A big movement is brewing, and in the smallest of objects.

Bread-tags have become collectibles.

Care labels have become brands.

Receipts have become culture.

The recent technological shift has reshaped creativity, and there are whispers of a new aesthetic age.

However, this feels like a collective glance downward.

Into the ephemeral.

The discarded.

Why are we suddenly captivated by the fragments we were never meant to keep—and what does it all mean?

What This Is

Let’s talk about what this aesthetic is.

The tricky part, though, is it doesn’t really have a name. At least, not yet.

You’ll hear people calling it different things.

• Ephemera

• Micrographics

• Functional design

• Micro-industrial

-and more.

When a new visual language has many names, it means a shift in culture is happening faster than our language can keep up with.

For now, let’s call it micro-design: the design of things that are unapologetically honest about where they come from.

That honesty shows up in two ways.

1. The visuals. Micro-design strips away all non-essential decoration, leaving only the “guts” of information: the text, the icons, the numbers.

2. The materials. Micro-design is made of unpolished industrial materials, which it doesn’t try to hide. You don’t pretend a bread tag is precious plastic or that a receipt is archival paper. Micro-design is cheap, raw, and unapologetically useful.

We were never supposed to notice micro-design.

We were supposed to hold them in the margins of our attention, where they would ubiquitously serve our needs.

Yet notice them we did.

The Bread Clip

Artists have started illustrating with bread clips. They would craft with them, merging them with the visual language of fan cultures like F1 and K-pop.

The Receipt

Last year, people started turning restaurant receipts into poster and canvas art sharing intimate messages, a trend that went viral across Tiktok and Pinterest.

Artists like Charli XCX released her brat vinyl credits on dot matrix paper, which receipts are printed on, to the initial confusion of her fans.

Millions of people downloaded apps like Receiptify to reformat their listening history as receipts.

Think about that for a second.

Millions of us chose to frame something we care deeply about—our taste, our identity—in the most throwaway representation possible. What does that say about the way we like to express ourselves?

The Care Label

There’s another format that’s recently taken over the tech and fashion world: the care label. What tells you how something should be handled, interpreted, stored.

It’s unmistakeable in Perplexity’s branding, where the logos appear like washing instructions.

It shows up boldly in new Nike campaigns.

It breathes in the logos of newly-opened design studios.

Serial codes and timestamps, systems of information at their most primitive, have become style itself.

Why Now?

To understand why we’re gravitating toward micro-design, we need to zoom out a bit.

it started with a decade of exhaustion.

The Polish Era (2010-2020)

You’re being watched, so make it look good.

For the last decade, we’ve lived inside filtered, hyper-curated worlds. Perfect feeds. Perfect branding. Perfect lives, constantly optimized by targeted digital advertising to do one thing: make you feel like you’re behind.

The context makes sense. In 2010, Instagram launched and turned identity into performance. Digital advertising went mobile, following us into our pockets. Social ads quadrupled from 2010-2015. Every click was tracked, every scroll analyzed.

In an online world optimized to make money from our attention, polish reigned.

Then something changed.

The Slop Era (2022+)

What started as tech fatigue turned into-

2022 was the year of the AI breakout: ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, DALL·E 2, all within months of each other.

Think about what that means: the thing we’d spent a decade perfecting—polished content—could now be produced by anyone.

So the internet flooded with AI imagery. Too polished, this time. The kind of output we started calling “slop.”

If synthetic could masquerade as real, we could not trust polish any longer. Imperfection therefore re-emerged not as a flaw, but as a marker of increasingly-scarce authenticity.

That shift set off a snowball effect.

Design started to feel more handmade again.

Anti-design

Cut-and-paste layouts. Rough edges. Things that looked assembled instead of rendered. For example, junk journals, books built from receipts, tickets, and other scraps, hit 3 billion TikTok views in 2024 and remain widely replicated today.

Sit on this reversal for just a moment.

Unpolished visuals, which were once considered “sloppy”, have started reading as cool. Meanwhile, polished AI visuals have became, quite literally, called “slop”. A complete inversion of value.

Micro-design becomes the perfect vessel for this moment.

Three reasons.

1. The Shift Towards Hyper-Local

Look at this collection of AI-generated flowers.

AI generates from patterns; outputs tend towards this sameness.

But a bread clip? No function rewards generating it’s taxonomy: the time imprinted on it, the shape and color that indicates where it was made.

Micro-design elements signal grounding in time and place.

That hyperlocality becomes proof of life.

2. The Shift Towards Honesty that Shows It’s Seams

Everything online begs you to prove its worth.

Every post, every pixel, is engineered to capture your attention. To keep you scrolling. To make you want something.

On the other hand, a bread clip exists just to tell you what it does. That lack of an agenda now reads as deeply honest in a way we forgot things could be.

And what happens to things that become rare? They become precious.

3. The Shift from Making to Noticing

For centuries, creativity meant making things. Now, when making becomes infinite, the creative act shifts: it’s no longer making.

It’s noticing.

We can generate anything now; therefore the creative act is deciding where we should direct our attention.

The receipts, the bread clips, the industrial tags are artifacts of human attention. Someone cared about something was supposed to be invisible. Decided that this overlooked thing was worth cataloging, naming, remembering, when no algorithm would select it. When no optimization function would reward it.

What we’re responding to is not just the objects themselves, but the fact that someone chose to notice the specific shape of a bread tag.

The scribbles on the back a guest check.

The scratchy material of dot matrix paper.

