“Why can’t we just loosen our belts, take off our heels, and cheerfully rot, like the boys?" Caitlin Moran, How To Be A Woman
There's a woman you’ve seen everywhere, on the streets and on your news feeds. She has a clear, luminous skin with no visible pores or texture. There’s no evidence that her face does anything as unglamorous as produce oil or change with the light. Her hair is in a claw clip and bun that took fifteen minutes to look like it took fifteen seconds. Her outfit is neutral-toned, minimal, expensive in a way specifically designed not to look expensive. She looks, in the precise word that her entire aesthetic is organized around, clean. Not clean like freshly washed, but clean like friction-less, like someone who has edited out every visible trace of effort, mess, and biological inconvenience. She’s called Clean Girl.
“Clean Girl aesthetic is a fashion, beauty, and lifestyle micro-trend that emerged on TikTok in late 2021. Characterized by minimalism and a hyper-curated ‘effortless’ appearance, the aesthetic prioritizes a look of disciplined wellness: dewy skin, slicked-back hair, neutral clothing, and an organized lifestyle. The Clean Girl aesthetic focuses specifically on the visual presentation of looking ‘put together.’” [1]
However, Clean Girl is not merely an aesthetic style. She is an argument.
My mother made the same argument, more bluntly, on a video call last Tuesday. “Look at you,” she said, the way a doctor delivers a diagnosis--of course not unkind, but clinical and conclusive. We were standing in our respective kitchens, having an existential conversation through a digital screen, and she was studying me the way you study a renovation project that has stalled and has not quite turned out as expected. “You are 25 now. You should know how to look put-together by now.” I glanced down at my jeans and T-shirt, and hair that had made its own decisions that morning. In her visual vocabulary, I was a woman who had let herself go, which is a strange phrase because I had not gone anywhere. I was, by her assessment, unfinished, like a woman-in-progress who had forgotten to make progress.
“Change your hair. Wear something that fits properly. You are not catching anyone’s eyes looking like that. Clean yourself.”
For about half a second before I decided whether to be anxious or furious, something else happened. Catching someone’s eyes. I keep turning that phrase over. Whose eyes? On what terms? The phrasing assumes without stating it. That there are eyes out there in the world, evaluating, and your job is to catch them. Don't meet them but catch them, the way you catch something falling. Because if you don’t, you lose. You have to really shine, be brighter, at least more pulled-together than the version of yourself that woke up that morning and simply got dressed. You got to glow, but not sweat. You have to look effortless, but never undone. You have to look, above all else, sorted and clean, and not clean in the way that means you showered, but in the way that means controlled, optimized. Now, the script is clear, I thought to myself, but I need a tutorial or at least a formula on how to be clean in the right way.
That night, I scrolled through my social media feeds, and I saw them everywhere. Take my cousin Linh’s latest post: white ribbed tank top, hair twisted into a claw clip, a green smoothie catching the morning light just so, the curve of the glass almost architectural in its perfection. Caption in English: “Self-care Sunday”. She’d tagged a skincare brand, a Pilates studio, and something called a wellness center I’d never heard of. The engagement was notable with 847 likes and 63 saves. Two swipes later: Minh Anh, my high school classmate, was also in a white tank top, with claw-clipped hair and a smoothie and salad, and said, “Wellness is a journey ✨,” tagging a different Pilates studio, a dermatologist clinic, and a collagen supplement brand.
Photo: Pinterest
I kept scrolling. Former classmates, distant cousins, that girl from university I barely talked to but somehow still follow. They looked not identical, but like variations on a theme, like when you’re playing The Sims and realize you’ve been creating the same character over and over with minor adjustments. Clean, glowing skin with no visible pores, no texture, no evidence of a pore ever having existed. Slicked-back buns or carefully staged loose waves. Claw clips, always. Minimal makeup that probably took more than thirty minutes to achieve. Delicate gold jewelry, barely-there. Neutral-toned athleisure. Someone’s entire grid was beige and cream with the occasional soft sage green as a punctuation mark, as if chaos and existential dread simply don’t exist in a neutral-toned universe. What nagged at me wasn’t that they all looked polished. It was that they all looked polished in exactly the same way, at exactly the same time, as if they had all received the same memo, and I was the only one who hadn’t checked her inbox. But why clean? And why so clean?
