It’s frightening how quickly Instagram conditions you to associate your personal worth with its metrics, and how it makes you feel ashamed for questioning this.
This is a machine that is not neutral. If I don’t use it for work and establish boundaries with it, it is very harmful to my health.
It is a machine in the same sense that you feel inadequate when running alongside a car. It makes you feel ashamed of the image you have of yourself as a soft, watery, organic being.
The personality one creates on the internet so quickly becomes a mask and a representation of a person. It can become part of the art itself, something I don’t want and something I do not consent to.
It doesn’t matter if I believe I have control, that I’m doing well, or that I’m being authentic. The machine turns my authenticity into a performance of authenticity without my even being aware of it. It is very insidious.
We need to think critically about how social media contributes to global capitalization when an American company is dictating the customs, norms, and social values of local Latin American communities. The metrics of likes and followers are not neutral. They are decisions about who and what has social value.
When you see two similar works of art and one has thousands of likes while the other has very few, that becomes part of the art and its value. When there are two political issues and one has more activity, that shapes society.
Now it’s quite obvious. Most people on the internet, if they have profiles and use metrics to evaluate their own personal worth, will also unconsciously evaluate posts according to their metrics rather than their content. And this enormously reduces diversity and curiosity about new perspectives. It is a form of mental laziness that tends toward conformity.
It is seductive because metrics give the illusion of having control over something that is inherently uncontrollable: other people’s opinions of me. Those opinions are based more on how other people see themselves than on a true reflection of who I am.
The seduction of control conceals the real product being consumed, which is my attention, consumed by the platform.
The definition of trauma is that it makes the pursuit of connection feel meaningless. And so many times I feel like I forget the meaning of why I’m making art. I’m doing it to connect. And to express something I can’t put into words so that someone else who cannot find those words knows that we have the same feeling.
And instead, I start to feel guilty that if I stop caring about what the machine wants, then I’m not a real artist because I don’t have ambition. So somehow the Instagram metrics are deciding the validity of the art I make.
But what if I make a performance art piece where the performance is that I have zero followers? Would that be allowed to exist neutrally?
How do you make art about the injustices of the tech platforms that we are using? How do resistance movements use social media to mobilize and connect and spread education and information and news when the platform is not free because nothing is free? It is consuming us while we’re using it. So how does that play a role in resistance movements?
In Oaxaca, during the 2006 demonstrations, one of the most contested factors was the radio that disparate resistance groups used to unite and coordinate themselves against the state and the police. And so the police were constantly trying to attack the radio towers.
But what is our radio tower? Is Instagram an adequate radio tower, or is it something that can easily be attacked by the groups of opposition, by the forces of oppression that we are trying to resist?
Leave a Reply