When everything must justify itself worthy of attention, paying attention to things that do not require attention at all becomes an act of creativity.

I prefer this humble thing.

I choose to see it.

That choice is mine.

What’s Next

We’re entering an unpolished, hyperlocal year.

As the media we’re exposed to feel increasingly rootless, we’ll instinctively reach for things that root us in time and place. Small local markers that become breadcrumbs back home.

As the question shifts from “what’s beautiful?” to “who says this is beautiful?”, the answer feels increasingly clear: that choice is still in our hands.

So 2026 might be the year we start looking again at the ordinary.

Finding charm in the overlooked, honest things. Beauty in the byproducts of use that were never meant to be beautiful at all.

Micro-design captures this shift.

In a world of mirrors, polish, and averages, it’s the humble bread tag, local and imperfect, that unexpectedly becomes a badge of cool.

And I think that’s a hopeful sign: that we’re learning to find wonder again in the smallest things that make us human.

Because we’re finally learning how to notice them.

I would love to know what you’ve been noticing. Has any micro-design been resonating with you?

yesterday, i posted a question:

how do you stay in love with what you do?

let yourself feel the good parts.
keep challenging yourself.
let curiosity lead the way.
see it all through a kid’s eyes.

what i heard beneath your responses was reimagining: learning to see what you already know, differently, tenderly, and again.

which brings me to something i’ve to believe, which is that you don’t fall out of love from doing too much.

you fall out of love from doing the same thing, over and over.

lately, i’d been telling the same kinds of stories, ones that performed well but didn’t particularly excite me to sit down and make, so the early shadow of burnout was blooming at the edges again.

then stranger things season five was released last week, and running up that hill resurfaced after three quiet years.

suddenly, i was nineteen again and grappling with turning twenty. and i wondered: with the technology that has emerged during this gap between show seasons, could i recreate the feeling of that scene that continues to inspire me deeply?

i needed to find out. right now.

the practical advice would’ve been to ignore such a feeling.

it didn’t fit my content calendar. the project could not breathe in-between upcoming deadlines. it offered no alignment with my strategy, no clear return on my time. and it looked like a complicated, multi-day project i wasn’t sure if i could accomplish to a presentable quality.

so, rationally, i went to a park that afternoon, got my knees and skirt muddy, and filmed myself getting up and down from the ground for an hour—while aunties practicing qi gong and kids on the nearby benches looked over, wide-eyed.

i think that’s a long-winded way of saying:

you have more agency than you think.
you can follow the curiosity that makes you pause in your path.
you can follow the rabbit hole and stray off that path, even for just a little while, to see what you find.

so here’s my answer to the question:

notice the things that make you feel like a curious child again—
then take them seriously enough to act on them.
even when it’s inconvenient.
especially when it’s inconvenient.

that’s how you stay in love.

-love, cole

(this article is a rabbit hole.)

streaming feels different to us than cinema. our words prove it.

binge-watching, for instance, the term for addictively streaming new netflix shows, has a grotesque quality to it. it’s stuffed full. an apex of digital consumerism that feels crammed in that hyphen.

on the other hand, silver screen, a term describing cinema, or movies we experience in the theater, glistens with something else entirely. a nostalgic glamor. a larger than life.

our language shows that we’ve ascribed something precious to cinema.

yet today, streaming announces that it absorbed the silver screen.

netflix has declared its acquisition of warner bros for $82 billion. a century of stories from the likes of hbo, casablanca, batman, harry potter now belongs to the platform that convinced us to watch movies on our laptops.

and the question is now, what happens to cinema?

what netflix bought

on the surface, this is a catalog play. a mile wide and an inch deep, netflix’s catalog is constantly being replaced. if 50% of viewers don’t complete a season, netflix would not renew a show. with the acquisition, it would now have a deep catalog of tried-and-true stories.

it’s also a prestige play. netflix has never escaped feeling like the streaming also-ran at awards season. they’ve received 170 oscar nominations and still haven’t won best picture, whereas hbo has been awarded over 220 emmys. netflix is buying the legitimacy that the prestigious library offers.

and it’s a money play. netflix has struggled to build durable ip—stranger things is their biggest original (over $1 billion in revenue) but it’s ending along with squid game. they don’t have a marvel or star wars equivalent, a universe that regenerates value across decades. warner bros. has four gaming franchises alone—harry potter, game of thrones, mortal kombat, and dc—each generating over $1 billion in revenue. these multi-generational engines earn through cultural relevance that compounds over time.

ultimately, netflix has been overcharged for attention for a decade because it has never built cultural equity. deep ip, prestige, and generational worlds are the compound interest it never earned, and so they’ve decided to buy it.

what can’t be acquired

beyond the business incentives, what’s been worrying myself (and most of the internet) is what this acquisition means for storytelling as a whole. let me explain.

streaming and cinema represent such different relationships we have with stories.

in theaters, cinema demands your attention. you surrender to it. it surrounds you, immerses you, fills your senses.

film theorist julian hanich writes about how a theater can summon joint deep attention—a moment when you a story to imprint itself more deeply. three features of cinema make this possible: the nonmundane space (you leave your house to somewhere else), the silence of the auditorium, and, crucially, the impossibility of manipulating the film.

streaming is built on the opposite premise. total user control. you can 1.5x it. pause, return whenever. put it on ambiently as you work on other things. you can, at any point, decide what you are watching is worth half or none of your attention.

and the metrics reflect these value differences.

