What the hell is water? How Instagram hurts art

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happened to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says, “Morning boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

—David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College 2005 Commencement Address

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / For the past eight years, I’ve been merrily swimming along in the waters of Instagram without once stopping to ask what it is. My first post was on December 10, 2016 – five weeks and four days after Trump won his first presidential election, when, like many people, I was devastated. I thought Instagram might bring me out of my post-election torpor. Rapidly scrolling through my feed, posting images (especially of art), seeing what my artist friends were posting, and discovering new art and artists initially felt uplifting. Over time, it settled into harmless, if addictive, entertainment, not much different from the “Walter Presents” murder mysteries I love. After Trump’s second victory, however, Instagram’s farrago of images turned into a source of agitation and anxiety, aggravating instead of alleviating my sense of dread. I felt as if I were Mickey Mouse in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” – the scene in Disney’s Fantasia (1940) where, after accidentally unleashing an army of marching, endlessly multiplying brooms, each carrying buckets of sloshing water, Mickey almost drowns. A few weeks ago, I decided I needed a break.

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Owned by Meta, Instagram is designed to make user reactions fast and easy – and also to make us happy. It advertises itself as “bringing you closer to the people and things you love,” and as “a place where people can be inspired every day.” It also aims to “foster a safe and inclusive community where people can express themselves, feel closer to anyone they care about and turn a passion into a living. ”Artists, valuing images over words, prefer Instagram to other platforms. Though we number only five million – just one quarter of one percent of its two billion users – Instagram still beckons us by casting itself as a place where we can “showcase” our work and “make connections.” 

Whether those connections benefit us as artists is open to debate. Instagram’s scrolling is designed to instill in users a desire to scroll even more. It’s as if Meta had channeled Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which human beings are so transfixed by watching the shadows flickering on the wall in front of them that they fail to turn around to look for their cause. Also by design, the people we follow on Instagram get to see only two to three percent of our posts, and – even sadder – each of our posts lasts only about a day before disappearing into the Great Internet Garbage Patch. Blog posts can last years, books centuries.

Until recently, I’d assumed Instagram’s algorithms were generated by the people we follow on the site. It turns out that AI, continually scraping the site for information on what we’re doing, generates 40 percent of them. These algorithms determine not only what appears on our feeds but also in what order. The number of people we follow, the ads on which we stop and click “Shop Now” (someone please kill me for ever having ever opened a lip gloss ad), how long we pause and linger over an image, what we “like,” the people we tag, how much we comment on other posts, to whom we send direct messages, who looks at our profiles, and more. This information populates the databases Instagram sells to advertisers, who then proceed to feed back to us the stuff we already like.

A lot of Instagram’s users, artists included, already know this but don’t care. They say we’re continuously spied on anyway, so it hardly matters that Instagram does it, too. Or that ads are already so intertwined with everything we do, it doesn’t matter if they pervade our Instagram feeds. Besides, they add, sometimes the ads offer great products. They’ll characterize the role of AI as benign. If it delivers images we like, that’s all that matters. In the end, they say, we pay a fair price for what we get. Alas, user indifference to privacy is the oligarchical Meta’s gain. Instagram’s ad revenue for 2023 is estimated to have been between $49.8 and $60.3 billion. The platform is only projected to grow. 

In his prescient book Democracy in America (1837), the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville famously warned that American democracy risked turning into a “tyranny of the majority.” By this he meant that the collective compulsion to conform would be as effective at suppressing freedom as kings and aristocrats. The coercion would be psychological rather than physical, deriving its power from the natural desire of human beings to belong to a group and their concomitant fear of not belonging, or worse, being ostracized. Members of the majority tend to feel that by virtue of belonging to the largest group they are in the right, and that the minority must therefore be in the wrong. The tyranny of the majority might even be more powerful than that of kings, Tocqueville wrote, in that it “acts upon the will as much as upon the actions, and represses not only all contest, but all controversy.” 

Although Tocqueville was writing almost 200 years ago, his argument applies to Instagram. The constant streams of images on our feeds dilute the impact of any individual image, gradually making all images feel more or less equal. The content that distinguishes the one image from others – what makes them utterly unequal – depends not on their size (always the same) or quality (usually from our phones) but on the number of “likes” and other reactions such as “shares” and comments they accrue. But reactions are not products of serious, deliberate consideration; they usually mean little more than “Kilroy was here.” 

Because Instagram is designed for “sharing photos and videos,” dissent and controversy are almost impossible. “Don’t like” emojis aren’t available; the only quick alternative other than “like” is to keep on scrolling. Commenting is an option, but because the putative spirit of Instagram is one of democratic tolerance, comments too ordinarily consist of upbeat emojis. When actual words show up, they tend to be simple, affirmative, and breathless – “terrific,” “beautiful,” or “love love love.” Straying too far from the majority-prescribed visual or written vocabulary of praise puts a user at risk of being shunned.

Not that long ago I experienced this firsthand. A woman artist and friend and I each wrote a comment – decidedly rational, concise, and civil – pushing back against a long caption accompanying an image posted on Instagram by a well-known male artist with thousands of followers. Both of us have known this artist for several years and considered him a friend. Interjecting our comments into a thread full of emoji encomiums, we argued that his semi-nostalgic take on the San Francisco porno-chic of the 1970s and 1980s failed to take account of the many women for whom this was not a good time. This male artist responded to my first remark by asking if I’d “woken up on the wrong side of the bed” and accused the other woman of going into “sex panic mode,” wondering why she didn’t “scroll on by rather than spreading bad vibes.” When I posted a second reply, he wrote that I was being “stupid and hostile,” adding that it was his post and I should “go away.” The next day he blocked both the other woman and me from his account. So much for free speech on Instagram.

My six-year-old grandson recently told me that his first-grade teacher often admonishes the class to “notice and wonder.” It’s a brilliant little sentence for artists as well as children to live by, since noticing and wondering are prerequisites for experiencing art in real time and space as well as for working in the studio. Instagram actively prevents either of these things from happening. Instead, it upends our faith in Hippocrates’ famous aphorism art is long, life is short, effectively replacing it with art is short, life is short by implying that art is as transient as life in real time. Yet I know that down the road I’ll start up with Instagram again. Like all users, I love the immediate fun and escape it offers. Once back, however, I will remember to keep asking what the hell water is.

About the author: Laurie Fendrich is an abstract painter and arts writer who lives in Lakeville, CT. She is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles and is a frequent contributor to Two Coats of Paint.

Note: The engraved fish image at the top of this post is available at Etsy