An Open Letter to Instagram

#nofilter


Dear Instagram,

Listen, chief, I know you’re rich and popular. Like, Facebook-bought-you-for-one-billion-dollars rich. Like, 200-million-people-use-you popular. All the cool kids love you.

That’s all well and dandy, but dude, honestly? If I can be real with you here? You — pardon my French — suck. You really fucking suck, and here’s why.

You are overrun by photos that people have taken of their own faces.

Sparrows or humans?

Do you realize how silly and sad this is? Where are these people’s friends? Let ducks and sparrows have their own faces.

You make people think they are real photographers.


“Edgy” filters and “artistic” crops do not a photographer make. Everyone overuses your shitty features to make their photos more “professional” — but goddamn, have they ever seen professional, published photos? Your inane users up the contrast between their white bikini and carrot-colored skin (yo, Snooki), blur their meaty fingers or bird’s-nest hair out of the frame, or shoddily obscure the creepy dude — always lanky, always wearing a hoodie — who makes it into the background of every public selfie. I don’t have a damn clue how to use Instagram, but I do know that turning a lurid sunset black and white — “But ART,” you cry, “ART!!1!1!” — isn’t the right move.

You coax people into publicly embarrassing themselves.

Do you see what people do in your name? Do you see the man standing on a teetering chair in the middle of Denny’s attempting to get an aerial shot of his runny eggs Benedict? Let’s count the things that are bad:

  1. His meal.
  2. His shameless belly peeking out from under his “DANICA PATRICK: #30 BUT #1 IN MY HEART” shirt.
  3. His picture (because he’s no Annie Leibovitz, and because he shamelessly abuses your Lo-Fi filter).
  4. His life choices up to that point.
“#LivingTheDream with my girl Danica!!!1!1!11!1"

Nonetheless, he will plaster it to your digital face, where his eggs will look insane-asylum white, his Hollandaise sauce will rival in color the urine of a dehydrated ultramarathoner (for those who aren’t WebMDing right now: that’s not good), and, Christ almighty, he should’ve gotten bacon instead of ham. You ALWAYS get bacon, guy.

You make me jealous.

Your foodstagram is worse than this.

People use you to share pictures of themselves gallivanting in Geneva, philandering in Paris, frolicking in Florence, and dining at Denny’s. (Their Grand Slam breakfast: hard 1 on the binary scale, c’mon.) All these things sound alluring, and yet here I sit, in my kingdom of dunces: fitted sheet recoiling from stained mattress, finger’s depth of week-old water in purple plastic cup, dog fur coating black socks and fleece bathrobe, empty bottle of melatonin pills BECAUSE MY MIND IS A NEVER-ENDING CYCLONE OF STUPID SQUARE PHOTOS.

I already literally can’t even with your peers.

I am an old-fashioned millennial. I like trees, puppies, books, beer. I saw one full episode of Game of Thrones and decided it wasn’t for me. (Pro tip: There are so many more boobs on the Internet than in that one show.)

Sure, I have a Facebook, which I check compulsively, but if you don’t have one then you don’t exist. Facebook’s good for being reminded of people who exist. A kid I knew from high school was really active on Facebook, posting pictures of his ugly dog and shit, and then he deleted his account. Now I don’t remember his name.

Twitter’s good for laughing at tweets by people who ❤ the smell of “colon”:

LinkedIn’s good for people with jobs.

You, Instagram, are good for nothing. You’re just pictures and too-short videos. If I wanted pictures, I’d find a goddamn family photo album for some wholesome reminiscing. (Dad put Post-it notes over my kiddie parts.) If I wanted videos, I’d watch Netflix.

You bring out the worst of humanity.

  • “Jeez, Mom — no, MOM — MOM I’M SERIOUS, DON’T — don’t say grace yet, I need to — MOM, I NEED — sorry — to get the right angle on my cabbage dish.”
  • “Getting a new ‘do… Better give my friends some preemptive visual evidence in case they don’t notice that I chopped all my fucking hair off.”
  • “Whoa, guys — YOU GUYS — my young infant made a facial expression portraying surprise when I unexpectedly made a startlingly loud noise in close proximity to his or her person.”
  • “RIP, Grandma. Ugh, funerals. Lemme take a selfie.”
  • “#MyFirstCigarette”
  • “This is a desk.” … “These are my hot-dog legs.” … “This is my tortoise with a bag of Franzia on its head.” … “This is me doing no-armed westward-facing sleeping lotus dog.” …

Y’know what’s a super sweet social network with #nofilter? THE REAL WORLD.

Do that.