The Internet Before It Became a Career

There’s something strangely comforting about discovering a corner of the internet that doesn’t immediately make you feel as though you should be building a personal brand.

My incredible new friend — who has just launched her business, Dimwit (which requires it’s own post later) — sent me Rec League and described it simply as: “It feels like the internet from the 2000s.” Which, honestly, was enough to sell me immediately.

And she was right.

Rec League somehow sits in this very specific sweet spot between Substack recommendations, Instagram saves, and Pinterest rabbit holes — but without the exhausting social hierarchy layered on top of it. No performance metrics disguised as personality. No needing to know who’s sitting front row at dinner. No pressure to turn every thought into “content.” Just people collecting and sharing things they genuinely like. Revolutionary, apparently.

It reminds me of the early internet, when people made weird little corners for themselves simply because they wanted to. Before everything became optimized and flattened and slightly corporate-feeling. There’s personality to it. Taste.

People recommending restaurants because the lighting is flattering, clothing they’ve worn into the ground, hotels they still think about months later, or paint colours they’re oddly evangelical about.

Naturally, within about ten minutes of joining, I was playing with fonts and headers like it was MySpace circa 2004. More importantly — and perhaps my greatest achievement to date — I turned my cursor into a tiny pixelated lit cigarette. Which is exactly the sort of unnecessary feature that makes something feel charming instead of scalable.

The whole thing feels refreshingly unserious in the best possible way. A place to collect rooms, books, restaurants, films, clothes, objects, hotels, people, ideas — all the things you’d normally text your friends at 11:30pm saying “this feels very you.”

Anyway, if you’re looking for me, I’ll be on Rec League, making deeply important lists about flattering rooms in New York and restaurants whose menus haven’t changed in 40 years and shouldn’t.