✨ Smattering 06: Instagram is Dead
Eclectic collections of fragments, quotes, and anecdotes from our on/offline lives.
💀Instagram is Dead
I’ve been hearing murmurs about Instagram getting ‘much worse’ during the COVID pandemic.
People say things like, ‘I really need it for my work’—which sounds ambivalent at best. Or share tips for how to discreetly post content without exposing themselves as less than compliant with social distancing. ‘Post it as #tbt!’
The surface-level problem for Instagram is no one knows how to post in a crisis. The consequences for fucking up are high. (Cancellation) While the upside for sticking the landing is low.
The dynamic creates content that’s flat. It all has a tin copy-paste tonality reminiscent of how a politician speaks. People complain that Instagram is no longer fun for the same reasons people complain ‘all politicians are the same.’
via. 8Ball Report
📣Here’s Something
I read Alan Rossi's blog today. He is forty and doesn't use social media and has never used it except Twitter for a month it seems. I recommend his novel Mountain Road, Late at Night.
– A recommendation by author Tao Lin on Leave Society
😢Sadness is now a design problem
‘The highs and lows of melancholy are coded into social media platforms. After all the clicking, browsing, swiping and liking, all we are left with is the flat and empty aftermath of time lost to the app.’
– We Are Not Sick
Listen their new album on Bandcamp, or click to play this song:
The lyrics are basically a list of truths:
Today’s sadness is a system, an assemblage of mind, body and techne.
Capitalist accumulation is driven by organized optimism.
Youth feel the anxiety, the stress and become sad by empty promises and diminishing opportunities. They are the experts at reading daily life through the sadness lens. This does not mean we should medicalize them.
Every situation, every object and service can and will be sad. This is why we trapped and do not see how collective action can lead to change.
Emotional rides are no longer experienced in solitude. The virtual others are always there as well.
Intuitively, many feel that their mental mess is produced by society. It is not a sickness in our heads. Capitalism is said to be able to deal with all these contradictions it produces. It is not.
Predictable continuity is not just elitist, it’s escapist. It walks away from the dirty present. Much in the same way romantics did in the industrial 19th century.
How do we comfort the disturbed? Not by taking their phones away.
What can we do that’s liberating and prevents moralism? This is not about natural or artificial worlds. It’s cutting straight through the post-modern lingo.
The social is very real, messy, ugly, sexy, boring—most of the time.
📽🤔What is the Creative Act?
It's very simple: philosophy is a discipline that is just as inventive, just as creative as any other discipline, and it consists in creating or inventing concepts, Concepts do not exist ready-made in a kind of heaven waiting for some philosopher to come grab them.
Concepts have to be produced.
Of course, you can't just make them like that. You don't say one day, "Hey, I am going to invent this concept," no more than a painter says "Hey, I'm going to make a painting like this" or a filmmaker, "Hey, I'm going to make this film!" There has to be a necessity, in philosophy and elsewhere; otherwise there is nothing.
A creator is not a preacher working for the fun of it.
A creator only does what he or she absolutely needs to do.
From Two Regimes of Madness, Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 by Gilles Deleuze