Goodbye, Instagram
I said there was not half a guinea’s worth of pleasure in seeing this place. JOHNSON. ‘But, Sir, there is half a guinea’s worth of inferiority to other people in not having seen it.’ BOSWELL. ‘I doubt, Sir, whether there are many happy people here.’ JOHNSON. ‘Yes, Sir, there are many happy people here. There are many people here who are watching hundreds, and who think hundreds are watching them.’
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
Speaking in general terms, there seems to be an arc for the notable social media channels of this century: initially people are curious — genuinely enthusiastic — and there exists a happy camaraderie and a commingling of thoughtful expression and collegial commentary. Subsequently it all goes to shit (gradually, then suddenly).
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have all followed this trajectory. On Facebook, this is how you get from being really excited to discover long-lost school friends to hate-reading smug parents, or buffoons with a new mindless universal theory on politics and humanity every day. We hate-follow people on Instagram or Twitter, with their limitless selfies and lazy political biases. Human beings can’t have nice things, we pollute genuinely useful places with narcissism, bullying, and all of our petty grievances.
From privileged White South Africans complaining about affirmative action, like the preceding 400 years of political and economic advantage didn't exist, to unthinking zombies espousing the cure-all powers of the paleo diet, Facebook, for me, is the worst of the three. But Instagram, which I mainly used to follow the world of cycling, has became my bête noire. It is initially like stumbling into a candy shop: there is an inexhaustible array of fleeting hits of visual pleasure. So much so that you amass feeds until it becomes a nauseating chore to stay abreast of things. I ruined Instagram when I began to follow individuals rather than brands or celebrities. It suddenly imported the worst conceit of Facebook—the pictorial history of someone’s perfect life. I can deal with the Panglossian stuff, but it is the obsession with self that is infuriating.
But those are just the other people, I hated what Instagram did to the way I lived each day or the way I encountered new places. Things were becoming harder to experience in isolation, without clicking the blue circle and sharing. The time suck was extraordinary, flicking through the feed was a mindless way to spend a stray few minutes. Yet it also crept into parts of my day that were already filled — work and family time. Keeping abreast of the feed was done late at night and first thing in the morning, the deceit of feeling informed. To be sure, all of these things are an indictment on my character; my procrastination, the neurotic band of my consciousness that I try to avoid, and the mirage of my own isolation. Whatever your own malcontent might be, there exists the illusion of its defeat in the blank face of the internet.
Cycling lends itself nicely to rapid consumption of pictorial feeds. Previously the domain of long-form magazine journalism and books, now there are more alpine tableaus than thumbs can reasonably scroll through. It may seem churlish and ungrateful, but this embarrassment of riches is wasted on the flick and forget medium. Instagram has also become a co-mingling of brands, brand ambassadors (both paid and otherwise), and cultivated personas. This is obviously not specific to the bike industry, and things like celebrity, fashion and general fitness are also well-suited. These rivers of content, into which brands launch their boats, have a streamflow determined by followers — you know, you. Followers loosely equate to relevance but, like magazine circulation, there numbers can be gamed, which is why social media companies take out the trash (fake accounts) from time to time, and marketers look at engagement (likes and comments). If you've got a fancy Radian6 dashboard then you’ll have as much data as you need.
These are the mechanics of the situation, but the human effects are much more interesting. When individuals are stripped of much of the framework that magazines entail — editors, photographers, stylists etc. — it becomes harder not to imagine themselves at the center of everything. Sure, the Instagram accounts of many celebrities are as choreographed as a Vogue shoot but, for many, the agony of taking the right self-portrait all the time (especially when your livelihood depends on it) is very real. Being an Instagram personality is now a legitimate career choice and potentially a significant source of income. Paid placements and mentions are big business when the audience runs into the hundreds of millions. The difference is that the means of production are now in the hands of anyone with a smartphone. The psychic threat occurs when measures of self-worth are counted in followers and likes. Being vulnerable to self-esteem problems is particularly tricky to navigate when these things play out over social media. It is often just another place to experience rejection, unpopularity, and victimisation. A young millennial told me that she deletes a picture (selfie) if it doesn't get at least 100 likes within an hour, and is in constant competition with friends over their follower numbers. This is, literally and objectively, a popularity contest.