in cinema, the focus on box-office hold (how much ticket sales drop or grow week to week), and legs (performance over time relative to the opening) mean that studios care about lasting impact—if a story can sustain momentum, travel through word of mouth, and root itself in culture over time.

streaming lives on a different clock. success is more immediate, determined by first-48-hour viewership and completion rates (because people can click away at any moment). these incentives reward front-loaded hype, quick spikes, and constant novelty rather than cultural staying power.

so cinema is scarcity, streaming is abundance. cinema’s impact is slow, while streaming’s impact is instant. cinema is described as larger than life. streaming is (quite literally) pocket-sized.

these are two unique types of media serving different needs for storytelling, and the world cares that this distinction survives.

there’s something about being small in front of a story. we remember sitting in the dark, neck tilted up, the image so large it fills your whole field of vision. we are not watching it. we’re inside it.

streaming puts the story in your hand. cinema puts you in the story’s hand.

two futures

the best case: netflix learns from what it bought.

netflix becomes a two-track company: streaming and theater, online and in-person.

they understand that their subscriber growth has plateaued in mature markets. therefore, they see owning franchises that require theatrical spectacle—the next batman, the next harry potter series—as a way to build differentiation.

netflix does not flatter warner bros into itself. it builds upon that legacy infrastructure to create synergistic ways, both digital and in-person, to extend the stories they now own that have been passed down through generations.

the worst case: everything becomes content.

netflix absorbs the new catalog and team into its streaming machine.

now, the filmmaker, the producer, the executive who knows that movies need time to germinate, who don’t speak the language of completion rates and churn, feel like the craft they mastered no longer translates.

the restructuring makes that lack of translation permanent.

netflix doesn’t need people who negotiate with theaters or plan regional rollouts. everything now launches everywhere, everywhere, all at once on its digital platforms. those theatrical-facing teams either get cut or get absorbed into general streaming ops.

netflix projects $2–3 billion in savings by year three. savings mean consolidation. consolidation means fewer people focused on theaters.

over time, warner bros’ deep theatrical knowledge gets treated as legacy infrastructure. that knowledge begins to disappear.

hbo max becomes just max, a prestige-coded label on binge-optimized shows all with the predictable end-of-episode cliffhanger.

dc films become global streaming drops with spikes of sensational moments, optimized for the new platform it exists on where users can decide to click away at any time.

the directors guild certainly believe the latter is the likelier future, having already raised “serious concerns” around the acquisition. cinema united further warned that “netflix’s business model does not support theatrical exhibition.”

indeed, netflix has never treated theaters as a priority. their ceo, ted sarandos, called moviegoing “an outmoded idea.” when they release prestige films—roma, the irishman, frankenstein—the theatrical runs are minimal, just enough to qualify for awards, before everything moves to streaming.

netflix says they’ll preserve warner bros’ theatrical business. but why would they?

if the incentives don’t change, the culture won’t, either.

we’re inside a shift now where all of our creative fields are being refined. music, art, film and television. craft is being eroded for attention, and in-person community is moving towards online personalization.

yet beyond the metrics is something no one really knows how to measure: the magic of sitting in the dark with strangers, breathing together through a story.

writing this, i’ve started to notice how my own cinema memories are blurring at the edges. they weren’t that long ago, but they already feel like artifacts of a world that’s moved on.

weekends, five bucks a person, the caramel-heavy popcorn.

the weight of the hushed moment when the movie begins, when the lights dim and the room goes quiet and we are all suspended together in the beginnings of a story.

i hope all of that doesn’t become something i remember instead of something i do.

i hope netflix sees what they bought. not just a catalog, but one of the last places we still practice surrendering completely to a story. i hope they keep two ways of being with stories: one we control, and one we give ourselves over to.

i just hope they don’t make us binge-watch the silver screen.

but i’m not holding my breath.

which artists inspire you?

i always pause when i get that question.

i immediately drift to the edit of kariza’s world. soft vignette, cool green in the shadows, warm gold in the highlights, light grain making her room hum with warm light.

i think about the ergonomics of casey's studio setup: the pegboard grids, taxonomied compartments, prototypes waiting on a workbench. when projects sit out in the light, the work feels lighter too.

i recall the moment in two sleepy people that showed me my own love was ending.

i imagine the way gawx cuts into a drawing timelapse, snapping it on like a punchline.

i name the members of offlinetv, who filled my room at 5am in a hong kong apartment while insomnia folded the night in on itself.

i remember where the music swells in kelly wakasa’s launch video (at 6:30).

i think about how natalie lets a shot linger two seconds longer than the algorithm recommends, to let a moment breathe.

i remember how the youtube new wave reverberated quietly around the internet margins, until those collisions became creator camps.

so when people ask me which artists i study, i say:

creators.

this year, i realized i became someone i could have grown up watching, between all the internet meetups and the comstant rotation of camera batteries charging on floors.

the label is young, imprecise, broad. after all, the internet was invented barely three decades ago. so, when i introduce myself as a creator, i get alternatives back.

artist. creative technologist. you’re more than a creator.

but creator fills me with something i can’t completely explain.

maybe it’s because it feels like something i’ve been growing into all along, a hyphen i’ve navigated while learning to move from being shaped by culture to shaping it. and i feel the lineage continue every time someone says my story inspire them share their own.

we are the first generation to inherit creativity in a different way. it used to flow vertically, through masters, movements, manifestos.

now, the lineage is passed on across friends. across strangers.

our generation didn’t grow up on the greats. we grew up on creators.

