interview with i-D

unedited, un-spellchecked, and unabridged

i-D: Where did you grow up and how did that inform your interests in culture? (Can be vague if you don’t want to say where exactly you are!)

MYB: I grew up in a placid suburb of Denver, and placidity is culture’s greatest enemy, so life for me was nothing more than little windows to something more. The first was my grandmother who took me downtown to see plays, symphonies, operas, and restaurant openings as a child. I can still remember the feeling of falling asleep to the lullaby of some opera I couldn’t bear to sit through. As a single woman divorced from her bitter controlling husband, culture was more than just aesthetic pleasure for her, but an essential route to freedom, to experience modernity, to be the modern woman. There wasn’t a second of her life allowed to be devoid of it. When she died of Non-Hodgkin lymphoma I was just 16, and that window was closed forever. The second window, and the one that could never be taken from me, was the internet.

i-D: What’s your earliest memory of the internet? How did you start?

MYB: My step-dad had always been obsessively interested in technology, so some of my earliest memories are of the personal computer I had in my room, and playing video games with my family using the LAN cables he had run through the walls. The internet, as we conceive of it now (e.g. the ‘feed’ and the isolated app-based ecosystems) didn’t really exist in the mid to late-2000s. The internet was a nebulous coalition of sites and moments without much of structuring arrangement. I can distinctly recall Naruto fanart and flash games hosted on transient sites with names so deeply memory-holed that they may be figments of my imagination. I remember looking up Toonami schedules and watching the first viral videos, but the internet of that time seems like cavemen and paintings of gazelle on rocks to me now.

i-D: What was your first screen name?

MYB: Even though I’ve been online for basically my whole life, the first usernames I came up with were in middle school. I had just read The Poisonwood Bible for school and in the book there was a character- who I was obsessed with- named Adah who communicates exclusively through palindromes. Basically from the moment I put the book down I would sit and write out versions of my name- or whatever I was obsessed with that week- in configurations that could be read forward and backwards. When I started making those accounts I used those palindromes, always changing them as I jumped from site to site. Often I would even change my username on a single site as frequently as they would let me, and as I came up with new ones. I don’t even know if I could recall them all, the fun was in the act of creating them.

i-D: How did the IG account come to be? Where did the idea come from?

MYB: There was a movement on Instagram a few years ago, of which I’m one of the few survivors, that was entirely dedicated to posting about philosophy and academic esoterica. It was all in-jokes about Immanuel Kant and niche references to Reza Negarestani. My earliest posts are really egregious examples of this sort of pretentious bullshit. In time I began to separate myself from that world and focused on creating images to express the knotty mess of feelings and concerns I am perpetually trapped in. Mourning a world which has lost all sense for its self preservation, riding the waves between accepting divinity and losing sight of it, what life is like embedded in a deluge of cultural references, and the commercialization of our existence at its most fundamental levels- in science, fashion, beauty, and being.

i-D: How would you describe your account to the uninitiated?

“The Young-Girl knows everything as devoid of consequences, even her own suffering. Everything is funny, nothing's a big deal. Everything is coo/, nothing is serious.”

i-D: Do you remember your first post/meme?

MYB: Yes, it doesn't even have anything to do with philosophy or biology or fashion or anything I talk about now! I was going to college in Boulder Colorado at the time and I was so sick of hearing about all the fucking mountains and trees from transplants that I have lived my entire life around and gotten used to. “Oh the pretty mountains” or “oh the pretty trees”, so as the very maladjusted phone addict I am I made a bunch of posts making fun of ‘nature lovers’. For the record I grew up camping every week and still deeply love nature, but it’s not THAT pretty, I would pick a museum over a forest any day.

i-D: What was the moment where the account went viral?

MYB: The most viral thing I’ve ever made is a version of the “standing in the corner” meme that riffs off the quote from Genesis about how all humans are dust who will return to dust, but instead flipped it into a celebration of the fact that we get to die. The profundity and ecstasy of life is that we get to carry something we did not build and to pass it to someone who we will never know. We are alive, and we are granted this moment.

I couldn't tell you how many times I’ve seen this re-posted, it's actually insane. There is not a social media app on my phone where it has not shown up in the feed. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr, it's never ending, to the point of becoming annoying really. I stopped even looking for it on my own phone, I just google it when I need it, or wait a day or two for someone to send me another post of it that's gone semi-viral.

i-D: Some proud moments?

MYB: When Arca followed me circa 2022 I told her I wouldn’t follow her back unless she followed my band’s instagram (Rose Laurel) and she responded to tell me she was not gonna be “out pettied” and that she was the “pettiest”, and then unfollowed me. It was nice to receive a glowing review of my music from an artist that good. Getting to collaborate with HMLTD on their 2023 album rollout was cool as well.

Also the process of assembling my book on fashion- Empires Over Skin- has been a really proud moment for me, bringing together all this academic reading of fashion studies I've been doing over the past few years into a book which I think is very gratifying to read!

i-D: Do you believe in crediting memes?

MYB: No, and if you watermark your memes you might as well concede that you wish you were making something other than memes. If you make memes, make memes, and memes are for no one and by no one. They are- by the very etymology of their name- an untethered and shared idea.

i-D: What’s your relationship with anonymity and the account?

MYB: Both in my posts and in my books I am very forthcoming about my life experiences and the context which forms my art, so my ‘anonymity’ is dubious at best, but I truly believe that the internet is a place where anonymity is enforced on everyone. Whether you are emilycc streaming for three years continuously, or a page like myself which has no face attached to it, you have nonetheless lost control of your identity, and you are no one. When you post your image onto a platform like instagram or youtube, your representation is ripped from your hands and given to the collective will of a disengaged viewership. Your words and your features are separated from an embodied true person, and you become an image in a collection of images spanning further than anyone can see. Even the most straightforward and visible creators are perpetually fighting a losing war against misrepresentations and anger from an audience which is not actually engaging with them as a person. The person is not there on the feed, the audience is playing with an image unattached to anything. In my work I try to draw attention to the gaping maw of the internet, the chasm which we are all falling into. I am ‘anonymous’ purely as a point, as a message. No one has a face on the internet, you just have a face to give.

i-D: What are some of your favourite accounts to follow? (Can be anything, anyone, not necessarily meme pages)

MYB: First of all, hazel on YouTube is the pinnacle of women with internet induced brain rot, so I think she’s what we should aspire to be, but the page I like the most on Instagram recently has been starworldlab. It used to be t.archivist, but instagram's moderation policy is absolutely antagonistic to art and thoughtful content so he was banned. Also meltdown your books.

i-D: Who’s the worst person on the internet?

MYB: Maybe not the worst people on the internet, but all those fashion guys on YouTube making videos like “why your accessory game is shit” with a thumbnail covered in wojaks need to be STOPPED. You gotta move past that at some point boys, you can admit to liking fashion without it being queer, you don’t have to cover it in masculine signifiers, it's ok. You can title your videos “how to accessorize”, it’ll be fine.