There is an old saying that an addict and a dealer never have an honest conversation. I thought about that a lot while reading Tavi Gevinson’s cover story in the September 16th New York magazine, What Instagram Did to Me: Confessions from Inside the Algorithm. I do no use Instagram and I am obviously not the demographic for Gevinson’s tale, but I do use social media, and I certainly understand how it can pervert your sense of self. The thing is, I don’t spend thousands of words in a prominent magazine complaining about it. I went from eye roll to revulsion to pity in the span of her tale, which follows Gevinson from precocious pre-teen catching lightning in a bottle with an online fashion blog to Instagram ~ influencer ~ complete with a paid-for apartment in Brooklyn and a coveted seat next to that icon of fashion herself, Anna Wintour.
Viewed in a more charitable light, Gevinson’s is a cautionary tale of what happens when the line is erased between the image you portray on social media and who you are in real life. The absence of personal space in the service of promoting your ~ brand ~ online may seem like a new concept, but the dirty little secret buried in Gevinson’s cri de couer is as old as advertising itself. Don Draper told us in the first episode of Mad Men that advertising is based on a simple concept - happiness. And how did Gevinson monetize herself? By becoming a walking billboard for the time-honored belief that more materialism, more consumerism, and the accumulation of more stuff, will make you happy. The reproduced Instagram photos that accompany her story say it all - designer labels hash tagged against curated backdrops to fill you with that toxic mix of envy and desire; that what will make you happy is that hand bag; that designer dress; admission behind the velvet rope. Gevinson was happy to avail herself of all of it in an industry defined by its vacuousness and veneer.
That Gevinson realized, to quote Fiona Apple, “it’s all bullshit,” is unsurprising, but there is something particularly tone deaf about celebrities complaining about the trappings of their lifestyle. You might excuse all of this carping as the product of naivete or youth but Gevinson is no babe in the woods. It is clear that she sought celebrity from a young age, beginning her first fashion blog at the age of 11. That morphed into an online magazine entitled Rookie, that garnered the attention of names like Ira Glass and Jane Pratt and landed Gevinson in TIME magazine and Forbes before she was 15. She has leveraged that into (apparently?) acting gigs, a book deal, and movie roles. And of course, New York magazine handed its front cover and plenty of journalistic real estate for her to vent her spleen about the tradeoffs celebrity forced her to make. I do not buy it. Gevinson wants all the benefits that attend celebrity without any of the downside. I would like to be able to eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch ice cream without gaining any weight, but few things in life can be done without tradeoffs being made.
Gevinson lost me long before the most telling part of her story. She shares a vignette from 2017, when, at a crossroads, she had an important decision to make. Her workload, combined with the pressure she felt from social media had her at a crossroads. Things were not working. Did she jettison her life in New York in her “spon con” apartment in Brooklyn? Give up rubbing shoulders with the celebrities she had met? Ditch Rookie or at least hand the editorial reins to someone else? No. She just outsourced her IG to a personal assistant and went along merrily with the stuff she wanted to keep - the book deal, the movie deal, the residual influence she wields on social media as proven by the invitation Instagram extends for her to visit their NYC office after Gevinson posts some snarky videos that garner attention. In other words, she put a human privacy filter between herself and the social media world that had handed her fame instead of ditching it all and starting from scratch.
But by receding from public view, she simply created a new problem for herself - no longer being “seen.” She laments a drop in her follower count (not to mention a demographic shift from teens to <gasp> middle-aged women!) but claims she does not care. She rhapsodizes about the power of not constantly being on, of not extending her brand, but what is a front cover story like this other than an effort to extend her brand? It’s maddening. And, in a final bit of irony, when she visits Instagram’s office, Gevinson learns that the algorithm knows her better than she knows herself. Having become a multi-billion dollar company based on people curating a fake reality, the social media site is pivoting to encourage authenticity via hashtags like “no makeup,” “no filter,” and “mental health.” Gevinson, either pleased or horrified, notes that her essay has checked all their boxes.
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