the details are different. different bedrooms, different cities, different people we choose to give our attention to. and somehow the upbringing feels exactly the same.

we all learned to be creators without noticing it happen--not apprenticed to a single mentor, but to an accidental generation of storytellers. people filming in cramped rooms, editing on glitchy laptops, talking to cameras like friends.

we are all part of that pedagogy.

maybe it didn’t feel special while it was happening. if anything, it felt like sneaking small, stolen pockets of time inside other people’s stories.

yet somewhere along the way, the thing that felt small and forbidden became the truest part of me.

so, on being a creator:

the label feels unfinished. somewhere in mid-sentence, still defining itself.

but the becoming feels infinite

lately, i’ve been collecting spaces.

co-working spots. matcha cafes. soft couches in offices. places with cozy light and high ceilings.

two months after leaving a traditional tech role to pursue my artistic passions, i’ve been designing my new life around a rotation of comfort places and people, while noticing a similar idea come up in conversation:

whether one should follow an urge to do something different.

at moments in our lives, i think we’re pulled towards the unconventional. sometimes in small ways, sometimes in life-changing ones.

having taken an unconventional leap recently, i’ve come to believe that one should really follow that pull. here are some reflections on why.

1. “unconventional” means a need isn’t being met where you are

“unconventional” isn’t fundamentally about being different, it’s about noticing what your context worships, and choosing differently.

the concept itself is geography-bound. change the location, change the meaning.

here in the bay, being a creator is unconventional. tech is gravity, pulling everything towards its center.

in new york city, where i was living until recently, things are quite different. creation is in the air. there are artists, founders, curators, new labels becoming. a new cheese club, a pop-up art gallery.

sadly, there isn’t such a creative class in the bay.

new york has built economies around art, from publishing to fashion, anchored by its creative infrastructure.

the bay did have its own scene, once. the beats in north beach, the summer of love in haight-ashbury. but by the 80s, those collectives gave way to silicon valley’s garages, and culture shifted.

as a creative here now, prophetically to what i wrote weeks ago:

i’m scared of the uncertainty that is being a creator—of losing myself in numbers, of missing the camaraderie of a team, of loneliness.

i admit i have been feeling a little bit lonely. but i’ve realized that this discomfort doesn’t actually reflect on who i am, it means a need isn’t being met where i am.

loneliness means you’re missing something that you can create, that could start with someone who asks you: how did you do it?

2. the lack of legibility is power, not weakness

at first, i thought the hardest part about doing something unconventional is losing legibility.

in college, you would struggle through the same math class with your peers. on a product team, you would grind through the same feature sprint with your team. someone tells you it’s okay, you’ve done enough, it’s time to go home.

now that i am a creator, there is no collective finish line. no moment when everyone leaves the office.

but i’m also learning that when you withdraw from legibility, you also withdraw from other people’s ability to measure you.

when they can’t read what you’re doing, you can invent. you can try things. fail in ways no one notices. succeed in ways no one has the words for yet.

3. prestige is a game you win by not playing

especially in the bay area, prestige tempts with its legibility. its collective understanding of what’s good.

that magnet is so strong i sometimes catch myself doubting whether what i’m doing now is real work, even though i finally admire what i do instead of just wanting to.

in when to do what you love, paul graham writes that prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. it causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.

here’s the thought that he offers: prestige is the collective opinion of people you don’t know. when you zoom out far enough, it doesn’t make any sense.

would you take advice from a random person on the street about how to live your life? no. so why would you let the collective opinion of thousands of random people determine what you value?

you can spend your whole life impressive to strangers, or you can spend it doing work that impresses you.

(and if there were anyone else i would want to impress, it would be my future kids and grandkids. i want mine to hear stories of mom/grandma who had the nerve to do what she wanted.)

if you’re on an unconventional path, or even just beginning to imagine one, you’ve probably felt the discomfort of not being fully legible—i hope you sit with that feeling.

don’t turn away. it’s a signal that what you’re doing matters.

the flame of that kind of work is special; let it burn.

a month ago, soon after taking the leap to create full-time, i wrote this:

being a creator is the easiest way to lose yourself.

by day-

the algorithm reads you perfectly. digital creator. X followers. optimal posting time.

it is decisive, yet it never fully reveals its secrets. it doesn’t recognize your art from all other pixels it analyzes. it only recognizes if a userID has paused its scroll.

so the influencer in you calculates accordingly—
if i use a trending audio, will it make people pause?
if i dumb down the message, will it get more shares?

to the artist within you, the influencer says: just to grow our reach. then we can make what we really want.

but there’s always another optimization, another compromise.

be you is espoused at the influencer dinner, evangelized by platform leads in keynotes.

be you.
be your audience’s best friend / big sister / teacher.
be you, if you are funny, relatable, resonant, and of course, always online.
be the version of yourself that performs.

the paradox is that the very platforms that demand authenticity turn it into another form of performance. when machines become our social authority, our sense of quality is outsourced to systems optimized to engage rather than express, antithetical to the aim of the artist.

by night-

the analytics quiet; between midnight and 2am, the audience logs off. the influencer finally sleeps.

an old paint-scented apartment, a forgotten fifth floor, where creating had no witness. the artist in you tries to remember what being in those spaces felt like.

you feel the dizzying rush of freedom.

you can make anything. you can refuse the influencer’s agenda.

but then what?

in the creator economy, can the artist exist without the influencer?

at dawn-

the influencer optimizes—how well will this perform?
the artist expresses—how true does this feel?

