Look at Me

Instagram Nation hurtles toward selfie-annihilation

Here’s what not to do when you wake up in the middle of the night and it seems you’ve had a full night sleep but really haven’t: scroll through random Instagram accounts.

It is the deepest of rat holes, and, I promise, you will never find the rat. You will find people doing incredibly stupid things, most often successfully (the unsuccessful ones don’t get filmed, or if they do, the phones on which the stupidity was recorded ends up in a plastic bag on the bedside table of a hospital room.)

The rat hole starts off innocuously enough—for me, a single swipe down from whatever site I happen to be on.

The first scroll or two are usually somewhat interesting: ridiculous but beautiful skiing clips in powdery mountains, big wave surfing in places I would love to be. Then it devolves into mountain bike tricks in the desert, then crashes of mountain bike tricks in the desert, then all sorts of crashes on bikes, skis, 18-wheeler trucks rolling over, and more. And suddenly I’m watching monster trucks crossing raging rivers and sloppy white guys catching giant fish or sharks in dinky little boats. Clearly there is some sort of AI bot at work, but one that clearly doesn’t work. It is not long before it seems I am swimming in the bowels of the internet, and I come to my senses and shut it off.

But this is not my only bone to pick with Instagram and other social media platforms that, by the way, all seem to suffer from digital inbreeding.

Instagram started off as a perfectly reasonable sharing platform: people sharing communal triumphs, natural wonders, other people’s birthdays. Its evolution—fueled by advertising dollars rather than familiar Darwinian factors—has transformed Instagram into a vehicle for telling everyone how cool you are, how very cool your life is. Common story lines—condensed into short videos—go something like this: Watch me ski this skinny little couloir of death then cook a lovely tofu stir fry in my Sprinter van parked at the trailhead. For the most part, postings on Instagram, Facebook, and other such sites are so carefully curated as to qualify as “fake news,” one of the great absurd colloquialisms of our time.

Indeed, it seems everyone wants to be an “influencer.” And why not? Shouldn’t we all get paid for doing virtually nothing but living a very bitchin’ life? I suppose the question becomes: If we all become cool influencers, who is left to be influenced?

I had never really thought much about Instagram or Facebook until some years ago when I stumbled across a photograph in an old album. It is a grainy photo of my uncle and three other soldiers in a Jeep trying to cross a river in North Africa during World War II.  My uncle is in the back, an amused look on his face expressing the absurdity of the situation: Nazis everywhere and here we are trying to start a Jeep hubcap-deep in a river.

What is ironic about the photo and the situation is that I hadn’t even known my uncle fought in World War II. Though I was very close to him, he had never told a war story, never once referenced it, never bragged, never even showed me this photo. And it wasn’t that he had some awful experience he didn’t want to talk about. It was, rather, the way of his generation. It was all about the good fight, the communal fight, sacrifice for others. There was no “me” in that generation. They just did the good and right thing and didn’t brag about it.

Sadly, today is not then.

Enter the quintessential Instagram candidate for president: Donald Trump. He is many things, but mostly he is Donald Trump. Trump and his followers—of whom there are many and many who support him with the verve of acolytes—represent the new “politics of me.”

It is easy to ascribe the blame for the politics of me to Donald Trump, but the fact is the politics of me has manifested itself in other more concerning ways: waves of extreme nationalist fervor sweeping across the U.S. and in various pockets of Western Europe. This is not the run-of-the-mill civic pride, nor American exceptionalism informed by our principles of equality, individual rights, and the promise of democratic change as determined by the people.

As Kim Hew, the former executive vice president at The Heritage Foundation, wrote in a 2019 article “The Problem with Nationalism”:

“Modern nationalism began in France, in the French Revolution … The terror and Napoleonic imperialism were the highest expression of this new-born French nationalism ... 

“After that (the French Revolution), nationalism raged across the 19th and 20th centuries … Nationalism was, in this sense, particularistic. It was populistic. It was exclusive. It was zero-sum. It celebrated differences, not the common humanity of Christianity as it had been known in the Holy Roman Empire or the Catholic Church or even in the Enlightenment …

“Nationalism is devoid of a common idea or principle of government except that a people or a nation-state can be almost anything. It can be fascist, it can be authoritarian, it can be totalitarian, or it can be democratic … Nationalism celebrates cultural and even ethnic differences of a people, regardless of the form of government.”

The politics of me is politics based on a distorted Darwinian view of the social contract. It is all about the conquering, the annihilation of the competition. I win, you lose.  I’ve harped on this before, but I think evolution—which, in my view, is likely the natural order of things—gets misappropriated by the politics of me. It is worth remembering that evolution drives us toward survival of the species, not the individual.

And, in fact, evolution does not negate cooperative behavior. Elephants, wolves, ants, and even humans, among many other species, have found cooperative behavior to be a critical skill of survival.

The politics of me stands in stark contrast to the “politics of us,” in which politicians actually act beyond their personal interests and in service of the most good for the most people.

When I look back at that photo of my uncle Leo, it seems the wisdom buried in that grainy photo comes down to humility—humility before others, humility before ourselves, humility before the natural world, and humility before the implacability of time.

Fierce independence has always been a cornerstone of America. I’ll be the first to say: I can do it myself, prefer to do it myself. I only know this because I hear echoes of myself in my children. “Don’t help me, Dad, I can do it,” is the refrain. It’s like hearing yourself think. In school, I always dreaded those awful “group projects.” They just seemed rife with drama and inefficiency.

However, there have been and will be many more times when going it alone is not an option. Everyone, everywhere, at some point needs someone else. We like to live independently, but the time will come when we must surrender to the realities of physics. Perhaps we all aspire to be the smartest, strongest, most competent person in the room. And that is a noble and worthy aspiration. But even if you achieve that for one shining moment, it won’t always be the case. And then me is not enough.