you’re hollowing out the very soul of art. But if your aim is to express, to share meaning, to bring forward something inside you that couldn’t otherwise exist, then the tool doesn’t diminish the creation. It deepens it.

Inspiration and extraction can look similar on the surface. The difference between them lies in the why.

When AI entered my life, it felt like liberation. Until then, my inner visions felt trapped. I carried stories in my head, emotions in my chest, but the tools I tried, given the talents I had, always left me unsatisfied. I wasn’t the kind of artist who could sketch flawlessly or paint with mastery. I was the kind of artist who painted with the mind. I had images, feelings, whole worlds inside me, pressing against the skin, waiting for release.

AI became that release.

The first time I generated an image that captured the seed of a reflection I had carried for years, it felt like breathing after being underwater for too long. I think I’ve only been that excited a few times in my life. I had finally found a mirror of my interior world, glowing back at me. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t mechanical. It was alive with intention. With my intention.

From there, the work grew. It wasn’t just images on a screen anymore. My art began to travel. It found homes on gallery walls and even in a book. It was exhibited in New York (Twice – The Featured Image is from “The Future of Art: Best Digital Artists of Our Generation” Exhibition that was held at The Oculus, WTC on 22nd of November 2024 – The exhibited piece is called Vespertilio), in Las Vegas, and in Bucharest (once in both). My art (and myself, spiritually) stood in those spaces, surrounded by the work of artists I had never imagined I would share a spotlight with. People stared at pieces that had started as sparks in my imagination, rooted in my own feelings and experiences, and made possible by a machine.

They didn’t ask what tool I had used. They asked what it meant. They asked where it came from inside me. They asked why it felt the way it did.

People didn’t walk away saying, “This was stolen.” They walked away saying, “I felt something.” (In person, that happened in Bucharest, where I attended the exhibition myself. In the others, it happened digitally, through exchanges of thoughts and impressions.)

That’s when I realized that maybe the medium matters less than we think. Maybe what truly matters is whether the work carries presence, story, and care. Whether it holds intention.

So when I hear people say that AI art is empty, or fake, or just theft wearing a pretty mask, I can only answer with my own life. Because for me, AI was not a machine that replaced me. It was a companion that revealed me. I didn’t use it to steal, but to express.

When I think about the difference between art and theft, between inspiration and extraction, I always return to a single word: intention.

Because the truth is that art has always been borrowed. Artists have always absorbed the world around them, drawn from the labor of others, and remixed culture into something new. Painters learned from other painters, copying their strokes before developing their own. Musicians sampled records, recontextualizing rhythms and melodies. Fashion designers quoted silhouettes from past decades and made them new again.

Every art form carries this lineage of influence. But what separates it from theft is the act of transformation, carrying the source through the fire of one’s own vision and reshaping it into something different, personal, alive. That is inspiration.

Extraction, on the other hand, is something else entirely. Extraction bypasses care, bypasses transformation, bypasses intention. It is a reproduction without responsibility. It is scraping someone’s labor not to build upon it, but to drain it.

That, in my eyes, is the wound many artists feel right now. Not that machines exist, but that their work was ingested without consent, turned into anonymous data points, and then regurgitated in forms that erase the human story behind them. That critique is valid.

But here’s where I believe we must be careful: the machine itself is not the thief. The machine has no intention at all. It doesn’t wake up wanting to exploit or to liberate. It is an amplifier. The theft of the art comes from us, from how we choose to use it. If you approach it as a factory, you’ll get a product. If you approach it as a mirror, you’ll get expression.

The line between inspiration and extraction, between theft and art, lies in the why. Why did you use the tool? To mass-produce disposable images? Or to reveal something you couldn’t otherwise say?

To me, that is the crux. AI doesn’t erase the human. It reveals the human intention that wields it. That’s why I believe it isn’t AI, the machine itself, that commits theft, but the humans wielding it. The problem is still with us.

And this is why I don’t believe we can dismiss the ethical concerns around AI art. To do so would be to ignore the very real pain many artists feel when their work is absorbed without consent, stripped of authorship, and re-emerges as something unrecognizable. (As I said, it’s not AI’s fault. It’s not the machine’s.)

We need solutions. Not for legality’s sake, but for trust, fairness, and, most importantly, respect.