somewhere between midnight freedom and when the influencer starts counting, though, there is a third framework.

how well does this communicate how i feel inside?

it sounds like a simple creator-audience exchange, but this question positions artist and influencer as partners rather than diametric opposites.

you cannot ignore the audience. art exists in dialogue. a painting no one sees isn’t less art, but it’s art that hasn’t completed its circuit, hasn’t entered into conversation with the world.

you also can’t create only for the audience, as you’re no longer expressing, but just reflecting back what they want to see.

thus, you can balance what feels true (art) with how you can communicate that truth with others (influence).

when you’re an artist first, influence becomes the natural physics of work that matters finding its people. this doesn’t mean ignoring the audience; it means creating from fullness rather than emptiness, from gift rather than transaction.

it means building in a third economy, neither the scarcity of the starving artist nor the hollow abundance of the influencer. an economy where the work nourishes you, where you create because you have something to say, not because you need something from the audience.

the artist creates from truth. the influencer finds the right people to share it with.

the daylight will return. the influencer will wake up.

but now we have an agreement: the influencer will serve the artist’s vision, not the other way around.

the world needs artists who happen to have influence. not influencers who happen to make art.

hey, cole! so, what do you do?

well... i’m a content creator.

creative technologist.

artist.

do we need to label identities that are still taking shape?

this january, while wrapping up my final year of college, i started posting videos showing creative people how to use emerging technology. people started knowing me as cova.

and a month ago, i left my job to see what would happen if i gave this my all.

hyphen posts will now be dropping every tuesday! stay tuned ~

so, how did we get here?

growing up, home smelled like paint.

mom was an art teacher, and made sure my sister and i drew a lot.

when we were making art, the world started to make sense. feelings could become hues and shapes. it was a simple realization that changed the way i saw things, which was always in relation to form and color.

during middle school and high school, i struggled with making friends, so i would skip activities in a pile of discarded couches and gym equipment on the fifth floor. on old wrestling mats, i’d sketch little characters while laughter echoed from the gym below. i preferred building my own world while the “real” activities happened elsewhere.

at stanford, i would rush through computer science assignments just to get back to whatever creative experiment i was working on at the time (procreate dreams, merch designs, some new tool). my fingers would literally itch during algorithms lectures.

i got the internships, did the hackathons, worked in AI when that became cool. your work funds your passion.

after directing my first video for stanford’s ar/vr club because i wanted to learn video-making, i was hooked. VFX was a cool way to visualize technology. i started landing gigs, making videos for others, until a friend watched me edit for the hundredth time and said something that stopped me.

you do all this for others. if you made videos for yourself, i actually think you can make it as a creator.

i took those words to heart and started posting, once or twice a month. at first, it was terrifying: what if the algorithm confirmed i was meant to stay hidden, and my friends saw me flop?

now, 25 videos and 200k followers later, my videos have reached an audience beyond anything i’ve ever dreamed of.

shortly after graduating, i landed a full-time dream role at one of the most lucrative tech startups in the world, and while it was fun for a while, i felt an old itch come back. now, it was impossible to do both, to be half-in-half-out of everything.

so i chose being a content creator.

creative technologist.

an artist.

whatever label i describe myself as, i know i’ve chosen art. the thing i’d been running from, and toward, for a long time.

when i think about what i did, i think about a chinese concept, “jing shen”. it means roughly “spirit” in english, but more than that, it means this drive to live that comes from some internal wellspring. that same place that would make you skip scouts to draw, or make your fingers start to itch in lecture halls.

the reasons why (i quit)

i want to tell stories.

something is so beautiful about the act of showing up for someone. when that person chooses to spend their irreplaceable minutes with you, to let your voice and your story connect with them and fill their morning kitchen or late-night stillness.

i want to tell the truth.

working in tech, i had trouble performing passion. i always felt slightly uncomfortable when my obligation was not solely towards my audience. when you make something and share it directly, there’s no bureaucracy between you and the truth.

i want to exist in a kinder space.

in tech, and especially in AI, i’ve felt like my sense of what mattered was constantly fragmented, rebuilt, and destroyed. AI is important, but the work is carnivorous. everyone’s building the thing that will replace everyone else. your work is obsoleted by next week’s model. labs cannibalize each other for the same talent pool.

creator-land has its toxicity, but i have found it to be much kinder. when you put your stories and self on the line every day, it changes you. storytelling demands this paradox. thick skin for the feedback, care for the people who trust you with their time. building your own compass, finding your corner of the internet to care for, takes a lot of courage. i think that’s why this work tends to produce genuinely good people, in my opinion.

i want to be a bridge.

i think artists are being left behind in conversations about their own future. similarly, i think technologists are curious about the doors to creativity new tools open. i want to be trusted by artists and technologists because i advocate for both in those rooms, though i am first and foremost an artist.

it is possible to do this.

content creation can be financially viable, even lucrative in some niches. however, it is easy to lose yourself. this is a long topic, so i will probably write about it in another article.

there will not be a time like this ever again.

creativity is about to undergo the biggest transformation in history. i think someone needs to document this revolution—to show how their world changes.

traditional career paths are dead.

the explosion of “efficient”, AI-generated content has led to rapidly declining trust in institutions. people are turn to creators as their sources of truth, the ones who show up, who provide a way to navigate existence.

life is too short not to be designed the way you want to live.

i’ve also always struggled with how a traditional career forces you to compartmentalize yourself into specific skills that become your identity. as a hyphenated human, being a creator allows me to be a holistic person.

previously, i’ve felt burned out trying to squeeze the things i cared about into the margins of my “real job”. through that, i’ve realized that telling stories wasn’t a nice-to-have for me.

it was something i had to do, so i could truly live as myself. or, at least, the version of myself i am right now.

i’m scared of the uncertainty that is being a creator. of losing myself in the numbers. of missing the camaraderie that comes with a team. of loneliness. i suppose that’s also why i create, so others who feel the same can find me.

but freedom and fear often come together, and i love what i do now; it’s everything i wanted and perhaps even more.

now, i’m designing days without knowing tomorrow.

the path forward is uncertain, but i’m glad it’s mine.

and onwards.