We're not talking about hygiene. Brushing your teeth is hygiene, and surely nobody is selling you a brushing-your-teeth aesthetic or judging a woman by the photogenic appearance of her teeth-brushing routine. The moment hygiene becomes the Clean Girl aesthetic, the practice has been extracted from the private domain of self-care and conscripted into the public domain of performance and judgment. But how can it even process that idea?
“Dirt is matter out of place,” anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote in ‘Purity and Danger’ (1966). Something becomes impure, not because of its molecular composition, but because it violates the categories a given order has established. The logic appears across virtually every religious tradition ever documented, not as a coincidence, but as the same anxiety wearing different robes.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness.” This is not a Christian invention. The idea was already everywhere. In Islam, taharah (ritual purity) is a prerequisite for prayer; the body must reach a prescribed state of cleanliness before it may approach the divine. In Judaism, tahara and its opposite, tumah, structure enormous portions of religious law, with the mikveh (ritual bath) required after specific bodily states, including menstruation and all that transgresses categorical boundaries. In Shinto, kegare (pollution contracted through contact with death, blood, or moral transgression) must be ritually expelled before one can approach the sacred. In Buddhism, the “Vinaya” prescribes bodily cleanliness as a condition of mental clarity, stating that a disordered body reflects a disordered mind.
None of these traditions talks about bacteria. While the theologies differ -some treating impurity as temporary and achievable, others as inherited and indelible - each tradition shares the structural move of reading the body’s condition as a moral statement about its inhabitant. For centuries, cleanliness was understood as the condition required to ascend. Not to stay level nor to maintain, but to rise toward God, toward the sacred, toward whoever held the highest power in a given social order. Impurity was not just a physical state. It was a social verdict. Every tradition that organized life around cleanliness understood it, at least formally, as an achievement. Impurity was the default, while purity was the destination.
The Clean Girl has reversed these entirely. What the religious traditions demanded of the devoted, the Clean Girl aesthetic demands of every woman as the cost of basic social legibility. It is when the sacred has become the standard, and the extraordinary has become the bare minimum.
Cleanliness is no longer the ceiling. It is now the floor. It is not what a girl should achieve but what she owes before she has done anything else, even before she has opened her mouth or demonstrated a single quality that might make her worth knowing. The effortless makeup look, the skin without any visible pores, the collagen supplement, and the salad in one’s recipe merely earn her the right not to be penalized. But that floor does not stay still.
Cleanliness is considered a protective shield against dirt, with your skin as the boundary that represents victory. But the abject is not simply “the other”, it is also something once inside the self. The corpse is the ultimate abject object that the self will become once the boundary collapses, leaking out stuff just as it does with all organic matter. But aren’t bodily fluids - sweat, blood, pus, tears, milk - occupy the same category? They are produced inside the body, crossing the boundary of the skin, and in doing so, they remind the subject that the boundary on which it depends is unstable, ultimately fictitious. It is the recognition that the clean, controlled self you present to the world is built on a foundation that keeps leaking. As such, The Clean Girl is performing selfhood against her own body, which keeps threatening to dissolve the performance from the inside. She is not asking women to be clean in any general human sense. She demands that the woman’s body produce no proof of being a body.
But whose bodies have historically been coded as dirty? The bodies most historically assigned to the category of inherent dirt - in colonial logic, in class ideology, in every system that needed a “lower” category to justify itself - were non-white bodies, poor bodies, female bodies, bodies that visibly worked. The logic was always the same: these bodies produce more evidence of their animal nature, that they cannot control their surfaces, that they leak. The so-called “civilized” body, by contrast, is the body that has learned to suppress its own productions, achieved through discipline and resource and culture like a kind of cleanliness that elevates it above mere biology. The Clean Girl has absorbed this message that her body, left to its own devices, is potentially abject - potentially dirty, potentially coded as belonging to the “lower” categories. The clean phobia ought to be the shield. But the shield is now pointed inward. Is the Cleam Girl’s true phobia about being unfashionable, or is it about the terror of being placed, through the evidence of her own body, in the wrong category?
Photo: bellanaija.com & author edited
The aesthetic isn’t selling you beauty. It is selling you a temporary, daily, renewable defense against your own mortality. The seven steps of the skincare routine soon become seventeen. The SPF becomes the SPF plus the essence plus the peptide serum plus the redlight therapy device that now has a waitlist. The effortless look requires more effort. The natural face requires more product as it ages. The floor ascends, quietly and continuously, and the women on it must keep climbing just to stay in place, while the system that sets the ever-rising floor profits from every step of the climb. The Clean Girl is, at her core, essentially nothing more than an ideal digital image and a redaction project of a woman with all the inconvenient biological data removed, then handed back to herself as self-love.
