The death of Instagram

And a vision for moving forward

My heart’s been heavy, friends, and so I need to talk to you. I’ve been disturbed by the changes happening with Instagram, and I find my stomach flopping over each time I try to engage. The Instagram community is not okay. Will you bear with me while I process here? You’re the ones I want to talk to about it; I hope you can hold my angst with grace. And I hope we can, together, find a way to preserve what’s been life-giving these past several years on the app. Because I think it’s pretty clear: no one’s coming. It’s up to us.

Last week, Instagram updated their app yet again, and it’s quickly become hateable. Out of habit, I have been opening the app, scrolling past five ads to every one post by someone I sort of know, and then immediately closing it. I don’t recognize the place anymore. I certainly can’t post. If my Instagram community was once a vessel of hope, it’s been shipwrecked, leaving my friends and I clinging to splintered parts, spread out in a murky sea of commerce and catchy clips. I can’t find anyone; I wonder if we’re all staying afloat.

I’ve quietly weathered every update to this point, adjusting this and that, clicking here and there to keep attempting to see what I want to see. They’ve made so many updates in the last couple years, an escalating watershed of change since being taken over by Facebook, that the user’s habits have had to evolve rapidly or else lose the experience of the Instagram we’ve all come to know and love over the last 15 years.

It’s been a bit like trying to support someone who keeps getting plastic surgery. I’m not against plastic surgery, by the way, but I used to live in Orange County, and so I’m familiar with how easy it is to forget what someone used to look like. If you love a person and have grown to find comfort in their thin lips or wrinkled eyes, a change can be more than disorienting. There’s a grief in it. You feel loss when you see them, but you can’t quite describe what’s missing. This is how I’ve felt up till now with the changes on Instagram. I’ve missed the comforting feeling of the original version, but I also couldn’t name why.

I don’t mean to sound dramatic. But with this latest update, things have gone too far for me, and the reasons are growing clearer. As someone who has participated in the culture of Instagram with a consistent, personal investment for over a decade, it’s hard to find any trace of its original heartbeat. Instead, a feverish insatiability seems to keep the app throbbing, where digital content creators are rewarded for cannibalizing each other like we’re all players in a giant version of Squid Game but where Chip and Joanna have chosen the aesthetics. Instagram threatens to chisel us down to our worst selves. And when I look over my own shoulder, I realize I’ve been playing along.

When the earlier shifts in how to play the Instagram game were subtler and easier to assimilate, we thought we could keep up. We tried dumbing ourselves down and getting flashier, quicker to consume. We tried pandering for likes in every culturally acceptable way, then deleting likes altogether, and yet the reality has become that no one truly likes any of it. No one likes the culture anymore. No one likes the game. We are barely still managing to like ourselves, awash in constant feedback, namely through crumbs of engagement and follows, that we aren’t enough. We aren’t doing it right. We are never quite being all Instagram hopes we will be and promises we can be, if only we’d play the game more proficiently.

Remember at the beginning, when it wasn’t a game at all? It was a gift, me to you, you to me. We were all giving a piece of ourselves, and we didn’t want to take anything back.

I titled this issue “The Death of Instagram,” before I realized that Instagram, while struggling with plenty of social diseases and disorders, isn’t going anywhere. The app won’t die; it’s the artists and the writers who are actively drowning. I’ll admit, we writers followed the artists over to Instagram when blogging began to fizzle. We were mesmerized by their gorgeous visuals when all we had were rambling paragraphs under a blogspot URL. And a beautiful thing happened. The writers and artists found a way (as writers and artists often do) to build an intricate, inspiring, magical, fairy forest of inspiration. We all got along, we valued each other, and we each had our own quirky variety of beauty to share. Beauty invited beauty; everyone started offering something, and no one was denied their own corner of contribution. In hindsight - and perhaps I’m romanticizing things, or maybe it was just that lovely - there was an unspoken social agreement: we were all trying to heal something.

Now, there is so much more harming than healing.

What I fear, now, is that Instagram has become simply another digital deluge, where beauty and art have been drowned out by salesmen and stimulation, anger and entertainment. Let’s call the latter angertainment, the emotional band-wagoning popularized by those influencers who pop up overnight like yard mushrooms and who might just be poisonous. When beauty is no longer available to rescue us and anchor us in the human experience, we will settle for the cheap ties offered by aggression and scapegoating. The way I see it - particularly, post-pandemic - we have a choice in how we use social media, to either slowly exhale through our persistent feelings of isolation and powerlessness while wrestling with something pithy from our favorite artist or writer, or we buy shit we don’t need and rage at the nearest enemy. I’ve done both. One self is who I want to be all the time, and the other is who I want to be none of the time. I need to start asking which self is being cultivated by the social spaces I occupy. With the pressure to purchase and rage while scrolling faster and faster, I need to start asking exactly which of these selves Instagram hopes I’ll be.

A couple years ago, I would have made a point to say, Be intentional about whom you follow. But it doesn’t much matter whom you follow if you can’t find them among the ads and angertainment. I want to ask Instagram: Why would I want to make new friends - the ones you’re suggesting I will like - when you’ve hidden all my old ones?

They’re unapologetically torpedoing my well-established, life-giving, online community, and then suggesting I find what I need from those they deem relevant. This is why I feel adrift; the deterioration of Instagram’s integrity as a sharing app has left me feeling like I’m wandering through a massive crowd of strangers, looking for a familiar face. Instagram’s solution is to simply suggest an endless stream of new people it thinks I might want to befriend. But no, they’ve lost all my trust. At some point, it gets too tiring and too sad to try to find each other from the splintered pieces we’re all clinging to. At some point, I have to admit Instagram never cared about community; they’re dismantling it as we speak.