___

question for you: what’s been your creative journey so far?

what are you grappling with when it comes to navigating your professional & creative identity?

gold spills across flowers that shouldn’t exist.

there i am, remade in pixels.

the me sitting behind the screen is a little in awe. of this new way of seeing myself. of what i might lose.

for months i’ve been asking myself: what does it mean to be an artist when machines can create endlessly?

flowers in every color, every style.

so what do i make that still feels alive?

i keep returning to the idea of gardens.

as AI learns to generate endless flowers, i just want to plant gardens.

what is a digital garden?

a digital garden could be a collage of influences.
it could be an intensely personal list on google docs
it could be a substack tracing things you’ve loved and let go of.

gardens look different, but they share the same philosophy: they are living homes for ideas, tended over time.

not polished. not finished.

just intentionally kept.

i stumbled across my first garden in freshman year while reading a brief history & ethos of the digital garden, which chronicled the rise of these personal, handmade spaces.

only while revisiting the concept recently did i realize gardens weren’t just an aesthetic choice. they were always a response to something breaking.

how gardens became urgent

for most of human history, we gardened our information.

one of fiction’s first multiverse concepts described time as a garden of diverging and converging paths.

when the internet emerged, “wiki gardeners” tended our knowledge ecosystems.

in the earliest websites, you would navigate through hypertext gardens.

but then the metaphor changed.

in his 2015 keynote “the garden and the stream: a technopastoral,” mike caulfield described how we stopped walking through gardens and started being swept into “streams”—algorithmic feeds. the birth of targeted digital advertising had turned the internet into a torrent.

soon, people were talking about the dark forest theory of the web. the internet seemed full of motion, with feeds refreshing, bots rustling, and ads clamoring for attention, yet amid all this mimicry of life, people themselves felt absent.

then came late 2022, and the launch of chatgpt, image generators, and AI copy tools that whispered creation at unprecedented scales.

observers predicted the dark forest would rapidly expand, and they were right. by 2026, it is predicted an estimated 90% of online content will be AI-generated.

but this represents something fundamentally different from earlier dark forest problems, like spam or low-effort content. now, our own interactions have become raw material for models to learn from and generate more content in our image.

everything, even our shadows, gets recycled to keep the forest moving.

we’ve always had to make sense of noise. but this time, the noise sounds like our own voices.

six principles for gardening

so i sat with the question: what was i actually teaching in my content?

how to generate, or how to create?

how to produce more, or how to tend what matters?

i realized i’d been so focused on showing people what AI could do that i hadn’t stopped to ask what it should do. or more importantly, what role I wanted to play in all of this.

gardening is fundamentally not about producing more. it’s about choosing what deserves tending. leaving traces of care, signs that a human hand touched this, returned to it, believed it worth keeping alive.

so i’ve been building something a little different recently: my own practice of gardening. six principles.

i. create with risk.

the best art risks something.

when i create, i take a risk because i am the face of my work.

as murray shanahan describes in talking about large language models, to “triangulate” upon reality may be the last distinctly human acts. to test our understanding against the physical world we share, against other people, against lived experience. to be proven wrong and change our minds.

that accountability to reality is what makes our creativity fundamentally different from machines. AI doesn’t live in the world it creates for, and therefore it doesn’t inhabit the consequences.

when i decide to tell a story, i make a bet about what matters.

i’m saying i considered what this story might do in the world.

i thought about who it might harm or help.

i weighed the tone, the implications, the subtle messages embedded in my choices that would enter into circulation.

i’ve come to peace with the fact that i might, and probably will at some point, get it totally wrong; that i might face scrutiny; that my work might produce effects i did not intend. but i think the value of creating things now lies in commitment, in the willingness to put myself on the line, to make choices that reflect my values and judgment, and to remain answerable for those choices.

II. cultivate a shared garden.

AI can plant flowers, but it cannot cultivate a shared garden.

a real garden isn’t about the gardener. it’s about what grows between the people who inhabit it. when i think of creating, i think of that community of people.

i think community turns scattered viewers into something living. it’s when people start talking to each other in the comments instead of just to me, when someone recognizes another name they’ve seen before, that it stops being simply “my audience” and starts being our space.

AI can produce flowers, but it cannot care about them.

it can’t build those invisible threads of belonging. it can’t make people see each other.

it cannot remember you, who might’ve read my first hyphen article, or watched one of my videos, and is still here.

in an age where infinite content blooms, the most valuable thing i can offer is my attention. not to the algorithm, but to you, and to the spaces that grow between you.

III. tend to roots.

in an age of AI, i think our taste is our most important asset.

so i don’t aim for perfectly engineered flowers. i grow work that only i could have made.

to do that, i’ve had to dig into my roots—documenting the memories, conversations, and pieces of media that shaped me. hong kong noir films. blue hour on palm drive. the first time i watched ex machina. they’re the soil my work grows from, and i return to them, trying to understand them more deeply each time i create.

