Goodbye Instagram…

Here are some reflections I wrote in December 2025 when I was preparing to leave instagram- originally shared there and via my regular Sunday email. I was looking for a way to share them after a relevant conversation and decided to record them here, even if the timeline is stretchy. Re-reading them is thought provoking for me, and prompts me to write an updated reflection piece soon.

The relational dynamics baked into this platform invite me to be the most fragile, fragmented distortion of myself. They seduce me away from my hard earned maturation, and from my material reality. It’s as if I am a ghost in my own life. My life force is “here” instead, wherever “here” is, perpetuating the destructive dynamics further whilst pumping profits for billionaires who are stealing our liveable lives.

Being here feels like complicity in our shared demise as the culture of the platform- an acute expression of the neoliberalism norms that will be the death of us- infiltrates my thinking and feeling. I’ve noticed that I must pour so much energy into decontaminating myself of it, and I’ve wondered where that energy might be better spent. I feel an ongoing sense of revulsion here- not at the images of genocide or climate collapse (here I feel deep love and grief and truth)- but at our own reflection in the screen- the consumerism, the competition, the clutching at a world (and of a version of ourselves) that does not really exist. There is no part of me that feels at home here.

There is an existential fury that swirls in my chest reading the vapid, banal utterances that we collectively swoon over, obedient in the corruption of our critical cognition. It has never been more necessary for us to expand our psychological capacity for complexity and uncertainty- our shared survival depends upon it. It’s no accident that the inverse choices- oversimplification and the performance of authority- are rewarded here.

I notice that many of my clients believe themselves to be inadequate communicators because they can’t (won’t) reduce the richness of their thinking to cheap, algorithm-approved portions, suitably provocative and stripped of layers of meaning. “I wish I could be more coherent”, meaning concise, linear, punchy. We have let ‘them’ have coherence- as if our rambling, conversational, multi-tangential storytelling is not at the core of what it is to be human- as if nature is incoherent in her cycles, in her seasons, in the wildness of her ecology.

“The creature in me is screeching”, Nora Bateson writes, and my head nods. Our social relation is mediated by Meta’s machines, and so, therefore, are our relationships to ourselves. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967 babes), Guy Debord shares how our orientation has shifted from being to having to appearing, leaving us tethered to an abstraction of the world, and my gut twists. Octavia Butler writes, “all that you touch you change, all that you change, changes you” and my mind whirrs. How have we been changed by this technology? Is the Meta~verse a component of my cultural heritage now? (Again, where are we? Where is here?)

Meanwhile, redistributing resources into people’s hands in the halls of our community, partnering with friends to generate mutual aid for Palestine, scrolling strolling through the library, in meandering conversation with my clients and comrades… I know myself in relationship to this world- with all the horrors and joys it contains. There’s a settling, a re-integration, a reliable sense of the ecology I belong to. Time expands, and I feel I am participating in a meadow~verse of vitality. I feel human & whole.

Liveable futures are asking to express themselves through me. This is the invitation I want to accept.

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