What was once a space for personalized, homemade, colorful joy is now a pile of beige, minimalist content sludge optimized for engagement metrics.
I remember when the internet felt like it belonged to people. Now it belongs to a handful of platforms and the advertisers they serve.
Instagram flattens everything into brand aesthetics and algorithm play.
Twitter gamifies outrage and bigotry.
TikTok rewards mimicry and trends, not originality.
Facebook is a graveyard built on surveillance.
Reddit launders groupthink as community.
LinkedIn rebrands exploitation as inspiration.
They don’t want creators. They want content.
They don’t want people. They want users.
Creativity has been devalued, mined, and spat back out as algorithmic paste. Everything's a funnel now: from post to feed to cart.
We’re being trained to speak in formats, not voices. Trained to perform instead of connect. Trained to be legible to systems that were never meant to understand us.
I’m not here to make peace with that. I don’t want to be a good product or a good user.
I want the old web back purely out of refusal.
Pages made by hand, not by weird hoops and vibe-coding.
Communities held together by curiosity, not follows.
It wasn’t perfect. But it was ours.
Patchwork Girl is what I do with what’s left. Patchwork Girl is what I am when I'm out of fucks to give.
I write code, essays, music, and whatever else doesn’t fit cleanly into categories. I build outside the platforms, because I don’t want to be measured by their rules.
I care about autonomy. I care about friction. I care about the right to be unreadable.
This isn’t branding. This is personal. This is political.
You probably feel it too. The web didn’t just change. It was taken.
We can’t get back everything we lost, but the least we can do is to stop giving more away.
Make a mess.
Host your own site.
Write weird shit.
Resist the feed.
Last updated on May 7, 2025.
—patchwork.girl // always in beta
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