A few that already exist or are beginning to emerge include: Content-based datasets (Artists could opt in or out of having their work used to train models, just as musicians can choose to license or protect their songs.), Attribution and compensation (If a model has learned from your labor, perhaps it should acknowledge that lineage and even share some of the value it generates. Think about how streaming platforms pay musicians (imperfectly, yes, but the structure is there)), Transparency in labeling (AI art should not hide itself. (I won’t hide mine.) Just as photography is not painting, AI is not pen and brush. But that doesn’t mean it’s lesser.), Tools for agency, not erasure (Imagine systems where AI doesn’t replace artists but becomes something they can guide, bend, and collaborate with. In truth, that’s what each tool already is, but it depends on how we choose to see and use them.)

But in my eyes, no policy, no dataset, no tool will ever fully solve the ethical question. Because at its core, ethics in art has always been about intention. Even with perfect consent and compensation, if the machine is used without care, without purpose, it can still become a form of theft.

So yes, we need structures. We need fairness. We need new standards. But we also need something older than any of that: integrity. The willingness to use and create with these tools not for extraction, but for expression.

Maybe the real question isn’t whether AI art is real art. Maybe the question is whether we, as humans, are creating with honesty.

Every tool in history (the camera, the sampler, the computer) was met with suspicion at first. Each one blurred a line. Each one forced us to ask what counts as authentic. And each time, the answer was not found in the tool, but in the hands that used it.

AI is no different. It is a mirror. It is empty on its own. What gives it life is us with our choices, our care, our willingness to use it as an extension of our inner worlds rather than a shortcut around them.

The fear that art might become extraction is not unfounded. But I believe the cure is not rejection, but intention. If we create with respect, if we build tools and systems that honor consent, if we treat this technology not as a factory but as a canvas, then perhaps AI will not steal art from us. It will give it back to us, albeit in new shapes, new languages, new mirrors.

When I stand before my own AI works, I don’t see code, datasets, or the labor of other artists. I see pieces of myself crystallized into form. And when others stand before them and feel something, that is the proof.

Art has never been about the tool. It has always been about the transmission of presence. And presence can never be stolen. It can only be given.

Thank you!🌹

Eduard🌹

For the past few decades, coding has been the golden ticket. Learn to code, and you could build anything. It was the bottleneck, the gatekeeper between ideas and execution. Without coding, you couldn't have built many of the things you wanted to, regardless of your other talents. You always needed a “dev.” But today, tools like Replit, Cursor, ChatGPT, and other AI agents are removing that barrier at lightning speed. You can describe what you want, and the machine will scaffold it for you, sometimes in minutes. (It sounds easy, but it's not that simple yet. There's still work required to fully develop and launch your app.)

The walls are coming down. What used to require teams of developers can now be prototyped by a solo creator on a weekend. Again, I emphasize it's not effortless (yet), but this shift is thrilling. Absolutely thrilling. The deeper implication is clear: something fundamental is changing.

There is one thing that happens when execution becomes democratized: originality becomes priceless. That's where design starts to matter more. By design, I'm not referring to just “how it looks,” but also to how it works, how it feels in your hand, in your head, in your heart. Design is the soul of a product. The difference between a tool you use once and forget, and one you keep returning to. Think of the products you love... You do so not because they're the most powerful, but because they are the most thoughtful. Because someone, somewhere, cared enough to make every interaction feel smooth, meaningful, maybe even beautiful. That's design.

Now you may say that what I've described above can be automated by AI as well. And to be honest, I would disagree and say that it is much harder to do. You can teach an agent to write code. You can train it to generate layouts, mimic trends, even analyze patterns of user behavior. But what you can't teach it (at least not well enough) is taste, that intuitive sense of what feels right. The ability to distill chaos into clarity. To craft an experience that makes people feel something.

Taste is scarce (in my opinion, the scarcest thing ever because rarely, if ever, do people have 100% similar taste). And that's exactly why I believe it's about to become one of the most valuable assets in tech.

As creation is being democratized, and we are about to step into a world flooded with products (apps, platforms, tools), the barrier will no longer be “Can I build it?” but rather “Will anyone care?” And in my eyes, the answer to that depends almost entirely on the designer's eye. On their ability to strip things down to their essence and make decisions that are not just functional but emotional, human, enduring.