Keys wrote that in 2016, and then proved the point by appearing at public events without makeup, generating enough media coverage to demonstrate exactly how conditional the ‘freedom’ to go natural actually is. With the Clean Girl’s methodology, the “natural” look is the most expensive aesthetic ever invented. It is gaslighting in minimal beige packaging. It takes enormous resources to look like you require no resources at all. The demand for skin so flawless it looks like you woke up this way, like your face is a naturally occurring phenomenon.
Let us walk through a typical Clean Girl morning. Six AM wake-up. Twenty minutes of meditation. Thirty minutes of skincare: cleanser, toner, essence, serum, eye cream, moisturizer, SPF. Ten minutes on body care. Photograph the aesthetically pleasing breakfast. Twenty minutes of eating while scrolling wellness content. Choose a neutral-toned outfit and style the effortlessly messy bun in 15 minutes. That is almost ninety minutes before you have left the house, done any work, or created anything. You have simply maintained yourself like a very expensive car that requires constant detailing.
Now add the real numbers. A quality moisturizer can run the equivalent of a week’s grocery budget. A dermatologist-grade chemical peel costs more than many people’s utility bills. And don’t forget about the Pilates membership, collagen supplements, laser treatments, and sunscreen replacement every two months. Add it up for what the aesthetic calls “the basics”.
That is not self-care. That is a part-time job that has convinced you it is a spiritual practice. The demand is not a standard you can meet and then rest from. It is a condition of ongoing membership, renewed daily and revocable at any time. You are only clean until tomorrow morning, when the routine begins again. This is clearly not a beauty culture but a maintenance culture instead. The whole ‘effortless’ look seems like a math that doesn’t add up at all.
So why would anyone - many women, in fact - invest this level of resources into an aesthetic that costs so much and claims to cost nothing?
Because it works and often genuinely feels good. But the pleasure of the routine and the architecture of the system that designed the routine are not mutually exclusive.
The logic that said clean equals upward access, unclean equals exclusion has been running in the human unconscious for so long that it operates below the level of conscious thought, like a very old piece of software nobody remembers installing. When societies secularize, the destination changes, but the psychological structure remains the same. The ‘higher-ups’ are no longer divine figures but economic and social ones, let us say, the educated class, the globally mobile professional, the person who summers somewhere and has a consistent skincare routine. But the equation transfers intact. Clean yourself in order to rise. Maintain your surfaces in order to be received.
Social status is not simply about money. It is about the simultaneous accumulation of different forms of capital (economic, cultural, and social), and more importantly, the ability to convert one form into another in ways that are legible to insiders but invisible as deliberate strategy to everyone else. This form of advantage is called symbolic capital: prestige that appears natural and inevitable, as if it were simply a matter of good taste rather than accumulated resources. The keyword is natural. Symbolic capital works precisely because it has erased the evidence of its own construction. [2]
The Clean Girl is not simply converting economic capital into cultural capital, as someone might by buying an expensive bag. She is converting economic capital into what, in the oldest part of the collective unconscious, feels like a moral and spiritual quality. The Pilates membership produces a body that reads not just as wealthy but as disciplined. The seventeen-step routine produces skin that reads not just as maintained but as pure. The neutral-toned wardrobe reads not just as expensive but as refined, ordered, controlled. As such, class signal operates simultaneously as character judgment, and the character judgment carries centuries of religious and moral weight that the class signal alone could never access.
A logo announces wealth and invites conscious evaluation. You can find it vulgar or retain critical distance. But when someone’s skin is luminous, and her environment is ordered and minimal, your response does not come from conscious evaluation. It arrives through the unconscious - trained since childhood through every religious tradition it has ever absorbed -to read that combination of signals as evidence of someone who is clean, and therefore worthy. The unconscious read arrives fully formed: she was raised carefully, educated properly. She is evidently not someone who works with her hands dirty. The judgment feels like perception because it is drawing on something far older than individual taste.
And critically, this can only be fully decoded by those with the specific cultural competence to read it. The difference between a cheap white shirt and an expensive one, or between genuine ease and performed ease, is visible only to those who have been socialized enough into the system. If you lack that cultural capital, the whole aesthetic might simply look boring, which is precisely how it maintains its exclusivity. By doing all of this while appearing to screen for nothing, it looks like it is simply rewarding beauty and privilege for women who have their lives together. However, this kind of capital can be faked, and fakery still produces real results.
