THERE IS NO INSTAGRAM
A self-indulgent, meandering excursion through misleading language and our desperate hunt for shared experiences
Drake put out an album or three recently. I haven’t listened to them and I likely never will. Drake is not, and has never been, for me. I was nearly 30 by the time Drake became a relevant artist. I aged out of the need for the same angsty songs about teenage melodrama repeated ad infinitum well before he realized he should grow a beard to hide his chinlessness (as a friend of mine told me years ago, ‘a weak chin has never conquered a nation’).
My slander aside, new Drake albums are a big deal in pop culture. Arguably, the last true ‘monocultural’ event — beyond live sporting events, which as Pablo Torre often notes, is the last remaining bastion of shared reality for many people around the world — was the Kendrick and Drake beef. Everyone knew about that. So it’s no surprise that this heap of albums are generating a hell of a lot of chatter. I’ve heard people talking about them at work, in line at the taqueria, and of course, random debates everywhere I look online.
I may be misreading the room, which is neither here nor there to my broader point, but the general consensus concerning these albums — including from people who are still big Drake fans (see: many of my younger co-workers) — is that they are … fine. Rock solid 6.2s out of 10. Totally good. Extremely okay. And yet the albums are occupying (at least for the moment) the cultural oxygen of a shared monocultural moment. Everybody is talking about how they’re very, very, pretty okay.
It’s bizarre that the most en masse discussion I have seen about a pop culture artifact in the last year is happening about something that no one seems particularly excited about. Even the haters (who I tend to support, up the haters) are feeling pretty underwhelmed, and yet they’re hating anyway. I have a theory about why everyone is talking about something they don’t seem particularly interested in that I will work my way back to.
First I need to talk about Titanic for a bit.
James Cameron’s Titanic landed in theaters right before Christmas in 1997. It was winter break of my senior year of high school. That shit was a hit. It was ubiquitous. Everywhere you went, every channel you turned on, every magazine you picked up — it was Titanic time.Iceberg season. It was the first film ever to gross a cool billion dollars at the box office, it went on to win 11 Oscars a few months later, it became the basis for a million memes, many of which still circulate as legible cultural artifacts to this day.
Being a profoundly oppositionally defiant teenager, I did not see Titanic. This was a point of pride, because I have always enjoyed being difficult. I inevitably made snarky jokes about ‘I know how it ends’ and then told people about how I was reading Dostoevsky instead (which was true — annoying, but true). In fact, I still have not seen Titanic. This has little bearing on this essay — though I do think there’s something worth exploring about how differently teenage rebellion functioned under monocultural conditions; I suspect it actually benefited the coherence of the social whole. I really just want to show you that I always have been and always will be exactly this insufferable.
Transport your brain back to January 1998 when our little Christmas break in the UP ends. Me and the other 21 people I graduated from public high school with sit around the snowmobile parking lot (a real thing) blasting cigs and everyone is talking about having seen Titanic.
This may seem like a profoundly banal point, but bear with me:
When people said, “I watched Titanic”, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind what was being referenced. Big boat. Class conflict. Star-crossed lovers. Paint me like your French girls. I’m the king of the world. Lifeboats. Iceberg. The Seinfeld finale happened that same year, we all also watched that. A few years prior, when we were all watching MTV, we were seeing the same videos, the same Beavis & Butthead episodes, even the same commercials. Whether it was Titanic or MTV or Seinfeld or The Weather Channel, language and reality were in some sort of co-incidence with each other. Shared reality was being made left and right.
Now consider what happens when you open Instagram.
You get your feed and I get mine. Mine is a hodgepodge of leftist politics, tattoos, sphynx cats, weightlifting, grappling, and frequent intrusions from manosphere content because I confuse the algorithmic sorting hat a bit. Your feed is a function of every account you follow, every post you’ve lingered on, every search you’ve made, every ad you’ve clicked, every demographic inference an algorithm has made about you based on your behavior across a dozen other platforms. My feed is a function of all of those same inputs, producing a completely different output. If we both open Instagram at the same time, we are not looking at the same thing. We are looking at two personalized, algorithmically-curated media feeds that happen to share a name and a logo.
And yet we talk about Instagram like we used to talk about MTV.
