There are over a million posts on the “dark academia” tag on Instagram. The images are quite disparate: cardigans, young women reading old books, photos of Oxbridge colleges, candles, and, more bizarrely, a black-and-white still of Ross from Friends. Autumn is a recurrent theme.

Like another recent online aesthetic, “cottagecore,” dark academia depicts a retreat from modern life and from other people. What unites these pictures isn’t a shared visual language — though features like colors and locations do overlap — so much as a mood or vibe. This mood is scholarly, romantic, and solitary. Most images show young people standing alone, often facing away from the camera.

While subcultures tend to bring their adherents together through shared practices, online aesthetics like dark academia and cottagecore are individual practices that bring people into an imagined community in which they never have to come into contact with any other adherent. Aesthetics are like something between a genre and an ordering principle for someone’s lifestyle. This particular ordering principle is structured around an idealized, romanticized version of learning. Learning in dark academia is an object of fantasy: the books are to be posed with rather than read; the photos of libraries rarely show them actually in use; the writing might come with difficulty, torn up paper scattered everywhere, but the end result is always flawless.