In contemporary consumer culture, we consume objects not only for their utility but also for their meaning and signs. A cold brew is not caffeine; it is a story about who you are. Yoga gear is not equipment; it is a signal of wellness consciousness and self-investment. An English caption on a post is not a translation; it is a declaration of cosmopolitan belonging. Each element functions as a semiotic building block, constructing an identity narrative that says “I belong to the global educated class” without the vulgarity of saying those words aloud. It is called a simulacrum - a copy without an original, a sign that refers only to other signs. You do not need to actually have the lifestyle she represents. You need the aesthetic vocabulary. The smoothie, the Pilates check-in, the skincare routine photographed in good light, etc. - these are not documents of a life. Instead, they are the construction of one. The simulation generates real social value, which is both deeply clever and slightly vertiginous to contemplate, like discovering the floor you have been standing on is a very good painting of a floor the entire time.
What makes the Clean Girl particularly vicious as a class signal is that she weaponizes the religious valence of cleanliness and the class valence of grooming simultaneously, making the judgment feel moral and aesthetic rather than economic. If someone shows up to a job interview in obvious luxury logos, you can consciously identify the class signaling and decide how to respond. It is legible as a strategy. But if someone shows up with clear skin and the general aura of someone who has never been tired in her life, the judgment you make does not feel like a class judgment. It feels like a character judgment. She seems disciplined, healthy, and sorted. These are moral categories, not economic ones; or rather, economic ones wearing moral clothes.
The Clean Girl doesn’t say, “you are not clean enough to be here”; she says, subtly, “you cannot afford to be here.”. And because that language has been rooted in the human unconscious since the first ritual purification, it lands not as economic exclusion but as a judgment on your character, your discipline, your fundamental worth as a person. The clean person has a sense of trustworthiness, of competence, of someone who has their life together. That feeling is the sediment of centuries of religious and moral conditioning, now activated by a beige linen set.
At first, I thought Clean Girl was simply popular. Aspirational things spread, most of the time. But popularity is not a neutral force. Popularity has an architecture, and that architecture was deliberately designed to serve a specific economic function.
Take the example of one of the biggest social media platforms, which has contributed significantly to the rise of Clean Girl. Instagram and its algorithm do not distribute all content equally. The platform is not a mirror of culture; it is a recruiter. It optimizes for engagement, which is measured through a hierarchy of signals: saves rank highest, then shares, then comments, then likes. And the Clean Girl post is almost perfectly engineered for this hierarchy. Her skincare routine can be bookmarked. Her Pilates studio can be researched. Her supplement brand can be purchased. She is, in algorithmic terms, saveable. Her content is not just something you enjoy in the moment; it is something you file away to return to, to enact, to purchase from. Every save is a micro-conversion in a commercial pipeline. Go back to my cousin’s post: 63 people bookmarked it, not simply to admire her beauty in these photos, but to find the studio, research the skincare brand, and buy the supplement. Whether or not she was being paid for any of it, the infrastructure treated her post as an advertisement. The fact that it did not feel like one but instead like a friend’s genuine Sunday morning is precisely what made it so effective.
This kind of broader system is called surveillance capitalism[4]. Your behavior on the platform - including every post you linger on, every face you zoom into, every routine you screenshot at 1am, every profile you visit three times without following - is not just data that describes you. It is a commodity, harvested and sold to advertisers who use it to predict and modify your future behavior. The most profitable version of you, from the platform’s perspective, is the one that is slightly but chronically dissatisfied, yet aspirational enough to keep scrolling and insecure enough to keep engaging with content that promises improvement, but never quite satisfied enough to stop. A woman who has been served by a precision-engineered recommendation system will stay on the platform. She is valuable to the entire infrastructure.
To monetize an aesthetic on platforms like Instagram or TikTok, you need brand partnerships. Brand partnerships require that you be consistently aspirational, universally palatable, emotionally non-threatening, and product-compatible. A woman whose income depends on skincare contracts cannot afford to question whether the seventeen-step routine is worth it. An influencer cannot afford to rage, mess, or indulge in ordinary human ugliness without losing her algorithm. The creator economy does not force anyone to perform this version of femininity. It simply rewards those who do and quietly starves those who don’t. Each woman who plays along validates the system, making it harder for the next woman to refuse.