This may seem like nitpicking. But this isn’t just subtle linguistic slippage, it’s a full-blown category error that has ripples throughout our individual lives and not-so-shared realities.
It is happening because language is a slippery little shit that has us in a goddamn stranglehold with its annoying tendency to obscure as much as it clarifies.
If you think I have a tendency to say annoying, idiosyncratic things in a convoluted manner, avoid Martin Heidegger like the plague. I promise all of the following quotes ‘make sense’ if you do the push ups. Heidegger said:
“Language is the house of being. Humanity dwells in the shelter it provides.” (Letter on “Humanism”, btw, I’m now out here fussing over translations. That second sentence, “In ihrer Behausung wohnt der Mensch” is super slippery German)
“Humanity acts as though we were the shapers and masters of language, while in fact language remains the master of humanity.” (Building, Dwelling, Thinking)
“Language speaks.” (Die Sprache / Language)
What Heidegger is up to here is as basic as it is confounding. I’ll give you the dramatically simplified version for the sake of this discussion. Heidegger is noting that we tend to think of language as a tool that we possess, which we can use or abuse as we see fit. That’s true when taken at a certain register, but the role of language in our lives is far prior to just a throughput for information to go from one person to another. We are born into a language that is filled with meaning before we ever utter a word. And all the words available to us at any given moment are always already (see also: never not) pre-loaded with conceptual commitments, historical residue, and embedded assumptions that exert a shocking amount of control on what and how we think, talk, and even see the world.
Now, Heidegger being Heidegger, he decides the best way to demonstrate this is to break language in a deliberate way. He coins what have become famous grammatical monstrosities — verbal noun constructions that are designed to feel wrong, to snag on the reader’s brain and refuse to go down smoothly. The most famous: das Nichts nichtet — the nothing nothings. This appears in an essay titled What Is Metaphysics? where he’s trying to describe the felt experience of anxiety — that specific, sourceless dread that seems to come from nowhere and attach itself to everything. His point is that the grammar of “I am afraid of X” doesn’t work here, because there is no X. Anxiety has no object. So he reaches for a construction that performs the experience of encountering the void: the nothing nothings, the void voids, the abyss abysses. The monstrosity is a phenomenological tactic.
What he’s trying to shake loose, in all of these cases, is the stranglehold of standard subject-verb-object grammar — the structure that carves the world into actors, actions, and recipients (or patients), and in doing so subconsciously convinces us that we are always the detached subject, standing apart from the world, acting upon a field of passive objects. The grammatical monstrosity refuses that world picture. It insists that things are happening around us and through us in ways that the standard sentence and cognitive structure will not let us think or say.
The reason I bring this up is not to make you read Heidegger. If you want to, just know you’re in for a world of pain. It’s because a generation of people who have never heard of him independently arrived at the same grammatical move. The math isn’t mathing. The situation isn’t situating. There is something experientially correct about saying the math isn’t mathing when the math is wrong — a well-executed piece of mathematics has a quality, a rightness, that you recognize when it’s absent. The verbal noun captures something that “the math is incorrect” simply does not.
Which brings me to Homer Simpson.
There is an episode of The Simpsons where Homer and Otto get extremely high and Otto looks at his hands and says: “we call them fingers, but I never see them fing. That is a rich phenomenological description the world suddenly becoming foreign upon truly hearing a word you have been using your whole life. The word becomes strange, which makes the world strange, which makes the word stranger. And so on and so on.
Is this stoner shit? Yes. But occasionally, stoner shit is profound (it’s usually not, 99% of the time — just to be clear). When moments like this happen, you notice that language must have a history that you’ve never asked about. That history piles up on time scales that aren’t geological, but are long enough for us to completely lose sight of them. The burying and cementing of those histories is what Merleau-Ponty called sedimentation: the way meanings accrete in language over time, layer on layer, until the words we use ‘just mean things’ to us because the inertia of their built-in meaning overpowers our instinct to interrogate it. Sedimented language is language that has forgotten it has a history.
Consider some quick examples, just to calibrate the feeling. To be clear, most of these are completely harmless, often silly, and best employed for trivia or scoring well on a standardized vocabulary test. But occasionally something deep gets unlocked.
