There was a very specific vibe to being young online around 2018 and 2019 that already feels weirdly far away. It was the bedroom-pop era: Clairo, boy pablo, Cuco, Rex Orange County, Wallows, Girl in Red, Mac DeMarco somewhere in the background. Thrifted sweaters, cuffed trousers, plants, fairy lights, Polaroids, cheap film cameras, wired headphones, Vans. Everything looked slightly grainy and homemade.
But underneath the clothes and the music, the point was the way ordinary life got romanticized. A few years earlier, Instagram had been about polish, with the ideal post containing rooftop pools, brunch, marble counters, expensive clothes, somewhere on Santorini. Bedroom pop flipped that around. Suddenly the fantasy was sitting on the bus while the sun was setting, smoking outside some random house party, walking through your neighborhood at night, hanging out in somebody's messy room, having a crush you couldn't properly talk to. Clairo's Pretty Girl looked like something you could have filmed on your own shitty laptop webcam. The masculinity of the scene felt different too, with the ideal indie boy having painted nails, necklaces, oversized sweaters, floppy hair. There was an emotional awkwardness, a casual queerness to everything. It was obviously curated too, but curated to look like nobody was trying very hard.
2019 was probably the cleanest version of it, and maybe one of the last times youth culture still felt like it had something close to one dominant indie sensibility. Then COVID happened, and the bedroom stopped being this cute symbol of teenage loneliness and became a room you literally couldn't leave. That same year TikTok exploded, and after that it felt like every possible taste, hobby, and feeling was getting a name. You couldn't just like forests anymore; there was cottagecore. Old universities and rainy autumn days? Dark academia. Empty shopping centers became liminal spaces. Then dreamcore, weirdcore, Y2K, coquette, indie sleaze, clean girl, whimsigoth, blokecore, goblincore and every other possible variation of -core.
Naming things is always fun. We love to do it with colours, sexualities, music genres, flavours. There was something genuinely satisfying about stumbling onto some little corner of the internet that perfectly described a feeling you had never had words for. But once an aesthetic has a name, it becomes searchable. And once it is searchable, it comes with a starter pack: clothes, movies, music, furniture, places, books, poses, colours. A taste used to be a bunch of things you accumulated messily over time. Now an aesthetic can arrive preassembled, and you can basically build the whole thing around yourself in a weekend.
Then those little worlds started bleeding into each other. A PS2 horror game, British shoegaze, Hong Kong art cinema, medieval armour, Soviet apartment blocks, old digicams, Japanese street fashion and a train through Kazakhstan can now all sit comfortably inside the same taste profile, even though historically most of them had almost nothing to do with one another. The algorithm doesn't care about those borders. It just notices that people who like one of these things often like the others too. And after lockdown, that whole cluster got noticeably darker and dreamier: the Backrooms, analog horror, empty malls, VHS noise, fluorescent corridors, PS1 graphics, old computer interfaces, weird low-resolution horror games. There is something very 2020 about an endless hallway that looks familiar but has nobody in it.
Silent Hill seems like it was almost made for this. Fog, rust, abandoned buildings, industrial noise, Akira Yamaoka, blurry PS2 faces, depression. Once those elements started circulating on their own, Silent Hill stopped being just an old survival-horror franchise and became a visual language. You don't even need to have played the games anymore to understand what somebody means by “Silent Hill vibes”. Shoegaze went through something similar. Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine fit perfectly into an internet culture obsessed with blurry nostalgia: buried vocals, fuzzy guitars, some vague sense of longing. Eventually “shoegaze” online stretched far beyond shoegaze itself. Duster, Deftones, dream pop, slowcore, emo, whatever sounded, looked, or felt foggy enough. I do this too. A rainy night scene on an old Zagreb tram can feel “shoegaze” to me even though there is nothing literally shoegaze about a tram.
Cinema got weird in a slightly different way. Letterboxd turned movie taste into a public personality test, with your Top Four becoming the film version of putting bands on your MySpace page. Criterion gave it a shelf. Wong Kar-wai is almost comically compatible with social media because five seconds of Fallen Angels already gives you the whole appeal: neon, cigarette smoke, motion blur, beautiful lonely people, Hong Kong at night. Sofia Coppola works from another angle: bedrooms, hotels, soft light, pretty clothes, ennui, dreamy soundtracks. The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette. They look completely different, but both translate almost suspiciously well into moodboards.
The interesting part is that the work and its aesthetic can now have separate lives. Wong Kar-wai becomes neon + motion blur + loneliness. Sofia Coppola becomes soft light + girlhood + ennui. Silent Hill becomes fog + trauma + PS2 graphics. Shoegaze becomes distorted guitar + blurry photo + lowercase font. The package can travel much further than the thing itself. Sometimes that is genuinely how people discover the work: somebody sees a Fallen Angels edit and ends up watching the whole film; somebody hears fifteen seconds of Slowdive and actually gets into shoegaze. The problem is that you can also become familiar with the package without knowing much about the thing it came from.