What makes this surveillance machinery so devastating is the Panopticon architecture underneath it - a prison designed so that inmates could be watched at any time without knowing when they were actually being observed, just as the original blueprint model of modern social control[5]. The uncertainty was the point, so that if you might be watched, you behave as if you are always watched. You know who is watching, while they know you can see them watching, while you know they know. This is mutual surveillance in which all parties are simultaneously guards and prisoners, and everyone is fully aware of their dual role. The architecture of surveillance was built for profit, and its social consequences, from the platform’s perspective, are entirely acceptable side effects. The Clean Girl aesthetic has perfected this mechanism, rebranded it as empowerment, and given it a technological infrastructure that no previous era could have imagined.
The Clean Girl, hence, did not simply get popular. She got selected by a system specifically designed to identify and amplify content that keeps users on the platform longest and makes them most receptive to advertising. And we kept scrolling, filing away grocery lists for a version of ourselves we had not achieved yet, turning our insecurities into data points.
The Clean Girl went mainstream around 2021 - 2022. By the normal lifecycle of internet microtrends - burn fast, get declared over, make way for the opposite - she should have been buried under by 2023. And the recoil did come. “Mob wife aesthetic”, “weird girl,” “balletcore, “dark academia,” “tomato girl summer”, etc. - the feed has been cycling through alternatives at dizzying speed, each one announced as the thing that finally kills the Clean Girl’s reign. But why does she keep refusing to die?
Fashion operates in cycles. Minimalism begets maximalism begets minimalism. So the standard explanation is: she will come back, because everything comes back. But that explains recurrence. It does not explain why she never left.
The reason for that is that the Clean Girl was never really a fashion trend in the first place. Fashion trends are about style. They operate at the level of silhouette, color, fabric, and cultural reference. But the Clean Girl operates at the level of moral category. And moral categories don’t go out of fashion the way hemlines do.
Take an example, “Mob wife aesthetic” was a style. It had a specific visual vocabulary with fur, gold, drama, and excess, and it carried cultural references (a certain era of prestige television, a specific kind of Italian-American femininity). When it stopped feeling fresh, you could simply stop wearing fur coats, and the trend was over for you. Nothing about your fundamental worth as a person was at stake.
But the Clean Girl is not a style you wear. She is a condition you perform, the secularized version of a moral-spiritual category that declares the clean body as the worthy body and the disciplined surface as evidence of an ordered interior. You cannot simply stop doing the Clean Girl the way you stop wearing wide-leg trousers, because the thing the Clean Girl is actually signaling doesn’t go out of fashion. Those are permanent social currencies. The aesthetic is just their current costume.
“Mob wife” said: excess is glamorous. The Clean Girl said, "Yes, but are you disciplined?"
“Weird girl,” said, " Strange is interesting. The Clean Girl said, "Yes, but are you healthy?"
Hence, every attempt to kill her through aesthetic opposition fails. Every counter-aesthetic attacks her on the level of style, and she simply absorbs the attack because the thing she is protecting is untouchable by style critique alone.
You have been convinced that the controlling instrument is a wellness tool, and that using it diligently is an act of self-love. When you search for the “Clean Girl” on YouTube, you can never exactly get the “Clean Girl videos”, but instead, you are always handed a bunch of precious keywords, such as ‘detoxing’, ‘glowing up’, ‘healthy’, ‘productive’, etc. It is not an error; it is a feature.
Photo: Author captured
With genuine hygiene, the cost of failure is personal. You might get sick, smell, or experience physical discomfort. The consequence lives in your body. With the Clean Girl standard, the cost of failure is social. The ‘unclean girl’ loses her status. She is read as undisciplined, unserious, unworthy. But a woman who skips the collagen supplement does not get sick. A woman who cannot afford the Pilates membership suffers no genuine health consequence. She simply fails to perform a class signal and is then penalized as if she had failed a moral test because the system has successfully disguised the performance as a health practice. You cannot argue with someone’s skincare routine the way you might argue with their fashion choices, ever since skincare has been placed in the category of health. You are not being asked to be prettier. You are being asked to be healthier, which is fine and good and nobody’s business. And who could possibly object to that?