For many, design is just decoration. But I've learned that it is actually intention. It is design that transforms something usable into something unforgettable. It's how Apple turned a phone into an object of desire (it's not the best product on the market. I am an Apple customer but if you ask me, in many ways Samsung > Apple). How Notion made note-taking feel like play (Notion is the app I use the most. I've tried several note-taking apps, but none of them compares to Notion. I refer to it as the Apple of note-taking). How an indie app with no budget can outshine a corporate one with millions in funding. Why? Because their design is unmatched. It speaks directly to the soul, and code alone can't do that.

Thus, I arrive at my conclusion that in a time when everyone can code, those who design will lead. Of course, the dream is to master both. To be able to bring an idea to life with your own hands (from the logic that powers the interface to the interface that invites people in). There's a rare kind of magic in being a builder and an artist at once. When you understand code, you're not limited by what's been made before. When you understand design, you're not limited by what people expect. Put the two together, and you become dangerous in the best way.

But, if someone asked me today to choose only one, I'd go for design. I believe that code is becoming a commodity, thus making design still a compass.

You can ask an AI agent to generate a login page, a database schema, a working prototype (almost anything that comes to your mind) and it will give you something that works. But what it can't do is tell you why something should exist in the first place. It can't tell you what it should feel like, or how to make someone care. Those are questions of taste. Of judgment. Of empathy.

These are the things that make design so powerful. It's not just about making things look good, but also about making them feel right. It's about choices that can't be reasoned by logic alone: the placement of a button, the curve of a corner, the silence between two moments. It's about knowing when to leave something out. When to go bold. When to do less, because sometimes, less is more.

I love to say that design is where the soul enters the process. The part that refuses to settle. It's the part that makes you ask yourself not what you can build, but what you should build. What will make people feel something real? Look at design as the refusal to be forgettable. (Think again about your favorite apps.)

I believe that in the present moment, and in the future, the most important question won't be “can I create it?” but rather “do you know what's worth creating?” That's the reason why I'd choose design. As a creator, a designer myself, I have to think about what this means for me as well. What does it mean for someone with an idea, a vision, a need to make something real? I have great news.

It means the tools are no longer the problem. The gatekeepers are gone. The EXCUSES are fading. You don't need to know everything. You don't need permission. You just need taste. You need to care deeply about what you're creating and for whom. You need to observe the world with precision, notice what others overlook, and shape something that speaks.

We are entering the era of designers. Not just those with Figma files and moodboards, but those with clarity. Those who can cut through complexity and make things simple, honest, beautiful. Those who can make a thousand invisible decisions and have it all feel effortless to the person on the other end. That's what will matter now. That's what will set my and your product apart.

Study design. Develop your eye. LEARN TO TRUST YOUR GUT. Make things that feel like you. Think about how anyone in this world can create the same thing as you do, at the same speed (even faster) as you. What will make the difference then? The care you put into details, the intention behind your choices, and the taste you bring to the table. You don't need to be the loudest. Just the most thoughtful. That's how you'll be remembered.

I am saying it again, with different words this time...

The playing field is being leveled, but not in the way people expect. It's not just about who can move the fastest; it's about who can move with feeling. As the technical barriers fade, what remains is the human layer: the vision, the aesthetic, the care.

If everyone can build, then the ones who stand out will be those who create with taste. Those who obsess over nuance. Who notice what others overlook. Who dare to strip things down until only the essential remains. That's the new edge.

This is the era of designers (not just in the traditional sense, but in the broader sense). The era of anyone who shapes experience with intention. Anyone who sees not just what's possible, but what's worth making. Your time is now.

If you're learning to build, don't just learn to code. Learn to feel. Learn to see. Learn to design.

Thank you!🌹

Eduard🌹

As artificial intelligence advances toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and AI Agents become more integrated into our daily lives, a question keeps arising in my mind: What role does human connection play in an era where machines can think, respond, and even emulate emotion? One of the biggest ironies of our time is that while technology promises to bring us closer, it often pushes us further apart. The more we rely on AI to fulfill social and emotional needs, the more we risk losing what makes human relationships meaningful.

Now, more than ever, I believe that human connection is not just important but rather it is essential for preserving our sense of self, our collective empathy, and the richness of our shared experiences.

Technology has made communication effortless. We can send messages in an instant, hold virtual meetings across the globe, and soon, we will have more and more AI companions offering words of comfort when we feel lonely. (I’m sure many of you, like me, wonder: Why would someone turn to AI for comfort? How could anyone find solace in something that “doesn’t exist”? But they will. Many people will.)

Chatbots, voice assistants, and AI-driven social platforms are, in my opinion, designed to engage us in ways that feel increasingly personal. But while AI can replicate conversation, it cannot (at least not yet, for some) replicate true understanding.