And once something has been compressed that way, it becomes very easy to sell. A corporation does not need to understand why somebody has nostalgia for a PSP. It needs the shape of the console, PlayStation typography, silver plastic, some vague 2000s-tech feeling. Put it on a bag. Done. It doesn't need to understand shoegaze either. Washed-out photograph, distressed lettering, oversized T-shirt, something vaguely 1993-looking. Done. None of this is new in itself; every subculture eventually gets turned into clothes. It just happens much faster now.
I've had a PSP for around fifteen years, and for basically that entire time nobody gave a shit about PSPs. It was just an old console. Then physical media and Y2K tech became cool again, and TikTok filled up with carefully staged PSPs, UMDs, iPods, digicams and wired headphones. Vintage stores started selling out. And then Zara made a PSP bag. Nothing about the PSP had changed. It had simply gone from normal, to obsolete, to suddenly being evidence of taste.
The same thing happened with cinema. Years ago I went to a Kubrick screening at an independent cinema in Zagreb and the theatre was half empty. Last year I went again, and it was packed. Obviously that is good. A full repertory screening is better than a dead cinema. Nothing about Kubrick changed either. What changed was the distance between you and the thing. Before, you had to move towards certain cultural objects. Somebody mentioned a weird movie, so you searched for it. You found a band in some YouTube comment section. You went to a tiny cinema because they were showing something you had never heard of. Maybe you downloaded some terrible 480p rip because it was the only way you could find the movie. There was friction. Now the thing moves towards you.
TikTok did not invent online discovery, but it made it almost completely passive. You don't really need to search anymore. Scroll long enough, and the archive eventually finds you. A song released yesterday can appear next to Slowdive from 1993, Final Fantasy VIII from 1999, a Japanese movie from 1968, a fashion campaign from 2004, and a medieval painting from 1320. The past is no longer really presented as the past. It is just more stuff that exists now.
For a platform whose main job is to keep you scrolling, this is almost perfect. There is effectively an unlimited supply of material. Millions of songs, films, games and photographs; centuries of fashion and architecture; entire national cinemas most people in our countries have barely touched. “New” no longer has to mean newly made. It can just mean old enough that your particular demographic hasn't seen it yet. The archive becomes a mine, and there is always another layer.
This creates an obscurity arms race. Kubrick becomes too obvious, so Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky becomes obvious, so Wong Kar-wai. Then Edward Yang. Then Tsai Ming-liang. Then some restored Japanese experimental movie that even the director probably forgot about. Music does the same thing: Nirvana, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Duster, Panchiko, then some cassette demo uploaded to YouTube with 400 views. Games go from Resident Evil 4 to Silent Hill 2 to Rule of Rose to Haunting Ground to LSD: Dream Emulator to some untranslated PS1 title dug up from an old forum.
Somebody finds the obscure thing, makes content about it, the algorithm shows it to thousands of people with almost identical tastes, and suddenly everybody has the exact same “how did nobody tell me about this?” discovery at the same time. Then it doesn't feel obscure anymore, so everyone digs one layer deeper. There is nothing inherently better about liking Tsai Ming-liang instead of Kubrick or Duster instead of Nirvana, but there is an unspoken status game at play: the more obscure the reference, the more it looks like something you found for yourself.
Travel works in exactly the same way. Ten or fifteen years ago Croatia could still be sold to foreigners as some slightly undiscovered Mediterranean alternative. Dubrovnik and Hvar were never secret, but there was still a little bit of “oh wow, Croatia” attached to going there. That is gone now. The coast sits firmly inside the mainstream European tourism circuit, with cruise ships, TikTok itineraries, overpriced drinks and the same photo spots turning up everywhere.
So the search moves on. Montenegro. Albania. Georgia. Then those get familiar too. Suddenly the culturally interesting trip is Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan. “I went to Paris” tells you almost nothing about somebody. “I spent ten days taking trains through Kazakhstan” immediately gives you an image of what that person is probably like. The old status symbol was “I can afford to go somewhere expensive”. Now there is another one layered on top: “I know somewhere you haven't heard about yet”. There is almost a curse built into the phrase “hidden gem”. The moment a place becomes valuable for being undiscovered, people start discovering it.
And that is where obscurity itself starts becoming a resource. The internet needs novelty constantly, creators need more things to discover, brands need more references to sell, tourism needs another place to market. Something that was worthless five years ago can suddenly become desirable again, and some crappy 2006 point-and-shoot that nobody wanted now costs €150.
Capitalism doesn't need to invent these desires from scratch. People really do like old games, physical media, strange movies and beautiful places. But once something starts becoming desirable, capitalism is very good at noticing it, amplifying it and selling it back to us. Then the thing is no longer just the thing; it starts saying something about the kind of person who owns it, watches it or goes there. That makes it even more desirable, which makes it even easier to sell.