IV. create superblooms.

AI feels like an existential threat, but this fear isn’t new.

the camera was accused of diminishing painting. music sampling was criticized as theft.

art has always been a dialogue between creator and tool; every transformative tool in history has been called the death of art.

yet every time, new genres were born.

since Generative Fill launched in Photoshop, my dorm room has turned into an endless film set. scenes that would take me days in Blender have become entire worlds prototyped in an afternoon.

i’m seeing a new wave of what i call “creative artisans”: artists who care deeply about their craft and are now building with the sky as their limit. for examples, designers like @meshtimes are crafting software programs in public, evolving into design engineer.

i think we will be seeing more hyphenated careers. programming, VFX, and other bodies of knowledge have unlocked as new mediums for storytellers. i choose to grow flowers at those intersections.

V. knows where seeds come from.

what the garden owes

every garden has a source, and we tend borrowed soil.

the life's work of artists has become training data without consent or compensation. my own work is training the very systems that i draw upon. common crawl scraped billions of images from deviantart and other artist platforms. laoin-5b holds copyrighted work from artists who never agreed to train these systems.

i can’t undo that harm, but i can choose my tools carefully. i use models like firefly and moonvalley, which are trained on licensed work; choose not to generate in the styles of artists who haven’t consented, like in the style of studio ghibli; and when I use AI in any part of my work, i label it clearly.

these personal solutions are not anywhere near perfect, but they are boundaries i can draw.

the cost of growth

borrowed soil isn’t the only cost of generation. a few seconds of generative video consumes as much electricity as powering my laptop for days. that’s why i think we need to treat every image, every video as an active choice to spend energy here instead of somewhere else.

i try to treat AI generation like film photography by composing generated images them using cinematography terminology, and by giving clear visual instructions rather than iterate endlessly on vague prompts.

i avoid AI when it isn’t necessary. sometimes a manual step is enough, and a search is always better than asking a chatbot. each output must justify the energy it consumes. the garden i tend should be worth what it takes from the soil.

VI. let soil rest

in many ways, i choose to make my content slow.

for example, i spend 10 to 20 hours on each video, and add handwritten elements and other choices to ensure my work feels touched by hand. while AI sees that as inefficiency, it’s craft.

yet i also know the seductive pull of instant output, the itch to generate endlessly.

but creative joy is fragile. it withers under efficiency’s promise.

so i want to let tools handle the mechanical aspects, like showing me directions when i’m stuck, and executing clear intentions when generating images of videos. but i protect what’s meaningful — the spark of an idea, the research, the decision of what deserves to exist.

i think a gardener should ask “what should grow?” before asking “what can i generate?”

and some grounds grow richer in silence.

the garden i tend

i don’t know if i understand art anymore, or if understanding it is even possible. at this moment in time, it seems the world keeps remaking itself.

but gardens gives me something to hold onto, a framework for making choices when everything feels uncertain:

plant something.

tend it carefully.

see what grows.

not perfect flowers.

just a garden i can stand by, and welcome you into.

a note ~

i debated on publishing this story, as hyphen is a space to explore the intersection of creativity & tech, and it didn’t seem aligned.

but i think this part of reality belongs here too: the unglamorous bureaucracy one faces to be a part of that world.

there's a particular sort of helplessness that comes with being a foreigner in America.

a helplessness that no amount of education, achievement, or assimilation can shield you from.

i learned that lesson crying on the curb outside the post office.

i. the search begins

it started simple enough: my work card was supposed to arrive.

this small piece of plastic would allow me to start my job here. with it, i could finally begin the career i'd spent years preparing for.

the card never came.

what followed was a kafkaesque journey through America's most broken systems.

"have you checked with the supervisor?"

i walked from post office to post office.

finally, i was told i could speak to the supervisor, then waited an hour only to discover he'd been there all along, helping other customers. no one told me he was there, no one told him i was waiting.

"he'll call you tomorrow morning," they promised.

he didn't, so i returned at 10am the next day.

"the supervisor is out for lunch," they said.

i looked around for somewhere to sit and wait. there were no chairs, so i stood. the heat was oppressive in the building. i ended up walking twenty minutes to the nearest cafe for water, and back. the clerk explained that the supervisor was actually out in the field, and that i could come back tomorrow.

they looked genuinely sorry when i pleaded with them that it was immigration mail. i could see they wished they could do more.

ii. two receipt numbers

the worst part wasn't the waiting, it was the isolation.

the way the system turns you into a receipt number, that only another receipt number could understand.

"it's fine, right? you're a Stanford student..."

at the Tresidder package center, one stop of many i needed to cross off my list, i ran into another new graduate from Stanford.

she was from Nigeria, and facing the same nightmare. her work card had also never arrived.

we waited together outside in the heat, while the building was being repaired due to electrical issues. therefore, the package center wouldn’t open for another three hours. we both stayed and waited. i had a headache because my water had ran out again. hers did too.

while we waited, i got on the phone with immigration services to see if they could help me understand what to do next.

after battling an automated voice agent, a customer service agent promised me a 90-minute wait time just to speak to a human being.

when i finally got through, they told me the only solution was to restart the entire application process from scratch.

two thousand dollars to expedite a replacement card.

five hundred, if i waited up to eight months.

with a job offer hanging in the balance, those weren't really choices at all.