You still say you dial a number, though rotary dials have been gone for forty years. You cc people on emails — a reference to carbon paper that nobody under fifty has ever touched. You roll down the window in a car that has not had a crank since before your children were born. You hang up the phone by tapping a red circle on a piece of glass. These are harmless. The sedimented meaning is just ghostriding the whip of language.
Another more interesting phenomenon: we have a remarkable tendency in English to retain only the negative forms of words while losing the positive baseline entirely. You can be overwhelmed. You can be underwhelmed. I’m trying to be whelmed, goddamnit. You can be ruthless. You used to be able to have ruth, which meant compassion. You can be feckless, reckless, disheveled, disgruntled. You cannot be feckful or gruntled (though gruntled — meaning satisfied, content — was a perfectly good word for a long time that I think we should bring back). Why we kept the failure states and left the baselines behind likely says something important about how we don’t feel compelled to name or discuss baseline experience, as only disruption is noteworthy.
Side note: there’s a whole essay waiting for me here about a huge danger of LLMs that I haven’t seen anyone discussing. If you want LLMs to be intelligent like a human, we are off to a bad start by training them on the sum total of written language. Because outside of a handful of personal journal maintainers and auto-fiction authors, we almost never write about the banal, mundane, day-to-day experience of being human that actually defines 99% of our lives. We write only about exceptional people, exceptional moments, exceptional states. We hagiographize the world. An intelligence based exclusively on that will be a mirror that is alien.
Etymology (chasing down the origin of words) is a game I enjoy playing because I am a massive nerd. But I want to be careful about what I am and am not claiming here. The dumb version of this argument goes: if I find the original meaning of a word, that tells me what it really means. This is wrong. Words mean what they mean in collective, colloquial usage.
Etymology is always interesting to a nerd like me, but it only matters (it’s only disclosive, to use the phenomenological term) when the meaning found at the origin is somehow still present in how we deploy the word today, even if — especially if — we never consciously noticed it.
Conspire etymologically means to breathe together. Con plus spirare. That’s interesting, and I think it also tells us something about how we experience a conspiracy, or feeling conspired against. Imagine a conspiracy as people huddled together, keeping their voices low, sharing air and secret information, closing ranks against whoever is outside. The proximity, the exclusion, the hiddenness are all there in the root. I think understanding that can help us do a better job of describing our own relationship to everything ranging from globe-spanning conspiracy theories to feeling like your co-workers are talking shit about you in the breakroom.
Glamour is a corruption of grammar. In Medieval Latin ‘grammatica’ meant the study of Latin — but since literacy was basically wizardry to most people, grammatica started to colloquially mean ‘occult learning.’ In Scottish English it became ‘gramarye’, meaning magic, spells, arcane knowledge. Thanks to what linguists call ‘liquid dissimilation’ (when two similar liquid sounds, like the two r’s in ‘gramarye,’ are too hard to say in close succession, so one drifts into something easier) ‘gramarye’ became ‘glamour.’ This entered the world in Scottish English as a term for a magic spell cast over someone’s eyes, making them see things as more beautiful than they were. An enchantment that we still associate with vampires today in folkloric and pop culture contexts. It was imported into English at large via Robert Burns poetry. By the early 1800s, it had come to mean “bewitching, irresistible allure” while shedding the explicit magical framing. Then Hollywood got hold of it and by the 1930s-40s, glamour meant exactly what it means now — manufactured, camera-ready, aspirational beauty.
Okay, but why am I taking you on this trivia tour? Partially it’s because I think it’s interesting and you signed up to read my thoughts. That’s on you, dog. But more importantly I needed to set this up to get back to talking about Instagram.
Remember a few thousand words ago, when I was talking about how it’s more than just bizarre that we talk about Instagram the same way we used to talk about MTV or Titanic? We are going back there now. I promise that at least some of what I just wrote is relevant to the rest of this discussion.
Sedimentation normally takes decades. Words tend to accumulate meaning slowly, through use, over time, until the history becomes subterranean, buried under layers of culture and history. But the constellation of language that surrounds the idea that media companies are‘platforms’ is extremely new, and it was doing its ideological work from the jump. Instant sedimentation in the form of pre-loaded meanings, shipped with the product.
Followers. Not friends, not subscribers, not even an audience.