Part of my heartache is in watching the app grow increasingly unsafe for those who are trying hardest to be outposts of goodness. Any landscape where creative beauty is suffocated becomes a place of survival, not healing, until innocence is vandalized, and art gets taken down. That’s what I see happening every day on Instagram. If you follow anyone who speaks to social ills like patriarchy, religious abuse, and social injustice, then you’ve probably seen grievous aggression toward them. The growing violence is shocking; the healers are being crucified. It’s hard to watch.

Despite the social dangers, Mako Fujimura, in his book Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life speaks to the need for “mearcstapas” or border-stalkers who walk the edges of culture stewarding beauty as a means of cultural balm. It’s an important and convicting book if you’re concerned about the deterioration of beauty in our social spaces.

There are a few of us still trying hard to be mearcstapas, stalking the borders of Instagram to bring beauty into what’s become unrecognizable, and at times dangerous, territory. But I don’t know if I have the energy to keep pushing back against the tremendous tidal wave of content that offers no beauty, no healing in the meantime. I don’t know if I have the stomach for the constant verbal clawing, where those who are trying hardest to recapture what’s been lost are the most dishonored, disrespected members. And I don’t know if I have the heart to continue to build a following when those metrics will be irrelevant in five years; my grandchildren won’t ask how many followers I had, and I’ve come to realize that any industry requiring me to prove my worth based on a number of fans is one that doesn’t share my personal values.

This week, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, posted a Reel where he tried to address people’s complaints with the update. It was mansplaining at its corporate finest. His entire tone and body language were what I’d use when speaking to my children when they were young. Instagram wants you to believe you’re a valuable, albeit minuscule, part of the technocratic engine, and at the same time, that they will be the ones to pull culture forward whether we consent or not. The summary of what he came online to tell the world was, “All of this is happening the way we want it to, and nothing you can say will change that. In fact, open your eyes and see how this is the natural evolution toward what’s best for everyone.” If that’s not a pretty, little nugget of gaslighting, I don’t know what is.

Yes, I’m disheartened right now. Disappointed and disheartened by what these shifts mean for us as a culture. How do we feed one another with what’s healthy and healing when what’s healthy and healing stops being valued? How do we tend to our wounds when all the restorative spaces get replaced by circuses? How do I myself heal in community when it’s growing increasingly difficult to form and keep my community intact? I don’t have all the answers. I do have grief. I also have this piece I wrote a couple weeks ago on building community with unconditional love, which became my most read issue of Small Affairs yet. I have these moments of clarity, of hope-filled enthusiasm for linking arms and sailing off into the sunset together, having defeated all that threatens to shred us as a society. But when it comes to social media - a primary way we choose to connect with one another - something precious is being lost right before our eyes, and we will be the worse for wear. There is no question.

If you decide to stay in the swirl of all Instagram has to offer, I would make this request: please build us an outpost of beauty. Become an artist. Write your entire heart out. Encourage everyone that you can. Offer the tenderest, truest places of your heart and the realest pieces of your story, and then be prepared to come out bruised for it, knowing deep down that sharing your story was worth the wounds. As everyone is stamped with the image of the divine, everyone has beauty and creativity to offer. I don’t mean a working knowledge of filters and how to go viral. I’m talking about soul-care, that which rescues the drowning and anchors us in belonging.

I know you can do it; whether in words, photos, or whatever it is you create, tell the stories others are afraid to tell, and be as authentic as you can. Believe that your story is a part of a greater story more redemptive than you can possibly imagine. Your words, your images, your photography, your drawings, your poetry, your songs, your cinnamon rolls, your ministerial wisdom, your prayers, your unfiltered freckles, your gracious silence, your bold truth-telling, your refrigerator pickles - it is all offering, all holy. It is all invitation to heal in the presence of Love, eyes on each other, palms open. It is all spirit-stillness, a catching of one another by the shoulders and holding each other steady in the middle of chaos. We are so seasick; we need places on solid ground to recover, places where we hold each other still.

What the current digital landscape tells me is that we are all feeling more alone and more storm-tossed than ever. It’s why Instagram, as broken as it is, won’t die: people still need each other, though the space is growing less and less safe. We keep scrolling, aching for something and someone we are struggling to find. But those of us who choose to be border-stalkers, who build outposts of goodness and beauty, can become embodied rest-stops, places where others can pause and breathe and remember they are full of beauty too.

Vision or mirage, I can’t quite tell. But I want and wish for us to become oases of stillness in an ocean of noise.

I want us to become shelters of beauty in a storm of commerce.

I want us to become outposts of love in the shadows of hate.

I want us to become safety incarnate in the presence of violence.

I want us to hold on to each other, no matter what, Instagram or not.

What are your ideas for moving forward? How can we support the oasis you’re building? Drop your @ in the comments (or your Substack, or community elsewhere) so others can find you. In this moment, I don’t want to know what you’re selling; that’s for another day. I want to know where we can find places of rest in the digital deluge. If you’re a creative, artist, writer, etc. please tell us where you are.

Any hey, there is always room on my floating scrap of wood.

You are the Beloved.

Tell everyone else they are too.

- Leslie

*This has been a special edition of Small Affairs. My next issue will be back to regular programming, complete with my current favorite recipe, two books I’ve read recently that have rearranged my heart in the best way, and a story from a recent flight that I simply can’t shake. Much love, my friends.

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