The Internet Is Not the Answer (16 page)

And so Instagram and its photos—what Systrom, shamelessly appropriating Kodak’s phrase, calls “Instagram moments”—were born. With fuzzily named filters like X-Pro II, Hefe, and Toaster, this free mobile network became an instant viral hit. The scale and speed of its success was astonishing. Twenty-five thousand iPhone users downloaded the app when it launched on October 6, 2010. A month later, Systrom’s startup had a million members. By early 2012, as the writing on the Eastman House wall reminds us, it had 14 million users and hosted a billion Instagram moments. In April of that year, after a bidding war between then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Systrom agreed to a billion-dollar acquisition offer from Facebook, even though his eighteen-month-old startup had neither revenue nor even a business model for making money.
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No matter. Just six months later, Instagram users had skyrocketed to 100 million, with the app hosting 5 billion photos. Over the Thanksgiving holiday in late November 2012, more than 200 Instagram moments were being posted in the United States every second.
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By the spring of 2013, just as a shrunken Kodak was limping out of bankruptcy, Systrom’s mobile network hosted 16 billion photographs, with over 55 million daily uploads by its 150 million members.
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And by the end of 2013, Instagram—with Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter—had, according to the Pew Research Center, emerged as one of the five most popular social media websites in the United States.
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Most remarkably, usage on Instagram and Facebook combined to make up 26% of all time spent on mobile networks in 2013,
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with Instagram’s 23% growth making it not only the fastest-growing app of the year but also the world’s fastest-growing social network.
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It was a cultural revolution. The London
Observer
’s Eva Wiseman describes how sepia-tinged Instagram moments have established themselves as a parallel reality for the network generation: “We eat, we sleep, we chat, we eat. But all the time, there’s a second plotline, unraveling on our phones. My friends preface any conversation with a brow-raised phrase:
Meanwhile on Instagram . . .
”

Kevin Systrom’s boat had come in. He could no longer claim to be a failure. He’d become a star of the “winner-takes-all” economy, a founding member of the Battery. He personally pocketed around half a billion dollars from the Facebook sale, giving him the instant wealth of a Gilded Age tycoon such as Kodak’s George Eastman. And like Eastman’s late-nineteenth-century startup, Systrom’s early-twenty-first-century photo network has imprinted itself on our everyday lives. The Instagram moment has replaced the Kodak moment. Not a bad return-on-investment from a day spent swinging in a hammock on a Mexican beach.

An Untruthful Mirror

But the benefits of Instagram for the rest of us are about as foggy as one of Instagram’s Hefe or Toaster filters. “Instagram is focused on capturing the world’s moments,”
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Systrom likes to say. But that’s a fiction—just like Instagram itself. In contrast with Kodachrome, a film stock dedicated to sharp-detailed, grain-free images, Instagram’s value is its graininess—designed, as the
New York Times
’ Alex Williams explains, to make “everyone look a little younger, a bit prettier, more cover-worthy.”
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Whoever first said that “the camera never lies” had obviously never used Instagram. If Kodachrome was designed as an unsparingly honest window, then Instagram is its reverse, a complimentary mirror “where,” as Sarah Nicole Prickett, writing in the
New York Times
, observes, “the grass looks greener.”
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That’s its greatest seduction. So rather than accurately capturing the world’s moments in all their colorful complexity, Instagram—“the highest achievement in Internet voyeurism,” according to Alex Williams, and “the app built to make you covet your neighbor’s life,”
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as Prickett puts it—is actually creating what
Williams, citing the title of a 1959 work by Norman Mailer, calls “Advertisements for Myself.”
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“Advertisements for Myself” have become the unavoidable medium and the message of what Sequoia Capital chairman Michael Moritz calls the personal revolution. It’s a world that, Tim Wu caustically notes, is defined by a “race” among social media users to build the most ubiquitous personal brands.
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Online narcissism is therefore, as Keith Campbell, the coauthor of the bestselling
The Narcissism Epidemic,
explains, a “logical outgrowth of DIY capitalism—the capitalism in which we all have our own “branding business” and we are our “own agent” and “marketing department”
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No wonder
Time
made “YOU” Person of the Year for 2006. “Yes, you,” the magazine announced. “You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”
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Meanwhile, on Instagram . . .
it appears as if we’ve all returned to the Dark Ages in Wu’s “branding race” and Campbell’s “DIY capitalism.” The billions of advertisements for ourselves that we post on Kevin Systrom’s creation are making us as ignorantly self-important as our most primitive ancestors. Indeed, the only thing more retro than Instagram’s filters is the pre-Copernican belief, encouraged by social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, that the new digital universe somehow revolves around us. Fuzzy technology leads to an even fuzzier sense of our place in the cosmos. In today’s culture of Instagram moments, celebrity, or at least the illusion of celebrity, appears to have been radically democratized.

Instagram actually represents the reverse side of Silicon Valley’s cult of failure. In the Valley, the rich and famous claim to be failures; on social networks like Instagram, millions of failures claim to be rich and famous.

“Our age is lousy with celebrities,” says George Packer, who sees our contemporary obsession with celebrity as an important cultural piece of our increasing economic inequality. “They loom larger in times like now,” he thus notes, “when inequality is soaring and trust in institutions—governments, corporations, schools, the press—is failing.”
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Packer is right. The truth about networks like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook is that their easy-to-use, free tools delude us into thinking we are celebrities. Yet, in the Internet’s winner-take-all economy, attention remains a monopoly of superstars. Average is over, particularly for celebrities. In early 2014, for example, Kim Kardashian had 10 million Instagram followers, but only followed 85 people. Justin Bieber, the most popular person of all on Instagram, had almost 11 million followers and followed nobody at all. Rather than cultural democracy, what we are seeing is another spin on Joel Kotkin’s new feudalism, in which narcissistic aristocrats like Kardashian and Bieber are able to wield massive armies of loyal voyeurs.