Obviously I am already a different person from my mother, my boyfriend or the guy sitting next to me on the bus. But increasingly that difference is supposed to show up in what I watch, listen to, wear, buy and where I go. Social media has turned taste into evidence of personality. And if everybody around you watches the same films, wears the same clothes and goes to the same places, something less obvious can start to feel like a more personal expression of who you are.
And so you watch interesting movies. You listen to weird music. You shoot film. You collect CDs. You own an old console. You know about Soviet architecture. You go to medieval fairs. You travel somewhere your coworkers haven't been. The weird part is that now millions of people are doing this at the same time, on platforms recommending them many of the same things. A forgotten band becomes everybody's new favourite band. An old game becomes a cult classic again. A supposedly unknown place gets ten million views. The obscure thing gets dragged into the light collectively, and once that happens, it loses some of the value it had as a marker of difference, so the search moves one layer deeper.
And somewhere in all of this, a strangely specific 2026 “interesting person” appears everywhere: Slowdive, Silent Hill, Wong Kar-wai, Criterion, an old digicam, Final Fantasy, Japanese fashion, medieval paintings, Soviet apartment blocks. There was never some historical subculture where all of those things belonged together. The algorithm didn't invent the overlap, but it noticed it, reinforced it and made the whole cluster much easier to recognize. The annoying part is that I am basically describing myself. In most of my actual life, that combination of things made me feel fairly unusual, and without really deciding to, I think I started treating it as evidence of who I was. Then I'd open the exact corner of the internet made for people like me and suddenly there were thousands of us.
I saw this perfectly in a YouTube mashup of Sade and the soundtrack from Chrono Trigger. It wasn't even that I loved the mashup itself. It was that somebody had taken two completely unrelated things I loved and put them together in exactly this very internet, slightly ridiculous, weirdly high-effort way. Sade, Chrono Trigger, and the impulse to mash them together somehow felt like three different parts of my brain showing up in the same video. Then I opened the comments and everybody was saying basically the same thing. One comment saying “This is so specific to me wtf” had hundreds of likes. Everybody was sincerely having the same experience of uniqueness at the same time. If all of you are basically me, then what exactly had made all of this feel so specifically mine?
Once taste becomes this visible, it is hard not to become painfully conscious of yourself performing it. Everybody can see everybody else's choices, and everybody knows they are being seen too. It's no wonder “LARPing” became such a useful insult. Are you actually a cinephile or are you LARPing as one? Do you like shoegaze or do you like what liking Slowdive says about you? Did you want a PSP or did you want to be the kind of person who owns a PSP? Did you go to Kazakhstan because Kazakhstan specifically fascinated you, or because it sounds more interesting than another weekend in Barcelona? What if I don't actually like this as much as I think I do? What if I like the person it makes me look like?
Nobody's taste develops in a vacuum. I discovered shoegaze through Lost in Translation, which also ended up shaping a huge amount of my taste in movies, music, and books. That isn't somehow more pure than somebody discovering My Bloody Valentine through TikTok. Everybody gets things from somewhere: friends, movies, magazines, older siblings, YouTube, Tumblr, algorithms, whatever. There was never some magical period where everybody independently developed completely authentic taste untouched by other people.
Discovery was always mediated. Mine certainly was. A friend, a movie or a magazine might point you towards something and then stop. The feed doesn't. Once it has figured out roughly what kind of things you respond to, it can keep producing the next one almost indefinitely. The machine can just keep digging. The archive is effectively endless, with too many countries, languages, scenes, movies, books, local traditions, magazines, old websites and recordings for any one generation to exhaust. There will always be something old enough, distant enough or forgotten enough to feel new again.
But the status game probably has a limit. If discovering obscure things becomes this easy, knowing obscure things eventually stops being impressive. An algorithm can make almost anybody look incredibly well-curated in a few months. Give it enough information, and it will happily walk you from Kubrick to Tarkovsky to Edward Yang to Tsai Ming-liang to some Taiwanese movie with 900 Letterboxd logs. It is better at finding obscure stuff than any person could ever be. What still takes time is actually knowing something, being good at something, making things instead of only consuming them, participating instead of just collecting references, or having a real connection to a place or a scene. TikTok can show you Silent Hill in fifteen seconds; playing even one of the games takes hours. It can show you a Wong Kar-wai edit just as quickly; watching his films takes days or weeks. The same is true of places: it can tell everyone to visit the Balkans, but it cannot manufacture what it means to return to the same village every summer for twenty years, know every road and bench, know the people, remember things attached to completely boring buildings nobody else would even notice.
I would like to think that eventually we get tired of needing everything we like to explain who we are. Some things can be there because we have had them for years, because they remind us of somebody, because we keep going back to them, or because we simply like them. They don't all need to add up to a person other people can immediately understand. But almost everything around us still seems to be moving in the other direction: faster, more visible, easier to find, easier to turn into something else. Bedroom pop was already obsessed with making ordinary life feel meaningful. It was just still curated for somebody else to see. Maybe eventually we stop needing that last part.
Written August 2026 / back to the front page