Perpetual Present
What if Instagram turned off to never return?
The acceleration of information replaces meaning more quickly that it can be digested. A dark world of continual feeds, endless scroll and rapid, shifting, lights and colors hypnotizing, lulling us, into a psy-op. What if Instagram went away at 8:03 pm on February 15th 2023 ?
Following a lack luster art show consisting of vinyl stretched over already blurry images we were discussing a consistent and always fun existential crisis of the virtual. Then the question is posed, what if Instagram turned off to never return. Maybe it was the medicinal grade spliff in my hands, but that question caught me quite off guard. I never questioned it because Instagram is to big to fail. Technology is most powerful as it assimilates without us noticing “…distilled into the social contexts that produce them.” (Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, preface) Insert some redundant analysis we all know about why people like seeing themselves and getting followers.
The preface to this is that there would be ‘real’ economic ramifications. $META would drop, advertainment companies would falter on contracts, billions of dollars in data would vanish, and the Chinese sweat shop workers in Shien factories would probably cheer. All of this before realizing this system needs to continue. Economic rationality forces this to grow, yes, but so does the socio-techno desire that the interweaving of these algorithms into our decision making has created. What is the alternative to this? Maybe not under the same name but the same assumed product it is reproduced instantaneously. The cheers would fade quickly, Shein factory run towns don’t physically exist in a world without Shein data farming, their single largest source of profit. This would indicate we have transcended the material desires to drive virtualization into one that is purely accelerated. The sonic animated cartoon theme song begins to play. Go to go fast.
The existential crisis felt by the hundreds of millions of users clocking in multiple hours a day would be immediate and intense, there would be a wide spread time crisis, why is my day moving so slow? A deafening lack of noise emitting from a screen, an instant shot through the hearts of Instagram models stranded at the Miami airport. How do I fix this a girl cries out, how does she fix this we all ask? Would people go touch grass? Would there be a consciousness shift? Would I finally develop the social skills to talk to a person in any semipublic space? Probably not. It is grimmer than that. Things are always grimmer than they seem, aren’t they?
The transition would be swift people would immediately switch to the other app, be it Twitter or Tik Tok or God willing, Rumble. In turn banishing Instagram to the shadow realm of lost apps and dead data mills. Alt accounts would become mains before the alt could have an official send off, no awkward attempts to transition to microcelebrity through face reveal and podcast features. Of course, they have to transform, more importantly they have to transform quickly. Desire ensures no packet loss in this transition, where the efficiency of the algorithm conditions the users (both consumers and creators) to rely on it. What embarrassing search terms do you use to find the wasian stay at home girlfriend who makes dropship videos in D.V.A. body suits. Can you really even look up the deep algorithm videos absent knowing the users name. If her name is not @yumibot (hope this isn’t a real person or I am deep unintentionally outing myself) on the adapted platform and you want to see her content you are dependent on the algorithm to figure that out and show it to you. The faster it does the more cohesion between the platforms; the faster Instagram is forgotten. The faster the adapted platform has become the perpetual present, what has always existed.
Immediate subsumption of data, information, in the name of server maintenance of a constant flow of informational distraction. The currently unused twitter video section would over flow, Elon Musk would cream his pants when ads re-shift to the platform. In his post nut ecstasy would reverse all his “pro user data protection” stance and immediately starting new bidding wars for data contracts sold to companies. In that transition the data is hacked, pirated and invested into a new emerging algorithm. The future is secured again, the data isn’t lost and there is new present being trained in some neural network farm outside of Shenzhen. Efficiency.
Because the present means of consumption are only ever refocused there would be no whiplash from the consumer, simply integrating a new UI into our finger’s muscles memory. The idea it always has been what we shifted to means there was no shift. Instagram was not left in the past, the ‘substance’ was simply repurposed into the present. The past is only engaged with in a hauntology, the nostalgia trip of a trending thread remembering Instagram, resurgent trends not as referent, but as a memetic original.
The world would move on. The void was filled, it had always been using Twitter. Why would it have been something else?