The Wonder of Pinoy Pop Culture, as Archived by '90s Kabaklaan

THE ANONYMOUS ARCHIVIST REFLECTS ON THE ONLINE CATALOG'S LORE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF PRESERVING CULTURAL MEMORY.

- By Lé BalTAR

For the chronically online generation, doomscrolling is practically a reflex. Since the world's first foray into digital possibility, social media has morphed into many things: go-to news source, therapy substitute in the form of cat videos, dopamine provider where bootleg movies meet celebrity gossip and porn, political theater engined by memes and TikTok reels, and artificial intelligence safe haven where we'd rather ask Grok or ChatGPT for literally anything than read and think. It's a ragebait wasteland in which we're all trying to be "thought leaders," or "the Renata Adler of looking at (our) phone a lot." Sorry, Ann Manov.

But for a curious, and sometimes horny, corner of the internet, it's a way of revisiting the heyday of Pinoy pop culture when printed matter and physical media were still so in vogue, particularly for the 148K audience of '90s Kabaklaan, the in-demand Instagram archive for local celebrity culture of the 1990s and 2000s. '90s Kabaklaan is to Instagram as Glossy Archive is to Twitter (or X, if Elon Musk is to be taken seriously).