I am off Instagram

In the wake of Israel bombing the shit out of Gaza and young people trying to attention boost the situation (which I am very on the fence about, by the way, because I’m not sure if this is in Israel’s playbook as they have very sophisticated intelligence and work with social media companies to craft the narrative around their genocide. Having a large, visible, dissenting voice may be part of their plan in terms of the videos that are allowed to be shared.) I have decided to get off Instagram fully.

Instagram is a war machine and a stupid ass little doo-dad that is incredibly effective in changing the way that you think. It attempts to re-wire your brain in order to sell you products and ideals about how to live your life. It promotes content that either does sell you products or appears to sell you products, whether directly or indirectly. Even if you and no one you know makes money on Instagram, your posts feed into their system that teaches them what kinds of things people are interested in. If an average post that you make gets an average of 3 seconds of attention, and then you make a post that gets an average of 7 seconds of attention, Instagram jots this down and feeds it into their attention matrix system thing. Millions of accounts and attention given/received allow them to create an effective attention grabbing system that allows them to create an amazingly effective advertising platform that robs people of their humanity and reduces everything in their system to an item of economic production.

As I spent more time on Instagram my worldview, and the things that I think are cool, like skateboarding fashion, etc. Become whittled down to an economic unit both in Instagram’s eyes and then my own.

I hate this way of thinking and I hate feeding into their system whether actively or passively, and as such I’ve decided to stop engaging. I’m clearing my cookies, I deleted my FB apps, and I’m trying to send as little data as possible to any social media website that uses analytics around attention to deliver content.