Hello This Is Us

Social networks like Instagram can’t, of course, be entirely blamed for this epidemic of narcissism and voyeurism now afflicting our culture. As the work of prominent American psychologists like Jean Twenge, Keith Campbell, and Elias Aboujaoude indicates, our contemporary obsession with public self-expression has complex cultural, technological, and psychological origins that can’t be exclusively traced to the digital revolution.
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Indeed, Twenge and Campbell’s
Narcissism Epidemic
was published in 2009, before Systrom even had his “aha” moment on that Mexican beach.

As David Brooks notes, our current fashion for vulgar immodesty represents another fundamental break with the Great Society, which, in contrast with today, was represented by a culture of understatement, abnegation, and modesty. “When you look from today back to 1945,” Brooks notes about the “expressive individualism” of our networked age, “you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line.”
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Nor is Instagram alone in crossing this narcissism line. There’s also Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and the rest of a seemingly endless mirrored hall of social networks, apps, and platforms stoking our selfie-centered delusions. Indeed, in an economy driven by innovator’s disasters, new social apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat, and Snapchat—a photo-sharing site that, in November 2013, turned down an all-cash acquisition offer of more than $3 billion from Facebook—are already challenging Instagram’s dominance.
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And by the time you read this, there will, no doubt, be even more destructive new products and companies undermining 2014 disruptors like Snapchat, WhatsApp, and WeChat.

For us, however, Instagram—whether or not it remains the “second plotline” of the networked generation—is a useful symbol of everything that has gone wrong with our digital culture over the last quarter of a century. “I update, therefore I am,” I once wrote, half jokingly, about the existential dilemma created by our obsession with social media.
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Unfortunately, however, the idea that our existence is proven by our tweets or our Instagram moments is no longer very funny. As the
Financial Times
’
Gautam Malkani warns about our selfie-centric culture, “if we have no thought to Tweet or photo to post, we basically cease to exist.”
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No wonder that what the
New York Times
columnist Charles Blow calls “the Self(ie) Generation” of millennial 18–33-year-olds has so much lower levels of trust than previous generations—with a 2014 Pew Research Center report showing that only 19% of millennials trust others, compared with 31% of Gen Xers and 40% of boomers.
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After all, if we can’t even trust our own existence without Instagramming it, then
who
can we trust?

“In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, ‘Hello this is me,’” the American movie star and self-confessed Instagram “addict” James Franco confessed in the
New York Times
.
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And so—from the tasteless Rich Kids of Instagram with their “they have much more money than you and this is what they do” tagline to the craze for selfies at funerals
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to the hookup app photos of men at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin
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to the inevitable “Auschwitz selfies,”
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to the “Bridge girl,” the young woman who casually snapped a selfie in front of somebody committing suicide off New York’s Brooklyn Bridge
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to Franco himself, who in 2014 was accused of heavily flirting with underage girls on Instagram
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—the shameless self-portrait has emerged as a dominant mode of expression, perhaps even the proof of our existence, in the digital age. Presidents, prime ministers, and even pontiffs have published self-portraits snapped by their mobile phones—with Pope Francis publishing what the
Guardian
called a “badass selfie” inside St. Peter’s Basilica.
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No wonder the “selfie”—defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media site”—was the
Oxford English Dictionary
’s word of the year in 2013, its use increasing by 17,000% over the year.
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And no wonder that almost 50% of the photos taken on Instagram in the United Kingdom by 14–21-year-olds are selfies, many of whom use this medium to reify their existence.
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“All too often, selfies involve shooting yourself in the foot,” Gautam Malkani noted about Barack Obama and David Cameron’s selfie debacle at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service in December 2013. But the unfortunate truth is that we are all—from Barack Obama to James Franco to the other 150 million selfie addicts on Kevin Systrom’s social network—collectively shooting ourselves in more than just our feet with our battery of
Hello this is me
snaps. These “Advertisements for Myself” are actually embarrassing commercials both for ourselves and for our species. They represent the logical conclusion of a “Personal Revolution” over the last twenty-five years in which everything has degenerated into the immediate, the intimate, and, above all, the self-obsessed.

Hello this is us
, Instagram is saying about our species. And I, for one, don’t like what I’m seeing.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. The Internet, we were promised—by entrepreneurs like Kevin Systrom and relentlessly cheerful futurists like Steven Johnson
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—was going to “capture the world’s moments” and create a global village, thereby making us all more open-minded, progressive, and intelligent. One particularly nostalgic futurist, the
Economist
’s erudite digital editor Tom Standage, even believes that the Web is making us more like our civic-minded ancestors from Roman antiquity. In his provocative 2013 book,
Writing on the Wall
,
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Standage argues that “history is retweeting itself” and that social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are transforming us into inheritors of what he calls “Cicero’s web.”
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But what is even faintly Ciceronian about Instagram’s “unadulterated voyeurism,” which, the
Times
’ Alex Williams notes, encourages us to “create art-directed magazine layouts of their lives, as if everyone is suddenly Diana Vreeland”?
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And what, I wonder, would Cicero, that stoical republican, think about the Rich Kids of Instagram, with their snaps of a teenager’s “this is how the pimps roll” Ferrari and “reptile” shoe collection, or the photo of a wealthy young woman’s head lost in an ocean of her Chanel and Hermès bags?
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