Too Poor, Too Ugly, Too Uncool

There was a whole micro-genre of website in the late 2000s built entirely on the premise that you weren’t there. Party photos—flash-lit, taken by photographers with names like The Cobra Snake, posted to sites like Last Night’s Party or Hobo Gestapo. The formula: get access, point the camera at skinny indie models and whoever else was orbiting them, and let the internet do its slow, envious scroll.

I was too broke, too uncool, and living in the wrong country for any of it. Which made me exactly the target audience. You don’t need to be at the party to feel its judgment. The aspiration is real precisely because the access isn’t—you look, you catalogue the faces, you tell yourself it’s ironic, and then you bookmark the next one anyway. I Can Teach You How To Do It was the latest addition to the pile. Same Vice-magazine energy, same photographer-as-social-arbiter schtick, same parade of faces I’d never recognize on the street. Tada.