Before Nuclear Winter Was On My Mind
Before nuclear winter was on my mind I was thinking about the halcyon days of the internet. When social media was new, unformed, full of potential. When we were curious, open, unafraid. When we used social media for good, before it poisoned our brains and stole our days.
Instagram feels weird now. I miss 2012 Instagram, when I would open the app to be greeted by fun slice of life photos from friends and regular people. People who posted the most innocuous shit with the ugliest filters – not just influencers curating carousels of photos edited to look innocuous and ugly all in one performative dump. Now it’s performative dumping all over the place. We tolerate it because it’s how influencers make money, and we all understand influencing is a real job now, even a good one – and everyone needs a job, most people need two. But I’m sick of the brands. I’m sick of the idea that brands are people and people are brands.
2012 Instagram was new and creative and it seemed to do what social media first set out to do – give us a way to socialize and interact wherever we were. It gave us a chance to play with photography, to share the lens through which we see the world, to post unedited selfies with abandon, daily sunsets with the color saturation dialed up to 10, all sorts of stupid, innocuous shit.
But of course the other side of the capitalism coin is that the massively productive period of creative innovation gets sucked dry when people live to acquire more. We are told: optimize your feed, your friends, your time, your life. Do it well and you can sell it, sell yourself. On the other side of the capitalism coin selling out is a good thing. Everything gets stripped for parts and sold to the highest bidder so you can get that coin.
Did you know there’s a coin shortage? There’s been a coin shortage for a few years now. I don’t know if it started before the pandemic or during, because time has been truncated into nothing and everything. I needed to do laundry one day and I didn’t have quarters and I couldn’t get any. What kind of functioning country can’t provide its people with currency? That, for me, was the first real tangible sign the empire is crumbling. I knew it before this moment, but I felt it then.
Now the only people posting on Instagram are the brands and the influencers and maybe one of my friends at the end of a weekend. It’s 2022 and we all know what 2022 feels like. A never-ending pandemic, nuclear winter on the mind. Still we trudge on like it’s all normal, or like it’s always been abnormal; but what if we posted like it’s 2012 again? Like we don’t know what we’re doing and we don’t really care. Because if that’s not the right vibe for the end of the world, I don’t know what is. I want to see the selfies, the sunsets, the stupid, innocuous shit.