Human connection is about presence, shared history, and the depth of emotions that machines cannot experience. It is not just about words. AI may be able to predict what we want to hear, but it cannot truly listen the way another human can. When we confide in a friend, we are met with empathy born from personal experience, not programmed responses. When we laugh together, it comes from shared moments of vulnerability and joy, not from an algorithm designed to elicit engagement.

AI is at its worst today; it will only get better with each passing day. This rapid advancement makes me question the convenience of AI-driven relationships versus the depth of human ones. I feel that many people will turn to AI for companionship, whether in the form of virtual partners, AI friends, or digital therapists. (This is largely because we are living in a time when many people feel, or truly are, lonelier than ever before.) While these interactions may offer temporary relief from loneliness, they lack the raw, unfiltered complexity of human relationships.

The messiness, the unpredictability, and even the discomfort of human connection are what make it so beautiful. It is through these imperfections that we grow. Disagreements, misunderstandings, and reconciliations shape our emotional intelligence and help us develop a deeper understanding of ourselves and others.

If AI becomes the primary source of our social interactions, I believe we risk losing our ability to navigate real human relationships, leading to emotional detachment and an even greater sense of isolation.

I truly believe that now, more than ever, we need human connection. In these times, I see it as a necessity. And we must prioritize it before it becomes a luxury.

There are a few reasons why I feel this way. As you know, empathy is one of the core values that define me, something I always strive to encourage in others. Empathy cannot be automated. Concern may be mimicked, but pain, joy, and love can never be truly replicated by AI. In my opinion, true empathy comes from shared human experiences, from knowing what it means to struggle, to dream, and to overcome.

Another reason I believe this is deeply tied to something I value greatly: authenticity. GENUINE human interactions are unpredictable and organic. Their authenticity comes from the unknown, from the unfiltered and unscripted moments that shape our relationships.

Another reason I believe this is one of the deepest human desires: growth. And more often than not, growth comes through discomfort. Conflict, heartbreak, and even mundane struggles are essential for personal development. While it’s true that AI can simulate these moments, I believe that, in most cases, it will shield us from uncomfortable interactions, ultimately robbing us of the opportunity to build resilience, emotional intelligence, and deeper self-awareness.

The final reason I want to share is that, as humans, we thrive on meaningful connections. We need and crave them. Relationships are more than just words exchanged; they are built through shared experiences, struggles, and triumphs. While we are already at a point where we interact with AI daily, often without realizing it, it cannot truly experience life in the way we want and need it to.

As I believe that human connection is, and will always be, at the core of our lives, now more than ever, we must actively nurture it. Instead of primarily connecting with friends or others online, make an effort to do so face-to-face. No technology can ever replace the power of in-person interaction. Real-world connections should always remain a priority.

Whenever you talk to someone, try to be fully present. Avoid distractions, listen actively, and engage with genuine curiosity. The connection between two souls deepens when both feel truly heard.

Prioritize cultivating deep relationships. While it’s okay to engage in countless digital interactions, the main focus should be on building meaningful, lasting connections. AI is a helpful tool (I won’t deny that), but it should never replace real relationships. If you find yourself relying on AI companionship over human connection, take a step back and reconnect with the people around you.

And most importantly, create and share real experiences. Engage in activities that foster genuine human connection. It is in these shared moments that the most meaningful bonds are formed.

As we reach the final points of these thoughts, I don’t want you to think this is a piece written against AI or as resistance to the ongoing technological revolution. In fact, I am one of the biggest fans of what is happening, and I couldn’t be more excited about the advances in AI. But despite my excitement, I will never forget that human connection is what gives life meaning. It is what makes the world feel alive, what makes art resonate, and what makes love real.

This is why, even though I’m thrilled by everything that is developing (and even designing things myself), I believe that now, more than ever, we must nurture, protect, and prioritize the relationships that define who we are. Because in the end, when our story comes to a close, it will be the depth of human connection in our lives that made it all worth it. Thus, take a step today:

Reach out to a friend, set aside time to be fully present with those you care about, and remind yourself of the value of genuine human connection. Let’s not wait for technology to define our emotional lives. Instead, let’s take the lead by nurturing the bonds that give our lives meaning.

Because, in the end, it’s not the machines we remember, but the people who made us feel truly alive.

Thank you!🌹

Eduard🌹