iii. the myriad of possibilities

what tortured me (the situation truly felt like some sort of special, psychological torture) was the myriad of possibilities, illustrated in detail in many desperate reddit threads i combed through looking for answers.

the package could be anywhere.

stolen from my mailbox.

delivered to the wrong address.

sitting in a postal facility somewhere, misfiled.

i could pay two thousand dollars i didn't have—that was the point of a work card, to be able to start making an income—or keep searching through a system that felt like an endless maze.

my family was worried, but i didn’t want to explain it to them fully. they were an ocean away, limited to supportive WhatsApp calls in the hours of day we overlapped—what could they do?

so for two days, i made my way to and from the mail offices in three locations and every nearby package center, talking to anyone i could. a fifteen-minute trip from my friend’s place i was staying at to the main post office would take me an hour and a half by public transport.

i was on borrowed time; my unemployment days were ticking down. foreign workers on my visa class had ninety days of unemployment before being forced to leave the country.

the housing center staff told me they were “drawing on blanks”. neighbours, seeing the note that i had slipped, going door to door, told me they received nothing.

campus was closed for the summer, so there was nowhere to escape the heat.

iv. when achievement means nothing

funnily enough, my PhD researcher advisor appeared at some point while we were waiting outside the package center, looking harried.

i hadn’t seen him in a while; i told him i was going through a “visa problem”.

"not you too?"

international students are never alone in this particular circle of hell.

a professor going back and forth between Germany and the States every weekend for seven years, to finally be eligible for the green card that would allow him to be with his family. a Canadian student who was barred for five years from entering. workers sent home after not being able to draw lucky in the lottery that would allow them to obtain a work visa. my roommate, facing such extraordinary visa wait times that she might not be able to come back to school this year.

it’s something that not a lot of people talk about openly. you’re at risk here by even speaking out. anything can happen.

and i was, perhaps on paper, the ideal candidate. i had graduated from Stanford with a master's degree. i had a great job offer, a strong network, institutional support. but i was just another application number in a broken system, reduced to the same bureaucratic nightmare that destroys people every day.

despite years of building a life here, i was still just a visitor. my welcome could be revoked at any time.

i really tried to do everything right

if this was happening to me, who on paper had every advantage, what happens to everyone else?

v. the flimsy promise of america

here's the irony: even after you get approval on paper, after you've proven your worth to the federal agencies, your future still depends on the postal service successfully delivering a piece of plastic.

the American dream comes down to whether the mail carrier can find your apartment.

that plastic card carries your ability to build your life here, and it travels through a mail system that everyone acknowledges is broken, staffed by people for whom your desperation is routine.

being a foreigner in America means living with a vulnerability that we all here understand. you’re walking on a thin line between belonging and exile.

so you sit on a curb and cry. and then you get up.

Subscribe now

hyphen (n.): a small bridge between two worlds.

for a week now, i’ve been staring at this blank template, trying to will the name of this newsletter into existence.

but what do you call a thing that doesn’t quite exist yet?

when you’re not sure what it’s becoming?

i’ve just graduated into this strange moment in time where every day brings news of some breakthrough in technology that makes yesterday’s impossible feel inevitable.

i’m supposed to know where I fit.

instead, i find myself collecting words like smooth stones.

liminal

parallax

concatenate

words that feel like bridges, like threshold spaces, like the pause between what was and what might be. but nothing felt right.

one night, doom-scrolling design videos at 2am (because apparently the algorithm thinks i nerd out over typography at 2am, which is probably right), i stopped at a simple idea.

it seemed almost too simple. was this just my tired mind, or had i stumbled onto something perfect?

-

yes, -

not the em dash that announces itself in your chatGPT outputs.

not the en dash hiding between dates.

just the hyphen.

the smallest bridge in the english language.

i realised that’s what i am right now. that’s what this newsletter wants to be. the small mark that connects human-machine, creative-technical, analogue-digital. not choosing sides. making the connection possible.

my friend asked me yesterday if I think AI will replace artists. i told her no; i think AI is changing what creativity means, like how the camera changed art, or how sampling changed music. that wasn’t a terribly clear answer. what i meant to say is: maybe it’s not replacement.

maybe it’s compound identity. maybe we’re becoming something new.

writer-coder. artist-engineer. human-assisted intelligence.

i keep thinking about all the ways we’ve become multi-hyphenate. multi-everything.

between-everything. the generation that learned to read on paper and thinks in screens, that witnessed the world going mobile, that grew up on YouTube tutorials but now learns from AI teachers, that’s watching intelligence itself transform while we’re still figuring out our own.

in all this multi-everythingness, what fascinates me most isn’t the endpoints, but the hyphen that holds them together.

a note

hey, hyphenated human—thank you for reading my first post. this essay was somewhat of a braindump (truly, it was written mid-flight), but i felt compelled to share it with you.

if you’re here, you’re probably finding yourself somewhere in-between, too. these undefined spaces, that's where i’m excited to get to spend our time exploring.

some weeks we'll get technical. some weeks, philosophical. sometimes we’ll look at visual explorations. other times we'll just sit with the absurdity of it all.

a list of running ideas so far:

• who algorithms are really designed for (spoiler: not you)

• the art of content creation & community (yes - you are part of a story i’m documenting)

• the visual aesthetics emerging from our collective feelings about tech

• what artists are truly afraid of

• AI girlhood and the digital history of beauty

• finding love in an age of algorithms

this list will evolve as i discover what questions you’re carrying.

so, to start:

reply and tell me about your hyphen.

what two words (or worlds) are you bridging right now?