a vibe pic took me from Kazakhstan to South Korea
Clicking around a digital rabbit hole.
I’m sitting at a charging station in the airport in Las Vegas, listening to the din of slot machines, waiting for my flight back to Berlin. By the time this publishes, I’ll not only be back in Berlin but also have been off Instagram for over a week. My brain is still recovering, and I’m spending too much time yapping and scrolling on Twitter — but that’s another issue for another day. Like the cast of Twisters, it’s been hard to give up the thrill of chasing a swirling tempest. This one just happened to be full of content, not cows.
For this edition, I wrote about the wild goose chase I went on to try to find the source of an image that I saw on Discord on New Year's Day. Like all good digital rabbit holes, it took me to some of the strangest parts of the internet, made me fear a malware incursion, and ultimately led nowhere. I loved every minute of it.
Welcome to Public Service.
and life goes on
On the Dirt discord server, a user posted this image of what seems to be a train station exit onto a metropolitan city street. The caption is vague and feels ripped from a Wim Wenders film; it could easily be a deleted scene from Perfect Days. As had become a habit lately, my attempt to learn more takes me straight to Google Lens. The feature has been around in one form or another for years, but it’s only since August 2024 that Google quietly added it to Chrome on desktop. Copying and pasting the Wendersesque mystery image into Lens, the scarcity of results reminds me that not all mysteries can be solved — or, at least, not through AI reverse image technology.
According to Lens, the image seemingly only exists in five results, each leading to a more confounding dead end. It’s used as the album art (sans caption) for a Soundcloud rapper named eurei’s track, “destination +deadmall (lileffort)” posted in 2023. The beat is fuzzy, and the vocals are autotuned into oblivion, but its lyrics include the genuine banger of a line: “yea im reachin for the stars while you shootin for the sky” (please disregard that these metaphors mean the exact same thing).
Another result brings up a YouTube account that used the image as its profile photo. They haven’t uploaded in seven years, and their final video is from a trip to Family Park, a recreation area in Almaty, Kazakhstan (located by reverse image searching a screenshot of the park’s entrance pulled from their video). It feels voyeuristic to see these home videos, like stumbling through the wrong door onto an intimate moment. Only one result, a Thai Facebook page that translates to “slot games,” has text overlaid on the image. In that iteration, posted on January 15, 2024, and reposted from a page called “Nope,” the Thai text translates to “I’m so tired of growing up.”
Chasing one more wisp of smoke, I find the image posted on a site called “CRUSHBALL,” full of “content [derived] from the mind of a 20-something year old writer based in London.” The image is accompanied by a meandering short story titled “Mutuals” that begins: “Kalkan is a small place. It has a population that London exceeds by 9 million, yet both feel like toy villages. I was there this time last year, and my job was ‘holiday.’” The story — a meditation on repetition — is told over three brief paragraphs and ends as follows: “It’s a painful discovery, to find no life outside of repetition, of being predictable. But it’s better to accept it, to serve people with your willingness to repeat, to perceive life as a looping of different songs. Zooming out, it is all fascinating to look at.”
A quick search of the image plus “Kalkan” reveals nothing, as expected; Kalkan, Turkey, is a small seaside town (population: 3,926) with no sprawling downtown to be seen. Just as I’m about to give up and accept that this image will haunt me, I adjust Google’s Lens, framing two clues that might lead anywhere: a flag hung on streetlamps and a public transit bus seen stopped at a crosswalk. The clouds break, and god’s light shines on me as Google readjusts its search results. The flag is Korean, and the bus is used in Seoul. The brief glow dissipates, and like an episode of LOST, the new information only leads to more questions. I give up the hunt.
