The Lost Art of the Mini Internet World
There was once a time when the internet felt like a bedroom. Not the kind you see on Pinterest with its linen sheets and aesthetically arranged nightstand stacks, but the bedroom of someone interesting, where the posters didn’t match, the music felt too good for the radio, and you left with a book recommendation and a bad case of longing.
For me, that bedroom was Rachel Nguyen’s That’s Chic. Rachel was (and honestly still is) the quintessential LA girl. Her December vlogs, her little summer diaries, her habit of tacking on questions at the end as if you were in on some secret late-night conversation—it was lightning in a bottle. Each video felt less like content and more like this weird special atmosphere. You didn’t just watch, you inhabited.
She made a world out of song choices and car camera angles, and throughout school, I devoured it. Not because I wanted to “be her” in that parasocial-influencer aspirational way, but because she was quietly creating her own space online, free of the white noise. No ads shoved between sentences, no brand collaborations that made you feel like the price of admission was your email address. Just Rachel, making a corner of the internet hers and letting us visit if we knew the way.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling stuck, I’ll go back and revisit one of her vlogmas series. It’s the digital equivalent of opening an old shoebox of photos or rereading a dog-eared paperback. Even if the outfits feel very 2013, or the camera quality isn’t what we’d consider “good” now, there’s something timeless about it. And maybe that’s the point. Things that were cool before will always be cool again. Not because they’re reinvented for TikTok or brought back by trend forecasters, but because they captured a feeling that doesn’t age. A little world you could step into for 8 minutes and 32 seconds.
I can’t help but wonder if that kind of space even exists anymore? Maybe it does, tucked in a Discord channel…in the corners of TikTok, or in the blogs that refuse to die. But something about the ubiquity of short form content, the eternal scroll, the algorithm as landlord…it feels harder to stumble into a room like hers. Harder to get lost in someone’s vision that isn’t optimized for reach or clicks.
Which is funny, because wasn’t that the whole point of the internet? That you could carve out a small, oddly shaped cave for yourself, decorate it with things only you cared about, and see who else showed up?
Maybe this is the price I pay for being a little too nostalgic, but I think about it often: how Rachel’s world felt cool because it wasn’t trying to be. It just was. These days, I try to chase that same feeling in smaller ways. I spend more time on Substack, reading writers like Tembe Denton-Hurst, Julia Harrison, and Jo Rosenthal—voices that pull me out of the continuous scroll and into something that makes my brain happy. Sometimes I’ll wander The RealReal or eBay, read, or take long walks listening to a podcast or songs from 10 years ago. All of it feels like a way of carving out my own little corners again, rooms without algorithms breathing down my neck.
Maybe the art isn’t lost. Maybe it’s waiting for us to stop chasing virality and remember that lightning doesn’t come from strategy decks or perfectly curated shots. It comes from someone, alone with their camera or keyboard, building a little room on the internet that feels like home, and leaving the door cracked just wide enough for the rest of us to wander in.
Click to revisit Rachel’s videos: Here
