The Internet Scrapbook

Before algorithms etched us into memory. Before cloud servers and infinite scroll and our incessant need to share, you could still go dark and fade into static. Raquel Reyes understood this.When she stepped away from the screen, she didn't simply log off—she executed a masterwork of auto-redaction. Her website—one of the most downloaded of its kind—vanished. MySpace profiles dissolved. Glitter GIFs disappeared from host servers. Images blinked into 404s. She traced the architecture of her own legend and, one by one, dismantled the mirrors.To vanish so completely required fluency—not just in code, but in consequence. She knew where her images lived, how content propagated, which links decayed first. She anticipated platform collapse long before the MySpace purge, predicting the internet's forgetfulness and using it as brushstroke.In doing so, Raquel made absence part of the larger continuum of her self-creation. The void she left behind became part of the story-proof of a woman who seemed to anticipate that, one day, the most radical act online would be deletion.Today, her myth survives not through data but devotion: fragments, recollections, the hum of a name that once lit the early web. What remains is deliberate—a relic here, a rumor there—the curated silence of someone who mastered the medium by knowing when to leave no trace.And yet, her influence lives on. Everything we understand today about monetized influence on the web began long before Kim Kardashian turned it into a billion-dollar enterprise. Would it surprise you to learn that a pre-fame Kim—known on MySpace as Princess Kimberly—and Raquel were "friends" on the platform. Recovery evidence suggests they were.It begs the question: Was Raquel Reyes the Original Online Influencer? And why did she simply go dark?The Internet Scrapbook researchers were able to recover fragments of Raquel's Myspace page including a wallpaper collage she used that shows a remarkable amount of personal ephemera: There are polaroids. magazine layouts, centerfolds, even an all-access VIP pass to an early 2000s Aerosmith/Lenny Kravitz concert tour—relics from a life that once glittered online, now scattered like stardust across the ruins of the web.