The Death of Artistic Influence: Algorithmic Power on Instagram
Hi!
It’s been a few months since we spoke. I’ve decided to not post consistently anymore, so that I can take time to reflect between creations. This gives me the bandwidth to make more meaningful, insightful things. Based on the idea that deeper insight is more engaging, I developed a hypothesis this year: “Posting less can lead to virality more predictably than posting more”. It totally worked. Lil Nas X recently reposted my Reel, so you could say I don’t need to achieve anything in my life ever again. B)
Now, we’re back with another blog, because I have so many thoughts. I’ve attempted to say what I need to say as simply as possible, so we can all enjoy my dark and looming existential anxieties. TL;DR: I think that in 2024, Instagram is eroding culture, power, and humanity more impressively than ever before. This has a lot to do with the explore page, which has a lot to do with technocapitalism.
I had argued in a 2021 blog post that Instagram uses the language of human welfare — democratization, agency, transparency — to justify predatory algorithmic practices:
“Instagram elicits trust by revealing intangible rules and helping users achieve much-coveted algorithmic appeal. […] [But its] strategic, business-oriented foray into algorithmic transparency — hinged on the temptation of algorithmic appeal — does little to meaningfully alleviate the disciplining effects of its algorithmic power.”
This year, Instagram has done the same thing but tenfold, by making Mosseri an influencer. Since I keep seeing this on my feed, and since ethical debates around technological innovation are intensifying, I have been thinking more about profit-driven disregard for humanity.
There’s a lot to talk about, but before we start, here is a quick refresher on some basic ideas.
Instagram exists to make money. So, all of the elements that make it up — algorithms, interfaces, policies — are designed to serve this purpose. As the platform becomes better and better at figuring out how to make money, these elements also evolve and adapt. Every time this happens, the sociotechnical architecture of Instagram — and hence our very experience of it — changes.
Instagram figured out a long time ago that the more time we spend scrolling, the more money it will make. This is because when we scroll, we see more ads and generate more data about who we are and how we behave. So it optimized for ‘time spent scrolling’ by building the explore page and pivoting to short-form video content.
Now that the refresher is over, we can begin.
In the mid 2020s, virality became — for the first time — common and accessible. This happened because economic and psychosocial barriers to posting Reels have generally lowered across the world, and because a bunch of incredibly fine-tuned content ranking algorithms now show people almost exactly what they are likely to enjoy and engage with. This has made the explore page a key mediator of online visibility. As a result, a lot more people are posting great content, and a lot more people are able to see it.
Instagram calls this ‘democratizing’ visibility. But I don’t think it’s that simple.
Instagram’s premise was, once upon a time, connecting us to each other. This sustained a culture where you and I shared, and hence influenced, tastes, thoughts, and decisions. But then Instagram realized that it can make more money by entertaining us instead, so the explore page pivot happened. Now, user interactions — scrolling, liking, saving, sharing — happen rapidly, in millions of momentary, isolated instances. It’s as if you were flipping through TV channels where the actors on screen and the viewers at home, in other words the creators and consumers, are largely strangers. The transactional nature of this agreement — you sell me dopamine, I’ll pay you the currency of engagement, I don’t care who you are — turns Instagram into a different kind of marketplace than it was before. In the new marketplace, we treat our fellow humans and their creative output even more like products, which makes us emotionally disconnected from each other. This is an erosion of what makes us human, and hence of humanity.
But we already know this. We know that it is bad. So taking my critique into a more cybernetic realm, I believe that Instagram’s new sociotechnical architecture is also bad because it fails to respect a simple rule: Nature tends towards equilibrium.
What does this mean? The universe strives for balance. Predator and prey harmonise ecosystems, heat flows from warmer objects to cooler ones, water eventually falls back as precipitation. ‘Too much of anything is bad’ isn’t just motherly advice — it is a widely observed and well-justified scientific phenomena, enough so that the world attempts to correct any too-muchness within itself. Lest we forget that we are also part of nature, the human brain and body similarly strive for balance.
Instagram destroys the desired, innate equilibrium within you and me. When scrolling, we experience an overabundance of gratification without reflection, stimulation without processing, and ultimately, consumption without depthful engagement. In other words, nature tends towards equilibrium, but Instagram tends towards infinity. Since this state is artificially generated — i.e., unnatural — nature demands a correction. And our poor, overstimulated brains pay the price. Unable to bear the dopamine flooding caused by the extreme experience of the explore page, they dissociate and detach to survive.
This puts us in a state of human passivity.
