The Internet Is Starting to Look the Same

You know that restaurant.

Maybe you’ve never actually been there, but you know it. Tiny lamp on the table. Chrome somewhere. A martini. Menu in a font you’ve seen approximately 400 times.

Then you open Instagram and somebody in another city is eating at basically the same place.

Same thing with apartments. Same thing with clothes. Same thing with brand campaigns. Same blurry flash photography. Same oddly expensive chair.

At some point the internet got so good at showing us things we like that everything we like started looking suspiciously similar.

Which is kind of funny, because we’ve never had more stuff to look at.

You can wake up, see what somebody wore in Tokyo, find a magazine scan from 1994, save a campaign from Copenhagen, look inside an apartment in Paris and end up on some random person’s camera roll from Saturday night before you’ve even gotten out of bed.

We have access to basically everything.

So why does everything look like five things?

WE GOT REALLY GOOD AT COPYING EACH OTHER

Not even on purpose.

You see something cool. You save it.

Someone else sees something cool. They save it.

Six months later everybody is sitting down to make something original with suspiciously similar Saved folders.

Obviously references aren’t the problem. Everything comes from somewhere. Half the fun of making anything is collecting little pieces of other things you love.

The problem is when the reference stops being a starting point and becomes the whole idea.

That’s when you get a new café that somehow looks like the café you saw last week. A fashion campaign that feels familiar even though you swear you’ve never seen it. A brand with perfect typography, perfect photography and absolutely nothing you could identify in a police lineup.

Everything is nice.

Nothing is sticking.

THE ALGORITHM KNOWS WHAT YOU LIKE. UNFORTUNATELY.

Like one picture of a weird silver chair and congratulations, you now live in Weird Silver Chair Internet.

The algorithm is incredibly good at this.

It figures out what you like and keeps handing you more of it. Which feels like discovery for a while because technically you’re seeing new things.

They’re just… new versions of the same thing.

And when enough people making clothes, music, magazines, restaurants, campaigns, interiors and everything else are pulling from those same little worlds, eventually the internet starts leaking back into real life.

Then real life gets photographed and uploaded to the internet.

Then we save it again.

Cute little circle we’ve made for ourselves.

GOOD TASTE ISN’T ENOUGH

This might be the annoying part.

You can have incredible taste and still make something boring.

Everything can technically be right. The typeface is good. The photos are good. The clothes are good. The references are impeccable.

And then you forget about it ten minutes later.

Because knowing what looks good isn’t really the same thing as having something to say.

The better question might be:

Could somebody else have made this?

If the answer is yes, keep digging.

BE WEIRDLY SPECIFIC

The stuff people remember usually has something in it that makes absolutely no sense coming from anyone else.

The slightly bad photo you refuse to delete.

The color everyone told you not to use.

Your mom’s old going-out top.

Some terrible movie you’ve watched fifteen times.

A restaurant your family has been going to forever.

A song connected to a story nobody else knows.

A joke that maybe six people understand.

That stuff is useful.

Not because being weird automatically makes something interesting. There is plenty of very boring weird stuff.

But specificity is hard to copy.

Your references don’t have to be whatever the internet decided was cool this week. They can come from your hometown. Your friends. Your family. The club bathroom. The sign outside the laundromat. Something you saw from the passenger seat when you were twelve.

Your actual life is probably a better moodboard than you think.

MAYBE CLOSE PINTEREST FOR A SECOND

Not forever. Relax.

The internet is incredible. Use it. Save things. Find people making cool shit on the other side of the world. Watch an obscure movie. Screenshot the chair.

But eventually you have to look up.

Go somewhere you normally wouldn’t.

Read something old.

Watch something bad.

Talk to somebody who has absolutely no idea what your industry is talking about.

Look through your parents’ photo albums.

Keep the weird receipt.

Listen to the song you would normally skip.

Notice things before deciding whether they’re worth posting.

Because if the internet really is starting to look the same, having an actual point of view becomes pretty valuable.

You don’t have to invent something nobody has ever seen before.

You just have to make something that feels like you were actually there.