Five Women Who Made the Internet Feel Worth It
The early web had its mythology: overweight sci-fi nerds, lonely grandfathers, men in polo shirts running investment schemes. And that was mostly accurate. But every now and then you’d land on someone who made the whole thing feel worth opening a browser for.
Janina, writing from Darmstadt of all places, had the kind of eye that made you stop scrolling. Her site mixed fashion imagery with tattoo photography and her own self-portraits—and somehow it didn’t feel assembled. It felt like a perspective. She posted naked bodies and magazine tearsheets alongside snapshots of her actual friends, and the whole thing held together through sheer force of taste.
Then there was Mercedes Leona Lauenstein, who was proving from Munich that you didn’t need Berlin to have a scene worth writing about. She covered the city’s underground life—the bands, the exhibitions, the parties that didn’t end up in tourist guides—with enough love and enough edge that you actually wanted to be there. Her name alone was almost too good to be real.
Cory Kennedy had become a ghost by 2010—the American it-girl of the mid-2000s party circuit, 20 years old and apparently gone, last seen somewhere between a photographer’s flash and the internet’s attention span. She’d been the prototype: famous specifically because of the internet, celebrated by photographers and bloggers and spotty nerds who knew her name before any magazine did. Then she just disappeared, and nobody could explain it. I genuinely missed her in a way that felt strange given I’d never been in the same room as her.
Sara ran Dragstrip Girl with the energy of someone who’d decided life was too short to hedge. She wrote about sex, freedom, and the specific drama of a generation nobody had named yet—and she backed it up. She was actually leaving for the world trip she’d been writing about, keeping a record of it elsewhere. That combination of saying and doing, without irony, was rarer than it had any right to be.
And Mia Bühler was writing for what felt like half the German internet simultaneously—multiple blogs, each about something different, all of them worth reading. The output volume alone would’ve been impressive. The quality holding across all of it was something else. She was going to run out of hours long before she ran out of things to say.
What they all had in common was that their corners of the web felt inhabited. Lived-in. Like someone actually existed on the other side of the screen. That sounds like a low bar. In 2010 it wasn’t.