Gen-Z loves passivity because it sedates us. And why wouldn’t we want to be sedated? You and I, we feel the burden of existential collapse all around us. It is in the rent we cannot pay, the wars we cannot stop, and the bigots we cannot understand. Desperate for an escape, we turn to the explore page. There, we find brain rot. Simply calling the rot ‘funny’ would take away from its complexity — it is an absurd, obscure, and ironic form of media. I think it is this way because even in escape we are collectively, subconsciously aware of our circumstances. Just as we are finding comfort in the rot, the explore page exposes us to news and events that bring collapse back into our awareness. This back and forth — of making the subconscious conscious — is unbearably captivating. It keeps us looped into an endless cycle of relief-agony-relief. And the diminishing returns of the scroll turn passivity addictive.
This hurts both creators and consumers in a bigger way than we think.
Remember how I mentioned that Instagram’s older premise of connection allowed humans to influence each other? I think that is changing. Today, Instagram’s design disincentives consumers from tapping the follow button, because even if we follow nobody, we will still be endlessly — infinitely — entertained through the explore page. So creators make great reels, and those Reels achieve momentary visibility, but since we don’t follow them, they struggle to consolidate that critical mass of repeat consumers called a sphere of influence. You may buy into an idea like waking up at 5am if you see lots of creators posting it in several one-off instances, but individually, no one really has the power of sustained influence anymore. In this way, Instagram is disallowing humans to become centers of power. This is to say that individuals can’t really consolidate power anymore. In some ways this is good, in some it is bad. I think the bad outweighs the good. Meanwhile Instagram itself, and the algorithms that carry out its work, are the new power center. In all ways, this is bad.
Even if creators regained power, our state of passivity means that we are too sedated to be influenced. We may truly enjoy a Reel, but in a headspace of mechanical hypnosis, no conscious attention and hence no meaningful engagement can occur. We cannot remember the creator’s name, or what we were watching just one Reel ago, or what opinion we are supposed to have without the crutch of the comments section.
Of course, there are exceptions. Some highly skilled, high-output artists and thinkers are able to challenge this norm and break through to us, sustainably gaining followers and influence. They do this by eliciting virality again, and again, and again by constantly innovating to stand at the competitive edge of talent and magnetism. In this hyper-capitalist state, ‘survival of the fittest’ is determined by market demand. This is not only exploitative of creators’ labor — since Instagram doesn’t pay them fairly — it leads to sameness surrounding what art and ideas become visible on the explore page. And sameness is, of course, the death of art and ideas.
Now you may say, ‘That’s not true — I see novel, interesting, bizarre art on my explore page all the time.’ Yes, anything that elicits a strong emotional response is engaging, and hence novel things are allowed to become visibilized. But even these things must pass through the filter of: “what can elicit a very specific set of emotions that are likely to lead to the user interactions of like, save, and share?”. That is to say, novelty is constrained to emotions that serve engagement metrics. So Instagram now controls what novelty we are allowed to experience. This is, fundamentally, profit-making at the expense of humanity. There are various emotions, which humans ought to feel, that don’t make it through this filter. And there is art that makes us feel those emotions. The more time we spend online, jaded in passivity, the less we experience those unpermitted emotions. And hence, the less we experience our own humanity.
This, to me, means that Instagram is slowly leading to the death of artistic influence. Artistic influence requires powerful individuals to make novel things that connect with people, who then respond with critical engagement and free-range human emotion. Instagram mediates — and hence controls— the visibility of the art and artist, as well as the emotional response of the consumer. It does this in a messed up way that hurts everyone because Instagram doesn’t care about art, Instagram cares about money.
Soooo… scrolling — the thing you and I definitely do for more hours than we publicly report — harms our ability to participate in the creation of culture. When we are sedated and removed from such activities that make us human, that is an erosion of humanity. It is an erosion of art. This is my humble opinion. The good thing is that Instagram is only one corner of the internet. A very large and imposing corner, but still, only one. We can still step out of our houses, touch grass, explore other apps, or hell, just post the weird things we really want to post and loudly support the people and things that algorithms and moneymakers don’t like.
Sounds good?
As an endnote, is it really all that bad to lose human influencers? Do we really need another James Charles? Well, in the old days, Instagram influencers had become oversized mediators of money and power in society because of their ability to generate revenue and shape public opinion. Entire economies were built on this premise. This model was never devoid of fault. But it did one thing that we took for granted: it placed humans at the center of power. So yes, I do think it is worrying that today, we can have virality but not influence, and we can be creators but not influencers. Because all of that influence — that power — isn’t disappearing, it is simply shifting to the hands of a multi-billion dollar corporation. This is a natural outcome of the unnatural system we call technocapitalism.
