‘Given a platform, political posers thrived.’ Gerardo Vieyra/NurPhoto/Getty Images
On 16 July 2010, Kevin Systrom uploaded a picture of a dog at a taco stand to the app he had launched with a fellow Stanford grad for testing purposes. It was blurry and overlaid with a groovy blueish filter; also in the frame was his girlfriend’s flip-flopped foot. It was to be the first ever post on Instagram, which was launched on the App Store on 6 October that year — 15 years ago this week. Now owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, Instagram generated nearly $67 billion in revenue last year. That fuzzy, oversaturated dog was the beginning of something monstrous.
What started out as a platform where users posted slightly rubbish pictures they thought were funny, sexy or cool, ended up introducing a new aesthetic pressure to the lives of Millennials. It made each user a public diarist, the director of a gallery entirely about themselves; it changed, perhaps forever, the amount of narcissism deemed acceptable in public forums. It birthed an entirely new category of bullshit job (“influencing”) and spewed the consumer junk they promoted — plastic phone charms, teas that paralysed digestion, stacks of crappy eyeshadow palettes — into landfills via the bedrooms of young women. It gave that generation a reputation for vanity and trend-obsession which, millions of images of avocado toast later, it has yet to shake off.
Instagram also sped up young people’s deracination from political realities, becoming a forum for nonsense identity creeds and compulsive virtue signalling. In this, it doubled as a tool for shaming apostates: Instagram stories, launched in 2016, became peak-woke’s Place de la Concorde, swapping the guillotine for condemning posts. No celebrity cancellation scandal was complete until a heartfelt apology was coughed up here.
When George Floyd was killed, everybody posted black squares on to their grids and vowed to host reading circles to unlearn unconscious biases (five years later, these initiatives have all, obviously, vanished). Many Gen Zs’ understanding of the gender debate is based entirely on the content of infographics — snippets from Judith Butler, misreadings of Simone de Beauvoir — and glib slogans which knowingly trampled nuance (“trans rights are human rights”). More recently, the Israel-Palestine conflict has undergone this cartoonifying treatment: in the weeks after October 7, a woman I followed shared an infographic daydreaming about “queers” in the Gaza Strip, and the experiences Israel, in launching its offensive there, was denying them. Little matter that gay sex is punishable by up to 10 years in prison in the territory. Conducted through the Instagram grid, politics became flattened and hopelessly factional. And for the first time, people incapable of defending their arguments at the pub were able to broadcast their ignorance without justification or debate: put simply, we heard so much more from those who knew so very much less. Given a platform, dullard perspectives flourished and political posers thrived.
These blights were prophesied by the French essayist Charles Baudelaire. In 1859 he wrote that if mechanical cameras were even slightly permitted into the category of traditional artworks they would defile creativity itself. The culprit was “the stupidity of the multitude which is its [photography’s] natural ally”; the spiritual purpose of art would dissolve on contact with a medium so inherently prolific, realistic and (shudder) democratic. Although his argument was limited to the scope of art, Baudelaire’s fears echo through the Instagram feed. The amateur photographers of his imagination were what he called “sun-worshippers”; hysterical yobbos dazzled by new tech instead of being, like he, chin-strokingly detached. Looking at the quality of what we see on social media, how right he was. The issue isn’t tech: it’s the immodesty of believing every one of us deserves to be a “creator”. The implication is horrifically snobbish (helpfully, this has never stopped me): not everyone should be an artist — nor a political pundit nor a poet, for that matter. Any technology that convinces us to broadcast as though we are is not to be trusted.
Later, Walter Benjamin would take the case against photography further by fretting that it endangered the “aura” of art — its singularity, its mythos. I feel that, grand though it is, his argument holds water as a template for our degraded social world. Instagram has made us know far too much about one another; what we know, moreover, is banal, bragging and useless in fostering intimacy. Closeness, friendship, true knowledge of another person; these are not what social media is for. At best, we are swapping avatars. The stupidity of the multitude has won out.
In 1888, Kodak sold the first handheld camera. In the 1890s, amateur street photographers seemed to spring from every grubby corner: the “Kodak fiend” became a figure of anxiety among the middle classes, who feared being caught in private, undignified moments by a snap-happy rogue. So irritating was the possibility of being ambushed that in 1890 two attorneys wrote a furious article entitled “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review. It said that “instantaneous photographs… have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops’”. This technology, in the hands of the unscrupulous, could destroy private life itself. It was also, as the essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes insisted, simply not decent. He believed that photography had introduced an unnatural self-consciousness in the lives of ordinary people: “In a moment the sitter becomes aware that the camera is merciless… the unconscious asymmetry of his features are laid bare… the world will see him as he is, or as the lens insists he is.” Of course, today blemishes can just be edited out, or be lost when one flattering image is posted out of 100 options. Social media gets us no closer to seeing ourselves “as we are”.
What a bunch of Luddites, you might think. But self-consciousness about cameras is something Wendell Holmes was right to bristle against. The presence of lenses attached to smartphones in almost every pocket has fundamentally changed how we move through the world. When anything and everything can be recorded in a moment, it’s not just personal vanity at stake; it’s privacy itself. Accustomed as we are to the fact that, in public life, everything we do might end up online, it seems quaint to think of a 19th-century office clerk suddenly feeling mortified about the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles. It seems crushingly naive to imagine anything about us being hidden from ourselves; a world that doesn’t continually show us our wonky teeth is prehistoric.
But 15 years after its inception, Instagram’s biggest crime is flattering us into inanity. Not only has it taught us that we must be our own personal archivists, but that these archives are interesting and important to both those who know us and, for the class of influencers, society at large. Instagram’s visual grammar has evolved over the years, from single, filtered images to carousels of images, videos, stories and the rest of it. All of this encourages us to agonise over how we present ourselves: what would “work” on a feed, what might accrue likes and shock and attention, and, increasingly, what makes us seem like we care about politics? And yet it’s worth remembering that most of us are, at times, boring, ugly and more concerned with the contents of our lunchboxes than the vagaries of far-away wars; though Instagram has supposedly encouraged us to be more “real” than ever, admitting these fundamental things remains too great a taboo.
