The woman next to me on the flight back from Dublin was, if not drunk, certainly in high spirits. She was sitting in the middle, with me by the aisle. And, as her friend walked by, she reached across me to pinch her bum.
I was too tired to protest my innocence, but the friend knew who to blame. “Have fun sitting next to this one,” she said. Thankfully, this had a chastening effect on my neighbour, who then did what everyone does when there is a spare moment and picked up her phone.
As the remaining passengers boarded, she scrutinised her photos from the weekend and decided which to add to her Instagram Stories. She would zoom in on her selfies, making sure that she and her friends were presented in the best light. All six were platinum blondes, but her hair was the blondest, her fake tan was the darkest, her lips the plumpest, and her fake eyelashes were the longest. While the crew prepared for take-off, she’d posted four photos and within thirty seconds had received half a dozen likes.
As the plane taxied, she obsessively checked the list of which followers had seen the Story and not tapped the heart. She ignored the request to put the phone into flight mode, only closing the app as the plane rose into the clouds and we lost the 5G signal.
What fascinated me about all this was that it felt like watching myself. I, too, have been a compulsive checker. The phone is such an intimate device that it is usually not possible to see other people’s behaviour close up. But here it was: a mix of vanity, insecurity and social positioning.
Two weeks ago, Meta—the company behind Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp—agreed to pay $18bn for failing to protect teenage mental health. As well as the settlement, the plaintiffs want Meta to make sweeping changes to the app to make it less addictive, such as:
turning off infinite scroll and autoplaying video;
removing ephemeral posts like Instagram Stories;
banning displays of likes;
limiting use to two hours a day;
prohibiting face-altering image filters;
defaulting to the non-algorithmic feed; and
disabling the app at night.
It remains to be seen if this will make a difference or if we can find new and improved ways to depress ourselves on Instagram. But, as someone who is also mildly addicted to the app, I hope the changes apply to everyone, not just teenagers.
Of course, there are many who are not led astray by Instagram. “It’s just a tool,” my wife tells me. “It depends how you use it.” They open the app for a few minutes, see wholesome content, catch up with friends and then do something productive. But tools have affordances which encourage certain behaviour.
And she is right. Just because a hammer can be used to murder someone doesn’t mean we should give up using it for nailing bits of wood. The difference is that these apps are designed to activate parts of the brain that are harder to consciously control.
In The Gossip Trap, Erik Hoel suggested that social media is a threat to civilisation because: “All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, to being popular, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering.”
I’d go further and say that, if you want to understand Instagram, you’d be better off going to a zoo or watching a nature documentary—anywhere you can see chimpanzees interact. These primates spend much of the day grooming each other by picking parasites out of each other’s fur, an activity we have replaced with clicking “like” on each other’s posts. The amount of grooming received depends largely on status within the social hierarchy. Sound familiar?
Instagram allows for a radical expansion of Dunbar’s number. According to Robin Dunbar, human beings are cognitively capable of maintaining social relations with around 150 individuals. Beyond that, the community fractures or relationships are too shallow. Thanks to Instagram, I can keep tabs on ten times Dunbar’s number. Certainly, I feel like I know some of my Instagram-addicted acquaintances a lot more than real friends whom I see a couple of times a year.
As well as getting a vague sense of their place in the social hierarchy, people learn to shape their posts around algorithmic expectations. Users come to learn what kind of content “does the numbers.” Selfies and drama do well, while arty ambiguity does badly. Each Story, whether posted or viewed, is like pulling the lever on a slot machine.
The genius of Stories is that they last twenty-four hours. This means that when you wake up in the morning, there are several hours in which a reaction may have occurred. One quick check, you tell yourself, to see how this small fragment of the self has been judged. Before you know it, you are on the Explore page seeing jiggling women, near-death jumpers, anger-inducing political news, football gossip, and other clickbait. Lives are lost in endless streams of content that render us incapable of focusing on anything important. It is a disaster.
As James Marriott writes in his essay, The dawn of the post-literate society:
The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens.
Young people I know call it “rotting”, short for bedrotting, which is the perverse pleasure of wasting your life in a world whose demands never end. It sometimes seems that social media holds up a mirror to your deepest desires ... and what people most desire is distraction. Indeed, recent research suggests that watching a stream of short-form videos shuts down part of the brain.
Being on Instagram is the cost of doing business in the modern world. It is like paying taxes. Instagram is where the people are, which means that’s where you need to be to reach them. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
But it’s not altogether clear that it is worth the effort. I have amassed a few thousand followers on Instagram. Yet whenever I post a link, the algorithm rarely shows it to more than a couple of hundred of them, even fewer of whom want to disrupt their state of flow by reading a Substack.
This is the problem with “it’s just a tool.” It is a tool with algorithmic demands. Just as the design of the hammer is best suited to a nail, the nail of Instagram is increasingly the short-form video. If you are not making them, you are not really in the game. My pals at The Glasgow Bell tell me such videos are effective, but I wince every time I see them. If that is the future, then I am out.
And so, this month I challenged myself to stop using Instagram. No posts, no Stories. Although thanks to the consolidated messaging app Beeper, I can still send and receive messages. I’ve had a couple of relapses, but for the most part, I feel infinitely less scattered.
It's the first time I see the analogy with the primates picking parasites, and perhaps this is the best of all I've read. I gave up on Instagram a couple of years ago, in that I still have an account, but I am not spending more than 5 minutes a week on the app. The sense of freedom has been overwhelming ever since.