the internet used to have bedrooms.

The internet used to have bedrooms. Not literally, although looking at some personal websites from the early 2000s, they came pretty close. There were glittering backgrounds, auto-playing music, questionable fonts, tiny GIFs, visitor counters proudly announcing that you were person number 00482 to arrive. There were pages called things like my_stuff.html. Entire websites existed because somebody liked mushrooms, or their cat, or a particular band, or had written twelve poems and decided the world deserved access to all twelve. None of it was optimized. That was probably the point.

You could click a link somewhere and suddenly find yourself inside another person’s brain. Not their brand, not their content strategy, just their brain. Here are the bands I like. Here is a photograph of my desk. Here is something I wrote because I could not stop thinking about it. Here are seventeen links to other people’s websites. Sign my guestbook before you leave. It felt less like consuming content and more like visiting someone. The internet had bedrooms.

Now it mostly has apartments furnished by landlords. Instagram gives everyone the same walls. Substack gives everyone roughly the same bookshelf. LinkedIn gives everyone the same horrifying fluorescent office. We are technically allowed to decorate, of course. Pick a profile picture. Choose a banner. Write a bio. Congratulations on your freedom.

What is strange is that the internet contains more people than ever and somehow feels like it contains fewer places. We used to build websites. Now we create accounts. That difference sounds small until you think about what an account actually is. An account is a room inside somebody else’s building. They decide where the doors go, what furniture is allowed, which visitors you get to see, and whether the whole layout changes next Tuesday because a product manager somewhere discovered a new engagement metric.

We accepted this because building your own little corner was annoying. You had to know things. HTML, CSS, hosting, domains. Things broke. A perfectly normal evening could disappear because you were trying to move an image six pixels to the left. Why would anyone miss that? Maybe because friction leaves fingerprints. When everyone solves the same problem differently, you can see the person inside the solution. When the problem disappears, some of that individuality disappears with it.

This is not only about websites. Look at how we present taste now. Spotify gives everyone the same album tiles. Letterboxd gives everyone the same movie posters. Goodreads gives everyone the same shelves. Pinterest gives everyone the same grid. We have become incredibly good at expressing ourselves through selections made inside standardized containers. I choose this song, rate this movie, save this photograph, and eventually a personality emerges from the collection. That personality is real, but it is also a strange form of self-expression. You do not build the room anymore. You choose what to place on the shelves someone gave you.

Maybe that is why everyone has become a curator. When the architecture is fixed, arrangement becomes identity. Then arrangement becomes performance. Your Spotify becomes something somebody else might inspect. Your Letterboxd ratings turn into evidence of taste. Your bookshelf becomes background scenery. Your clothes become an aesthetic category. Even things we genuinely love begin doing this second little job of communicating what kind of person we are.

Nothing is allowed to simply sit in the bedroom anymore. The bedroom has become a set.

I think that is why I miss ugly websites. Not because ugliness is inherently virtuous. A lot of old websites looked terrible. I am willing to defend that extremely brave historical position. I miss them because they were evidence of decisions. Somebody decided the title should blink. Somebody decided every hyperlink should be purple. Somebody decided their poetry deserved its own page and their cat deserved three. There was no algorithm quietly asking whether any of it would perform. Sometimes there was barely an audience.

Imagine making something on the internet without immediately receiving numbers explaining how much everybody cared. No engagement rate. No retention graph. No carefully optimized post time. Just: I made a thing. It is here. Come inside if you want.

There is an intimacy to that which we have mostly lost. Bedrooms are intimate because they are inefficient. They contain things that do not need to be there. A ticket stub. An ugly souvenir. Three books stacked beside the bed because you have nowhere else to put them. A note nobody else understands. A drawer that has become impossible to open because you have been shoving random things into it for years. A perfectly optimized bedroom would be terrifying, so why did we decide our online selves should be?

This is partly why I wanted my own website. I could have made a normal portfolio. There is a perfectly respectable template for this. Hello, I am Aadrika. Here are my projects. Here is my research. Here are some impressive nouns arranged strategically. Please contact me. And technically, all of that can still exist here. But I also want the strange books, the films nobody asked about, the essays, the unfinished thoughts, the little word game, the constellation made from notes left by people who passed through. Things that serve absolutely no professional purpose. Especially those.

Because maybe the point of a personal website is that it should contain things nobody would put on a résumé. A résumé proves you have done things. A room proves you have lived somewhere.

I want someone to enter this site through one page and leave twenty minutes later having somehow discovered a film from 1966, a research question I have not solved, a note written by a stranger, and something embarrassingly specific that I love. I want links that lead somewhere unexpected. I want corners. I want evidence that a person lives here.

Maybe that is sentimental. The old internet was not some perfect utopia. It had plenty of garbage, plenty of cruelty, and an alarming relationship with Comic Sans. But it understood something I think we have forgotten: a website did not have to justify its existence. Somebody could make a page simply because they wanted that page to exist.

So this website is, among other things, my attempt to build a bedroom again.

The door is open. Please don’t steal anything.