Valentina Tanni

I swear there was a time when finishing the internet seemed almost possible. Instead, the more we surfed, the bigger it got; in a sense, it was our very presence that made it grow.

ay after day, I have discovered that the rabbit hole is not just deep: it’s bottomless. What keeps me hooked, even now—the real core of my internet addiction—is the pleasure of experiencing the teeming activity of the world, sensing the presence of others, being constantly amazed at the complexity of the behaviors, words, sounds, and images that pour into the Web every minute.

One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no “them” out there. It’s just an awful lot of “us.”

I have spent an immeasurable amount of time online: I have studied, written, played, and chatted on the internet; I have built friendships, seen communities form and disband, and new phenomena and languages arise and change, but most of all I have learned to appreciate the staggering diversity of human expression. Day after day, I have discovered that the rabbit hole is not just deep: it’s bottomless

Barely a quarter of a century on, we are immersed in a completely different ­techno-social ecosystem: no longer a niche inhabited by a few thousand, or even a few million, people, but a global infrastructure that is a key part of most people’s lives.

On the internet there is a site that was set up with the aim of cataloging these aesthetics. Aesthetics Wiki3 is a collaborative project that was launched in 2018 and really took off in 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdown. According to official figures released by Fandom, the company that runs the platform, there are more than 250 contributors, and 57 percent of the site’s users are aged between 18 and 24.

With encyclopedic zeal, the wiki’s authors have organized the entries alphabetically, but the content can also be browsed by image or color or decade. The most interesting category, however, is “suffix/family.” To date, the most frequently used suffixes are “core,” which occurs in as many as 158 aesthetics, “academia” (49), “punk” (41), “wave” (23) and “goth” (22).

The urge to categorize, and the modular dynamic—different features being assembled to form ever new combinations—are key aspects of internet culture, an inevitable consequence of inhabiting a cultural system structured around databases, tags, and hyperlinks.

Each element—visual, sound, or text—represents a removable, catalogable, reusable brick to add to one’s personal identity-building project.

Assembling one’s identity from a set of keywords can in fact become a standardized process, reducing the individual’s contribution to merely selecting from items in a pre-filled menu.