Instagram is the dumbest imaginable proof of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy speculations about the significance that photographic literacy would possess in the future. But it is absolutely photography.  So what can we, as people who care about photographs, do with Instagram?

Not too long ago I attempted to write an essay about an Instagram account called @garfields_i_found_on_ebay, which, as the name suggests, aggregates photographs of toy Garfields from eBay listings. I was about 4,000 words deep into a strained attempt to weave the history of appropriation art with the superficiality and instant gratification of the Instagram interface when I realized what I wanted to say didn’t actually have that much to do with Garfield, or appropriation, but was really just about the platform. The excitement from @garfields_i_found_on_ebay is in the total lack of beauty or nuance in any of the photographs on the feed. eBay is a holdover from an earlier form of internet. Its blunt, descriptive, often ugly photographs cudgel the synapses when slotted in between the hyper-aestheticized imagery of the present moment.

Instagram is a corrosive platform that I enjoy daily in the only appropriate way, i.e., with pathological fervor and self-resentment. The longer I stay there, the more I become convinced that the best way to engage is to mutilate the feed. We should post slow videos that go nowhere. Deadpan pictures with no connotations, made from the deepest depths of boredom, incapable of generating any fear of missing out. Memes do something parallel to this, I think, and their anonymity allows them to become communal property. But the democracy of memes does little to overpower the rest of the feed and the focused negative emotional impact of the influencer, of the friend on vacation, the successful artist or ex-love. The algorithm may fight us, but only by pushing the medium as deep as we can into pure meaninglessness can we triumph over the capitalistic diseases of alienation and self-doubt!

A disrupted feed has the potential to transmogrify the social media platform most plagued by obsessive rise-and-grinders into something closer to a crowdsourced exquisite corpse whose unlimited participants collectively acknowledge the strangeness of the day—a truly ecstatic possibility. It seems difficult to achieve—and posters must find their own ways through—but it is attainable. My feed is not there yet, because I like my friends and will not tell them what to post. But maybe they will read this. Maybe they will be the only ones who read this. Hi, friends.