Can We Talk About the Evolution of Instagram?

This post contains lethal doses of sarcasm if read irresponsibly.

Artwork by @teenagestepdad

---

Orwell was just shitting on contemporary Britain.

Huxley wrote about a utopia and explained why people would hate it.

WALL-E showed people what they already were.

The internet had a strange and larkish and boggy equilibrium to it well before the arrival of Instagram, but this landmark was the turning point where being online almost mandated curating a very superficially cultivated and sanitized digital persona. The wild and palpably vast online sprawl became somewhat tamed when thirsty clout aspirants began presenting an ideal image, said the right things, and monetized the self. Before Facebook became the internet’s retirement home, it was a scrapbook of candid photos and general musings. When the quality of smartphone cameras improved, posting and captions became carefully crafted. Every post became little thudding epics, reliably bursting with every trend currently roiling the Very Online.

This marked the professionalization of the internet.

Even in the early days of Instagram, it was a long expanse, illuminated by hazy photos of a friend drinking a beer on a patio. It would have dozens of filters layered over the original image so it would look like it was printed in the 1840s. While these snapshots were ragged and whimsical, they were oddly charming because they would only have #happyhour as the caption and the comments would say “Looks good!” and “Have one for me!”

This era was too goofy and pure to survive, and people began referring to themselves as “content creators.” This situation is stressful, unpleasant, unhealthy, and it is not getting better. This was the precursor to the TikTok hellscape, and these horrific and awful videos will force themselves onto my Instagram feed, all amounting to a larger and louder nothing. Flubby and overdetermined in its aesthetic, this deluge of dull yet annoying content is unmanageable and crushing and crazy-making. There is almost a great and distant silence between the cringey end product and the time it took for these creators to set up their camera and lighting, do multiple takes, edit the video, and post.

This could be a crucial miscalculation, but I wonder whether influencers are even human or if they are walking billboards that happen to share human DNA. Commodifying your entire life seems to be a vast and deeply sad gambit—even celebrities have vacations. These people are cyborgs, but dumb. A Roomba with a selfie stick.

Present-day Instagram is a series of skronking videos and sponsored advertisements, blank and loud and signifying obnoxiously. Everything is somehow all connected, even if none of it quite relates. My feed will slap me with any piece of content except for what I logged on to see, a complete and completely defective update of this world. Seeing photos of my friends and family comes with the implicit condition of watching a thousand videos of stand-up comedians I have never heard of or do not follow.

Instagram has its own internal logic, but that’s not quite the same as saying that any of it makes sense. We see so more each day than we could’ve imagined we’d ever be able to see even a few years ago, but it’s tough to say that anyone is better informed for any of it, or demonstrably more free, or any happier. I flick my thumb countless times across my iPhone screen, anticipating a photo of my newlywed friends will finally arrive, and I am bombarded with endless ads for Taco Bell. I wonder why, and then remember in 2014, I once Googled the phrase, “dog food.”

---