Meanwhile, the algorithm has a financial reason to keep her alive. Every alternative aesthetic that rises gets progressively monetized, smoothed into palatability, and gradually starts to resemble her again. All those counter-aesthetics announced as her replacement are, in fact, evidence of her dominance rather than her decline. Every alternative aesthetic that rises - maximalism, “undone girl”, whatever comes next - gets progressively monetized and therefore progressively smoothed into palatability, which means it gradually starts to resemble the Clean Girl again. TikTok’s ‘tomato girl summer’ started chaotic and sun-drenched and joyful, and within about six months, there were “tomato girl skincare routines” and “tomato girl morning rituals”. The cage gets repainted, but the structure remains.
Some women genuinely enjoy their skincare routines. Some find real community in Pilates classes. The dopamine hit from a completed routine is real, just as the same hit you get from any ritual that imposes order on chaos, taking the ambient anxiety of existing and giving it somewhere specific to go. The comment sections of Clean Girl posts are full of women genuinely helping each other, recommending the affordable dupe, cheering on someone’s skin progress as if it were a personal victory, because it is. This is a real connection organized around shared practice, which is what humans have always done. The line between authentic pleasure and internalized performance is not always clear from the outside, and perhaps not even from the inside either.
But (again),
The pleasure is not the problem. The problem is the question nobody asks while experiencing it: who decided that this specific pleasure- not from rest, not from creative work, not from physical strength, not from being deeply known by another person, but the particular satisfaction of a smoothed and presented surface - was the one worth organizing your day and night routines around? Who installed that metric?
The question is not “should women wash their faces?” but “who benefits from the idea that washing your face correctly is a prerequisite for being taken seriously as a person?”The cage can be genuinely comfortable. But it is worth noticing that the cage was furnished by the same industry that profits from your staying in it, and that the contentment you feel upon completion is data the algorithm has been carefully cultivating since the first time you ever lingered two seconds too long on someone else’s post. The cage is invisible because it is disguised as a business model. The woman inside it has been told she is an entrepreneur. She is still performing femininity for approval, still having her worth measured primarily by the surface of her body, still prioritizing being pleasing and non-threatening above almost everything else. True liberation tends to make people uncomfortable. It creates friction, forces conversations, and challenges power in ways that cost something. The Clean Girl aesthetic makes everyone comfortable. Your boss approves. Your grandmother approves. Your algorithm approves. The surveillance has not lessened; it has been industrialized and automated instead. The standards have not relaxed; they have been rebranded as self-improvement metrics, making them far more difficult to resist or even recognize as standards.
The demand has been so thoroughly internalized that it has become indistinguishable from desire. The performance has been rehearsed so many times that it has become a part of the performer's personality. This is the system that has taken the washing of faces and extended it, infinitely and profitably, into a standard of personhood, and then had the audacity to call the extension self-love.
So here I am. Still getting lectures about catching someone’s eye, and still not entirely sure what that means. But I understand now what I am actually being asked to perform: a very specific magic trick. I must appear both modern and traditional, liberated and compliant, effortless and meticulously maintained, all at once. I must be the living embodiment of a compromise that asks nothing of the people judging me and everything of the person being judged. And I must accomplish all of this through platforms that are harvesting my anxiety about it as a behavioral data point and selling it to the skincare brand advertising in my margin.
The Clean Girl aesthetic promises that the obedient girl can have it all.
Catching whose eyes? I think I finally know the answer.
Everyone’s. All at once, all the time, for free.
References:
[1] Aesthetics Wiki, https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Clean_Girl.
[2] Xiaowei Huang, ‘Understanding Bourdieu - Cultural Capital and Habitus’, Canadian Center of Science and Education, 2019.
[3] A. Wright, ‘Taste and Distinction: How Class Shapes What We Like’, Thinking Sociologically, https://thinkingsociologically.com/2025/03/21/taste-and-distinction-how-class-shapes-what-we-like/.
[4] Wikipedia, ‘Surveillance capitalism’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism.
[5] Wikipedia, ‘Panopticon’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon.
Bio:
Quỳnh Vuong is an INC associated researcher, graphic designer and visual culture researcher, based in Vietnam. She is currently completing her MA in Applied Arts at Ton Duc Thang University in Ho Chi Minh City. Grounded in the mechanics of mass media production, she investigates the digital afterlife of heritage. Her practice re-encodes traditional narratives within interactive systems, asking critical questions about cultural translation, audience affect, and how smart technologies might serve as vessels for resonance rather than erasure. Read her first INC blog post here.