The story should end here, but then, suddenly, the internet throws a pie in my face. Hours after accepting defeat, I come across the image on @WordsCocoon, a content farming “vibes page” that traffics in sharing random images plastered with vague captions. These pages feel like ethereal diaries of a lonely circuit board, full of hot air. Currently, the image has nearly 10 million views and nearly 200 comments from both bots and seemingly real users (remember those?). “Everyone experienced today differently,” says a dominatrix named Skylar Dawn. Some recognize the spot as Wangsimni station in Seoul, South Korea; it’s a big win for my Google Lens digging but a big loss for my sanity.
As I sat with my mad hunt for meaning these past few days, a quote stuck in my head. It’s from “More Stillness,” a short dispatch by Thea McLachlan about the artist Celia Paul in the new Apartamento. It reads:
“In being photographed, there's a danger that the functionality of Paul's practice and studio (a simple, bare room, in which she wears her painting overalls) could be transformed into an aesthetic to be fetishised, something curated and removed from the practicality built into Paul's life.”
I’ve been thinking about how social media strips out context for quite a long time. To exist online is to perform, and part of that performance is reducing content (be it images, video, or text) into the most easily digestible form possible. As McLachlan notes, a photo of the studio of a great artist can be sanded down; its aesthetic becoming a fetish object for Pinterest boards and Instagram grids (or a WordsCocoon post).
I don’t have some grand conclusion to wrap up with here. All I can say is that if there’s anything to be gleaned from my journey through fuzzy Soundcloud rap, Kazakhstan amusement parks, and South Korean train stations, it’s this: algorithms may have forced our perspective of the internet into the size of a pinhole, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The internet is a wild, weird, vast world and a testament to the wild, weird, vastness of humanity. Go off the rails.
Cataloging things I brought back to Berlin from America:
The Two Lions by Furuya Nagisa. This is the first manga I’ve ever purchased. It was cute, but the story feels like it ends right as it begins.
One pair of '90s Loose Jeans from GAP in a dark wash colorway. One button on the fly doesn’t line up, so I received an additional discount. Final sale. Great fit.
Three keychains, one bumper sticker, and one oval sticker that say “I <3 Beaver.” All memorabilia from a gas station in Beaver, Utah. Purchased as part of a day trip with my dad to visit my half-brother and his family. We met at the Dairy Queen, attached to the gas station. The ice cream made my stomach hurt.
Take Ivy by Shosuke Ishizu and Toshiyuki Kurosu. An early birthday gift from a very nice person. I have wanted this book ever since listening to the “American Ivy” series on Articles of Interest two years ago, so it’s been lovely to finally see inside its pages.
Reese’s Puffs cereal bars. These are a gift for my friend Tycho, who has a crazier sweet tooth than me. He also requested the seasonal Snickerdoodle Oreos, which proved impossible to source.
One black t-shirt commemorating the 30-year anniversary of The Coffee Cup in Boulder City, NV. The famous diner in my hometown is nearly as old as me. The photo of smiling white people dressed in Native American garb was questionable, but the food was great. My meal was disrupted halfway through by someone with a squeaker horn commanding everyone to sing “Happy Birthday” to his grandson (because life is, sometimes, a Netflix movie).
Fiber supplements and allergy pills. Because healthy bowel movements are just as important as fighting Berlin’s killer seasonal allergy attacks. Trust me when I say: invest in psyllium husk.
Black double-knee Dickies pants. It is simply too economical not to buy these pants in the US, considering they are triple the price in Germany. They will be worn often and fit well. I wore them this morning to go buy bread from my local bakery and the stiffness of the material was a good companion to the sharp, cold air of winter in Berlin.
Baggu Large Nylon Sling Bag and Smiley Face Reusable Shopper. I wasn’t sure about these two purchases (there was an initial “crinkliness” to the material that took getting used to), but I’ve grown to at least love the sling bag. It’s easy to throw on and was durable enough to lug a bunch of shit through three airports on the way home. I haven’t yet used to the Smiley shopper, but I’ll surely enjoy it once I’m trudging home from the supermarket with a bag full of produce.
Thanks for joining me, and have a nice day!