Marcel Winatschek

After Amy

I’ve spent years wondering what happens to passion projects you eventually outgrow. You can sell them. Delete them. Or just stop touching them. Then they’re still there, but also not. Like abandoned people. Or a dog left on the highway. Goodbye, buddy.

For 2,300 days—or maybe more, I never actually counted—my personal obsession was called AMY&PINK. I fed it. Alone, with friends. Eventually it consumed me, dragged me across the world, and I stuffed it with everything I had. More in, more out, I thought. And I was right.

It didn’t take long before AMY&PINK became my job. If you can call sitting in front of a computer all day writing, digging up videos, and copying images from artists a job—hoping they’d be happy about it instead of suing. And that’s where the problem started. It grew. And grew. And grew. We’d built up this reputation for provocation and nudity that gave us a free pass to do things that barely qualified as defensible, but that same image kept us from doing anything real. We couldn’t push the things that mattered. Every time we fought ACTA or mocked the GEMA or defended privacy, we were on the frontlines, but our reputation as the hipster tabloid, the second-rate BRAVO, always pulled us back. Privacy rights, sure, but where are the tits? I could fight that at first. But as I got older, I just got tired. I felt us spinning in circles. My perfectly structured day was making me fat, gray, and stupid.

The last year was just about keeping the lights on while trying to figure out how to lift this thing above ground level. I was abusing it. Without limits. And when we started competing with BuzzFeed and Reddit to see who could throw garbage at people fastest, something inside me died. How many posts can you write about cats or squirrels kicking men in the nuts before you want to walk into a school with a gun. The answer is four.

There I was. Twenty-nine years old. Fractured. The site made money. Advertisers kept paying. We could’ve gone on forever. If AMY&PINK hadn’t been the thing I’d poured myself into, the thing wrapped up so completely in my own life that it had become another name for who I was. It had to end. Now. Because even if it had gotten bigger, more successful, more important, my misery would’ve grown alongside it. But how. This wasn’t just about me—other people would pour themselves into whatever came next. I needed to be careful with how I killed it.

I’ve learned that quick decisions blow up in your face. Always. So I sat with it. I thought about what mattered, what direction made sense, what we actually believed in. It couldn’t be a 180-degree flip or scorched earth. It had to be a natural evolution. A logical, strong chapter.

The biggest problem was that I’d stopped being able to write. When you spend years not reading actual newspapers or magazines and instead absorb whatever garbage teenagers and failed dropouts are spitting out—apostrophes everywhere, commas in all the wrong places, pure tabloid thinking—your mind gets foggy. I was rotting.

So I went out and bought a stack of newspapers, magazines, books. I read on the balcony, in bed, on the toilet, on the floor, on the train, while eating, while drinking, in cafes, while walking, while fucking. I filled my moldy brain with interesting information, well-written sentences, actual structure. I learned real things. Useful things. I joined a gym. Started working in a new office. Ate less meat just because I preferred fish and fried tofu anyway. Small changes that added up to feeling less dead inside.

The new project needed to capture that mental freedom and intellectual challenge. It needed to be about depth instead of mass, real opinion instead of cheap provocation. It couldn’t abandon beauty or pleasure—just refuse to let those be the only reason to publish. It needed to be the voice of a generation tired of being treated like idiots, that wanted substance alongside style. Less shit. More meaning.

So after TOKYOPUNK and AMY&PINK comes NEUE ELITE. A magazine for young people creating themselves through the internet. A culture magazine for anyone who’d rather think than scroll, an opinion magazine for anyone wanting to change things and refuse to be mediocre. No more cheap provocation. Yes, but smarter provocation. No more shallow personal details. Yes, but personal details that mean something. No more nudity for shock value. Yes, but nudity that matters.

I just want to be proud of this thing. We all do. I want to say I’m Marcel from NEUE ELITE and have it mean something. I want to be the king of words, the defender of the genuine. And maybe someone will give me a cookie. This date marks when we reclaim the internet and make it better. When we say no to more listicles. When we choose freedom over money, meaning over security. Usually that’s when everything falls apart, but this feels different. It feels right. Logical. AMY&PINK is now NEUE ELITE. And we’ve got a lot to do.