Going viral. The thing you made did not spread because you shared it or because people chose to pass it along. It went viral, which means you are passive — patient zero — the content is a pathogen, and the audience is a host population.
Feed. You are being fed. You are the animal at the trough. What are you being fed?
Content. Content implies a container metaphor — it names the stuff inside a thing, and implies that as ‘stuff,’ it is interchangeable. Liquid. Fungible. Content creator is the label given to someone we used to call an artist or a filmmaker or an essayist or a comedian or a musician when we thought the specificity of their creativity and creation mattered. Content creator flattens all of these people into ‘stuff makers’ to be distinguished only by volume and upload frequency.
Slop is a name being given to AI-generated content. But let’s be real, it’s redundant. Content already meant slop. We just hadn’t thought about it hard enough. When you go to the feed, what belongs in the trough? Slop. It was baked in from the start.
Okay, I’m almost getting around to making a point. Maybe.
We inherited a vocabulary for shared media from a world where shared media actually existed. That vocabulary made sense when the infrastructure was held in common — when the signal going into your television antenna was the same signal going into your neighbor’s.
What we call platforms now are not that. They are personalization engines that we unwittingly continue to refer to and talk about using the old language of broadcast media. And the word “Instagram” — used as if it names a single shared object the way “MTV” or “Titanic” does — is one of the primary mechanisms by which we obscure the reality of our personalized slop trough from ourselves.
There is no Instagram as such. There is only your Instagram and my Instagram and the Instagram of a teenager in São Paulo and the Instagram of a grandmother in Boise. These are four completely different worlds, none of which has ever encountered the others.
I now give this exercise to any curious folks with some time on their hands (I stole it from my friend Anari Fleming): build a fake Instagram account for a persona. Pick a demographic. Maybe pick a person who you find baffling and try to recreate their page. See who they follow and follow all the same accounts. Create your demographic bio to mirror theirs. Try to act as you think they would in terms of what they like, repost, and choose to ignore. Do it for two or three very different personas. What you will find is that the feeds are so different as to be almost unrecognizable as being the same ‘thing’ in any meaningful way beyond the UI.
The conservative influencer who keeps complaining that the algorithm serves him ads for gay porn is not describing the algorithm. He is describing himself, as refracted back through a mirror built specifically to reflect him. When he tells his audience that “Instagram is doing this,” he is making the category error in real time for all of our amusement — while also providing the best possible illustration of the very thing he doesn’t understand.
Curtis Yarvin is a blogger of outsized influence who used to write moronic edgelord screeds about how ‘capitalism good, democracy bad’ under the name Mencius Moldbug. He is one of the more reliably stupid people to have accumulated power in the last twenty years, largely, I suspect, because his brand of stupidity flatters other powerful idiots. He wrote an essay a while back with a title to the effect of “Red-Pilling Claude.” The argument, as best I could follow it, was: don’t worry about AI being captured by the woke mind virus, because look, I spent thirty minutes convincing Claude to endorse ‘human biodiversity’ (aka, ‘scientific racism’) and reject democracy. He included screenshots of his conversation in which he used world-class rhetorical powers to destroy woke Claude with logic and reason.
He was very pleased with himself.
What he actually did was get one specific conversational instance of an LLM — a session with its own context, its own operative conditions, its own momentum — to play along with a line of reasoning that flattered the direction he was already heading. The model, in that instance, did what models in conversation do: it continued the conversation. Yarvin, who does not understand the technology, interpreted this as having somehow reprogrammed Claude at the level of the base model.
There is no Claude as such, just as there is no Instagram as such. There is only your Claude, shaped by the context you bring to it, reflecting back a version of the conversation you initiated. He didn’t red-pill an AI. He talked to himself and liked what he heard.
Which brings us to the mirror.
Rodolphe Gasché wrote a book called The Tain of the Mirror — the best book on Derrida I have ever read. The title refers to the thin metallic substance applied to the back of a sheet of glass that makes an otherwise normal piece of glass into a mirror at all. Back in the day this was a tin and mercury foil blend; now it’s a silver blend. Most people have never thought about the tain. The whole point of it is that you cannot see it. If the mirror is working, the tain is invisible as you only see your reflection. If you can see the tain, the mirror is broken.
