Digital Shit

Merdeing the Insta surface

I started an Insta account because other people were talking about it. I didn’t use it for a while.

Then I was waiting for someone and idly opened the Insta app on my iPhone. I took a photo of the arm of the chair I was sitting on and a bit of ground under it. I focused on the formal composition more than the subject. I had the iPhone camera set to ‘square.’ Then I posted it.

I carried on doing this and now there are over 3,000 squares:

https://www.instagram.com/esshanson/

I use Insta filters. It’s an Insta account, not a documentary or art project or archive, the subtitle is ‘the visual notebook goes on forever.’ It has an overall aesthetic, or code. If I think a picture breaks the code I don’t post it, but the edges of this aesthetic are porous and change over time.

I’ve had some odd reactions to it, because I pathologically stay within one format. I always post a square image, never with music, very rarely with text.

And it is entirely reactive, if I notice things when I’m out, I take a square and post it. So it has a visual diary dimension, things that catch my eye, but after my daughter was born, I posted shitty nappies.

One day, someone who followed the account seemed to think the nappies were a step too far and wrote ‘why did you post this?’ under a picture of a soiled nappy. That question stuck in my mind for a long time. It seemed to suggest that a soiled nappy is unusual or revolting enough to comment on within the context of Instagram. Which is fair enough, I suppose.

I post pictures of dog turds and dead animals too. With the dead things I’m interested in how our ‘civilisation’ produces this massive amount of non-human death, particularly in summer. I notice dogshit that idiots don’t clean up, and this huge wave of animal death, particularly in the city, so I post it. It has a rhetoric to it.

I also started posting the interface of the technology we use, a screen grab of the laptop trash bin, for instance. It isn’t actually a trash bin, but it looks like one, so we know what that function does. Again, I focus on the composition within the square when I do this, more than the subject. But this also has a rhetorical dimension.

Soiled nappies are part of my day-to-day reality. Like eating food. So I post it. I sometimes post bowls of Angel Delight, also an occasional reality for me. Within Insta discourse, the bowls of Angel Delight are totally normal.

But by posting things outside the usual discourse of Instagram, and by ‘usual’ I mean millions and millions of pictures of food, of people eating, of them having a good time, of them appearing to be fun, creative or successful – basically selling themselves in a marketplace - I am highlighting what ‘the usual’ is made of. Insta is full of the narcissism of faces faces faces. These are not faces in the Levinas sense.

People are trying to sell themselves through Insta via an image which is very constructed and highly selective. My Insta timeline is equally very constructed and highly selective, even though it is all taken casually on my day-to-day, but it often selects - and this is obvious to some of my followers without having to explain it - things that are just that tiny bit outside of the usual Insta frame.

Foucault once said something like ‘lightning at night doesn’t just show the flash and the point it hits, it illuminates the whole landscape anew, briefly.’ So, a sloppy dog turd or a soiled nappy hits like a tiny little spark, showing how the space it lands in is entirely made of what it is not.

Perhaps showing a crappy nappy, or a series of them - to make the point through repetition – illuminates what has become acceptable and unacceptable. But the crappy nappy is just as banal and everyday in my life as food and people’s faces on holiday: I’m not making any great claims about any of this; it is just a load of square pictures. Someone who was trying to hustle themselves might say ‘ah well I’m trying to show you a slightly realer city’ by posting shit and dead things. But I wouldn’t make so ludicrous a claim, that would be pretentious. It isn’t a great transgressive lightning strike either.

The person who asked that question, ‘why did you post this?’ also posts pictures. I could legitimately ask the same question of them: Why did you post those? 14 out of 18 of the first 18 pictures on their Insta have their face in them. That’s 77.7%. I could ask why a high percentage of their Insta centres around images of their face. There are no pictures of my face, although sometimes I’m in reflections.

Why not just post one picture of your face with a caption which says ‘this is what my face looks like’ then get on with posting different things? But I only ask that strange question at all to make the point that really, something else is going on: there’s a social function to Insta, although it’s probably far less social than we imagine.

Perhaps they are trying to attract a mate, or perhaps they do it just because that’s the kind of stuff other people post. I think this is a big reason lots of people post what they do, actually, at whatever level of conscious awareness: ‘this is how to do Insta.’ So they go to it.

What amuses me is how - considering the historical badness coming down the line at us all – some people just cannot handle a picture of a turd or a nappy or a dead bird and so unfollow. I can’t imagine being that person. They’re clearly not ready for what’s on the way. How can they exist being so closed? Someone who can’t see all the animal death, because they’re buried in a smartphone so much they’re not even looking where they’re going. Or worse, they get in a car and go from the home interior to the work interior and then the leisure interior (repeat). Living, essentially, an airlock life.

It’s funny that online content is being described as ‘digital goo’, something which is part of the ‘enshittification’ of, well, everything, at the same time as some people can’t look at a photograph of real faeces.

Insta is supposed to be an open media platform for creative use, but when you deviate very slightly from the usual solipsistic discourses some people’s brains fall out, their tongues loll and their eyeballs hang on stalks. The significatory bandwidth has not widened, as the rainbow rhetoric suggests, it has narrowed, but swollen to include more people.

Insta is a discourse and its code has changed over time. 3,000 squares are a discourse and the code within those has changed over time. Obviously, there were no nappies at the start, as I wasn’t a father, but there was more Angel Delight. Who cares? No-one should care is the answer. There are much bigger things coming. But people loved the Angel Delight pictures.

Nappies, someone’s dinner, a dead bird, your face, they are, from only a tiny bit more distance, all as arbitrary as each other.

It’s just a thing I do in tiny bits of spare time while thinking about the world and what this nonsense called social media is. And now I have written it out here. I do it when my wife has nipped to the toilet and now she sends me squares to post too, which I do. She’s got the aesthetic right down. It doesn’t even need me.

Ask yourself not do I need social media but does your social media practice need you?