All Of The Following Images Are Beautiful

Sometimes, when I'm searching for art references in DuckDuckGo, I find images that my brain completely ignores at first. Maybe they are mundanely ugly, or obviously AI-generated, or they advertise dubious products. I see so many haphazardly created images that I feel exhausted and my eyes automatically filter out the majority of search results. A decade or two ago, a low-quality image might be pixelated, fried, or poorly edited. Now we have crisp, high-definition slop. I remember a disorenting adjustment period in 2023-2024 where I couldn't easily tell what was worthy of my attention. But it seems that my internal slop gauge has caught up.

I've been trying to turn my sense of judgement off and actually look at each image, even if it means I get overwhelmed quicker and can't find what I'm actually looking for. These images reveal as much about modern aesthetics as art created by a professional designer. It's like looking at an unflattering candid instead of a carefully posed selfie. Some of the images that I ignored at first become so striking that I've been saving my favorites. The more I look at them, disregarding their context and any associations I may have to focus only on their appearance, the more mysterious and beautiful I find them. I wonder how much human intervention was involved in their production. Who made them, or prompted an LLM to make them? Where does that person live? How do they view their creations?

The garish Y2K ads and amateur graphics in the GifCities archive look quaint and charming now. Will our perception of today's lowbrow images evolve similarly over the coming decades? Or does the ease of their creation make them feel too impersonal? I decided to start the Archive For Future Nostalgia so I could organize them all in one place and notice how my feelings towards them change over time.

Written June 2026.