Many have no problem with being the product sold, and will freely endorse products they wear. These unpaid endorsements are part signaling, part audition. Instagram has become a touchstone for status signaling, and it doesn't take much to attain the cultural code for the cycling industry. The semiotics may have become a little convoluted with the advent of hashtags and tagging, but it is mostly clear what group or tribe these signs point to. Sometimes they are obvious like #rapha or #attaquer, other times they aren't like #lightbro or #baaw. Some signs, like #outsideisfree, transcend cycling tribes. For others, the encoding process between the addresser and addressee is not obvious nor is it easily explained. This process creates stereotypes, and the esoteric allusions are exclusionary.
The politics of following friends, subliminal posts, and the impolitic act of unfollowing people is fraught with the kind of petty mechanics of highschool popularity games. But if the endless self-referentialism is exhausting to the casual observer, how much of a Sisyphean chore must it be for the owner of a handle? And what of the “friendships” that are built on these networks. We already have the Pickwickian term — a Facebook “friend” — and likes/followers really are equally hollow.
The carefully cultivated online personalities often have the look of being hastily thrown together, but there is a great deal of work required in seeming that way all the time. For Nietzsche “vanity is an atavism”, an extreme weakness, a return to slave morality. The noble person simply cannot fathom the idea of waiting for an opinion of himself to formed by others or trying to “arouse a good opinion”. If you create a fiction online in an attempt to give people what you think they want, you are entering in a slavish relationship with that audience.
It may be looked upon as an extraordinary atavism that the ordinary man is always waiting for an opinion about himself and then instinctively submitting to it; not only to a “good” opinion, but also to a bad and unjust one (think of all the self-depreciations which the believing Christian learns from his Church). It is “the slave” in the vain man’s blood- and how much of the “slave” is still left in woman- which seeks to seduce to good opinions of itself; it is the slave, too, who immediately afterwards falls prostrate himself before these opinions, as though he had not called them forth. Vanity is an atavism.
— Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Certainly, in this sense, vanity comprises the cultural and socioeconomic signs we use that are not merely cultural identifiers; they are the architecture of an identity we hope to project, an opinion of ourselves we hope is held by others. And, in that, this is submitting to a slavish condition where you believe your own bullshit. Even not giving a fuck suggests that more than enough fucks are given by the need for an audience. Narcissism implies that someone has a pathologically high opinion of themselves, but really it is an extreme sign of weakness when this is reinforced by likes and followers. Being the object of everyone’s praise or of everyone’s disapproval is equally ignoble.
I’m not implying that Instagram has no utility, nor that all its users are slavishly gooey for acknowledgment. I know plenty of people who effectively have a “read only” account or use it genuinely as a utility to entertain or inform real friends and family. Social media can be a great meeting point for like-minded enthusiasts — classic car owners, watch aficionados, or cyclists. However, once a self-important identity is inserted in the the feed, and broadcasting product ownership becomes a means means for gratification, the illusion of community is shattered.
The internet has fundamentally changed the way we consume photography and the pace at which new products are fed into the retail marketing machine. Instagram has had a serious hand in this shift, chopping attention spans and product replacement cycles. In the bike industry, product lines are groaning, limited editions appear with startling regularity, and there is always some cool bike to gasp at and then forget almost immediately. Not for the first time, I've deleted my Instagram account, choosing instead to survey the span of my interests beyond the confines of that little square. I’m dusting off my camera, too. Leisure activities shouldn't be hurried or hassled by marketers, they shouldn't be sullied by the self-obsessed. The restless, unending news feed at your fingertips is the apotheosis of consumption, it is the unswerving urgency of nihilistic capitalism.