The taint of the mirror is an entirely different thing which I shall not be discussing at this time. The personalization infrastructure underlying every major platform is analogous to the tain. But unlike in an actual mirror, this tain functions to make a mirror look like a window onto a shared world. It makes a world built for you masquerade as the world we share with others. The infrastructure has to be invisible for the illusion to work. The way we talk about that infrastructure helps to ensure we don’t notice it. The moment you see the tain — the moment you realize that your feed is a portrait of you and not a window on the world — the mirror reveals itself.
The word “Instagram,” or “Netflix” or “YouTube” or “Claude” or “ChatGPT” used as if it names a shared object that we can all experience collectively in the same way, is one of the things keeping the tain invisible. It lets us keep talking as if we’re watching the same movie, when we have not watched the same movie in a very long time.
The monoculture is gone but the need for it isn’t. We are trying to fill that need with objects, platforms, feeds that are built to stymie it rather than satisfy it. Which brings me back to Drake.
The album is not the point. Maybe it’s great. Who knows. The hunger for having something, anything, that we can collectively discuss and react to is the point. We are so thoroughly saturated in our personalized information environments — each of us sealed inside a custom-built mirror, each one reflecting a slightly different person back at themselves — that the mere appearance of a shared cultural object produces relief and excitement in equal measure. Even a mediocre album can serve as a way for us to connect with one another and feel like we belong to something if everyone is talking about it. We will take the monoculture moment where we can find it, because we are starving for it.
Let me talk business for a minute.
Spotify Wrapped is the most strategically brilliant response to this problem going. Once a year, Spotify converts the deeply individuated, algorithmically personalized experience of using its platform into a mass participatory event. Your Wrapped is yours. Mine is mine. They are not the same and that is the point. But the act of sharing them — of participating in the ritual together — splits the difference between the truth of the divided realities and the hunger for a shared one. It catches both at once: honoring the reality of the algorithm while honoring the need for something common. Everyone is trying to replicate Wrapped. Nobody has figured out how, because I don’t think most marketers are smart enough to realize why it works.
“Touch grass” is usually offered as a wellness prescription or a nudge to quit being a fucking weirdo. Go outside. Put down your phone. Get some air. This is great advice. I amusually outside. It’s the main reason I live in Southern California, so I can just be outside all the time. I walk twenty-five thousand steps a day, I am obviously pro-touching-grass. I want to note why I think it’s so important and not just because I find bilateral movement to be a good engine for cognition.
When I am actually in the world physically present with another person, looking at the same building or the same concert stage or the same steeple at the top of a hill, I can be sure we are talking about the same thing. I cannot be sure that we perceive it the same way — we don’t, and that is exactly the point — but I can be sure that the object of our attention is genuinely shared. When my friend Mike, who is an architect, describes a building to me on a walk, he is describing the same building I am looking at. When I bring my old skateboarding brain to bear on the same structure and read it as sites for crooked grinds and pop shove-its, we are showing each other different ways to perceive the same thing. The world gets better. If my friend Chelsea, who is a photographer, comes along and explains why the light here would make an interesting photograph, she adds a third layer of disclosure to the same real thing.
For each of us, that creates entirely new ways of having the same world disclose itself. These are new possibilities that no personalized algorithm will ever generate, new affordances I can grab and engage with. As I said, they make the world both more shared and more filled with possibility than it was before. This can only really happen when you’re outside with people. I shall insist. And I do believe it’s something we deeply desire as humans.
This is maybe why reaction videos have proliferated so intensely: watching someone react to the new Kendrick album, and then watching someone react to that reaction, is an attempt to approximate this. And there is something real in it — it is at least an effort to let another person’s genuine response complicate your own. But it is mirrors reflecting mirrors. You are not in the room sharing these experiences. The algorithm decided to show you that video. The object is still not shared, and the disclosure is still on the platform’s terms.
The only guaranteed exit is still the oldest one. Go find someone. Stand next to them. Look at the same thing. Try to see what they see. Feel the world get richer.
Next time: what happens when you put the screen on your face. It gets weirder.
Love it. You're putting things together in a way my brain works to understand that seems so.. sensible, but yet I wouldn't have been able to articulate. Thank you for your service.