The Oldest Algorithm

The internet’s foundational use case—before social networks, before streaming, arguably before search—was looking at photographs of women. Everything else was infrastructure.

Whether clothed or not, real or illustrated, outdoors or in someone’s bed: images with women in them have been the engine of this technology since the beginning, crossing every generation and class and cultural context that ever touched a keyboard. It began in the murkier corners of the early web, migrated to bookmarking services like FFFFOUND! and We Heart It, and reached critical mass with the Tumblr era, when trading images became frictionless enough that copyright stopped being a concept anyone seriously entertained.

One of the more considered operators in this space is a Japanese artist named Goto Motoshi, who built his reputation through his Straightline Bookmark and the 4U project—both of which treat curation as a genuine aesthetic practice rather than compulsive accumulation. His newer project, BijoMagazine—bijo meaning beautiful woman in Japanese—extends this into dedicated Tumblr territory: photographs of young women that are actually interesting to look at, formally and otherwise, which puts it several cuts above the average teenage mood board.

What makes it work is the eye. There’s a difference between collecting images and selecting them, and Goto Motoshi has been making that distinction long enough that it shows in everything he touches. I keep coming back to it the way I keep coming back to anything someone clearly cared about building. That’s rarer on the internet than it should be. And while we’re all here scrolling images of women for the ten-thousandth time, someone should really invent a version of this for video too—moving images, streamable, free. I’d call it YouTube. I feel like that could really catch on.