It Is Urgent and Imperative That We All Permanently Exit Instagram

Put down the poison satan make-you-stupid machines. Please.

Hot girls in cute outfits. Another hot take on Venezuela. A fancy, curated living room. Starving children in Gaza. Someone’s vacation in Italy. The wedding of someone I barely know. ICE kidnapping a mother outside her daughter’s school. A dog doing a silly thing.

It is unthinkable to me that we have normalized fire-hosing ourselves in the eyeballs with this alternately inane and horrific, surface-level, spiritually fractured fuckery.

I know it’s extreme to say, “It is urgent and imperative that we all permanently exit Instagram.” But I really mean it. It’s time. The world needs us. Also, I got almost all the way off Instagram when my baby was born, it’s been a massive life improvement, and I want that for all of you.

I acknowledge that exiting Instagram entirely is, for many of us (myself included), currently impossible. But we have to start somewhere. And depending on who you ask, the first step is either admitting you have problem or imagining alternatives. In this (somewhat sexual) fantasy of a mass Meta exodus, I intend to do both.

I’m doing this because my peers—the millennial creative class—are so extremely on Instagram. A casual survey I conducted suggests that people in my community spend, on average, 6-7 hours a week (a work day) on the platform. (And I think people are underreporting.) This is both by choice and not. Most of us love it and use it daily because we are addicted to it want to. But we are also stuck there.

Instagram has become our main platform for organizing/activism, the way we keep in touch with our communities, our news source, and the public square. Both where we go to escape from and plug into the world (we come to escape, end up plugging in, come to plug in, end up escaping.)

It is also where we “build” “our” “brands” (🤢😭) and establish ourselves as professionals. You want to publish a book? Doesn’t matter how good your writing is. It’s going to be really hard if you don’t have upward of 30K Instagram followers. Want a record deal? Gallery representation? To be a photo journalist? Same shit across almost all creative disciplines. And if you want to bypass the industry gatekeepers and sell your own work? Well then you really have to be on Instagram because where else?

And as you probably know all too well by now, being on Instagram doesn’t just mean having a profile and visiting it when you want to promote something. First you spend years creating content and interacting with other content to build an audience. Then, if you want to reach that audience, you have to spend months consistently posting because the algorithm punishes you for pauses. And even if you do post all day every day, the algorithm downranks anything it knows you’re trying to promote to incentivize you to pay for sponsored posts.

This all takes so much time that social media is literally a 40-hour a week job at most organizations and brands. And then who makes money off our labor? Meta (and Trump, quite directly!). Literally (literal use of literally) we are all working for Meta for free and somehow it’s become totally normal and OK. How!?

The result is: so fucking much time doing shit that drains vital force from our brains and souls, diverts it from The Revolution, and co-opts it for profit by The Bad Guys^TM.

Over the next few months, I will outline the mechanisms of this problem in detail. Below is a map of my arguments. A lot of this you’ve heard before. But I think it’s all worth compiling and really looking at. I’ve got a huge stack of research and I can’t wait to share it with you.

IG and ADHD are 69ing each other.

• IG is designed to be addictive. It plays with your emotions (sometimes makes you happy, sometimes enraged, sometimes sad, sometimes nothing) to create intermittent variable reward.

• It gives you a dopamine addiction.

• Dopamine addictions mimic the symptoms of ADHD.

• We’ve forgotten how to be bored, how to inhabit the present.

• We’ve converted downtime/rest time into time to stress and agonize.

• IG fractures our experience of reality.

• The UX makes deep, focused inquiry impossible.

The 👏 Revolution 👏will 👏not 👏be👏posted👏on👏 Meta.

• I’m increasingly worried that one day Trump will ask Zuck for a list of “radical left terrorists” and Zuck will simply hand over all of our data without blinking. Meta has a long, storied history of turning activists over to authoritarian governments, censoring criticism, and willfully facilitating human rights violations all over the world.

• Meta is so evil it makes Spotify look wholesome. Using the platform makes it and MAGA Cop Zuckerberg richer.

• IG stratifies people politically rather than convincing anyone to change their views.

• IG desensitizes people to horror rather than calling them to action.

• Performative activism makes people think they’re off the hook after posting.

• The majority of power and water used by AI is not people using LLMs to do their Googling. It’s things like video streaming, marketing analytics, and infinite scroll algorithms.—i.e. IG is wrecking the environment.

We’re mainlining ego and envy.

• IG puts you squarely in your ego and makes you obsess about your image and social standing.

• Stories = trying to convert everything in life into social capital.

• The FOMO deathtrap.

• Comparing yourself and your life to other people and their lives makes people miserable. Especially when comparing your life to other people’s curated not-real versions of their lives.

• We’re giving each other the evil eye.

Digital World < Actual World

• AI slop. We already don’t know what’s real or not, whether we’re interacting with robots or people.

• We’re spending time stalking people we barely know instead of quality IRL time with people we love.

• Do you know who your actual working community is? “Keeping up with” this many people is not natural or necessary.

• Not being outside touching grass. We are watching things on the screen instead of watching them happen in the world.

• Sitting still in the digital world instead of moving our bodies = We’re all totally getting hand arthritis, text necks, and hunchbacks.

After I get these pieces out, I will outline the alternative futures that I have been spending time imagining with friends.

Stay tuned.

OK love you bye!

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