#6 - On "I love your insta game" and how weird that can be

Performing your authentic self is tough already. Online, it's the tenth circle of hell.

The main dish..

Have you come across tiktok/reels that go, “The most chronically online take I saw this week..” and it’s someone who claims that encouraging aspiring parents to be financially independent before having a child is eugenicist? These reels/tiktoks are hilarious because they acknowledge a real disconnect between the escalations we raise online and the issues in the real world.

Of course, when I assert something like this, I spiral into - What is The Real World? Why do I claim that the digital world is not part of my full reality when my iPhone can vouch that I spend 4 hours and 48 minutes on it - giving it 20% of my every day. How then can I make meaning of the world without considering the weight the internet takes up in my life? Perhaps that’s the description of the problem phrased as a question. You can read about the issues with our internet diet here, here and here but, really, just study the number of phone pick-ups you make in an hour, wonder what they really did for you, and then ask yourself if you have a problem.¹

I came of age online. I started actively using social media in 2009 with Orkut, Hi5 and the likes and have voraciously consumed it ever since. Over the past few years, there’s been a shift in what the internet has felt like. Earlier, I had an online presence. Today, the online commands a significant space in my offline life. As I walked my dog a few evenings ago, my mind immediately crafted up a potential reel to the simple views on my walk. It made me wonder if I exist on Instagram as content and my actual (real) social life serves to mirror that curation. Perhaps this is an exaggeration of slight magnitude - so you can add as much salt to moderate this assertion - but it does feel that way sometimes.

And, I’m not a ‘hater’. I love and appreciate all the wonderful things social media brings into my life. I have 574 posts on Instagram (with my last post being yesterday). I’m one of those people that have a curation of Instagram story highlights (the levels on this woman, right?!). I ‘have a close friends’ but fail to develop a consistent criteria for what goes to which audience. I even updated my Facebook last month after what felt like a century.² I am chronically online. Instagram helps me stay connected with my widely spread out network of friends without exerting too much effort. Whatsapp would occupy the top rank if I made a #What’sInMyBag video because that’s where my mom receives my 8 hour live location, Uber link, friends’ contact details along with hourly updates about my well-being when I step out of the house. I develop most of my opinions on pop culture through Diet Sabya or by googling things like “hbo girls atlantic review” / “mad men don draper hot but self sabotage making charm fade away”. I tolerate hour long cab rides because of my well-prepared podcast playlist and I exchange mind-bending article links and gossipy screenshots across multiple group chats with friends. I’m also getting into the soft and stupid drama of sending-memes/reels-as-a-way-of-flirting.³ Surely I spend all this time and effort on these apps because they bring my some joy, right?

None of this is to establish my credentials so I can go on to claim how ‘social media is ruining our lives’. I mean, it kinda is, but (I know) I’m not the first person on the internet to come to that realization. It’s to underline the kind of performativity that’s changing on and because of the internet. I began by saying that we used to have an online presence, the persona we took on the internet, which was different from who we really were, i.e. in our real lives. Some people had a curated archive of vacation photos, work achievements and warm celebrations with family and friends. Others curated a niche to capture interests they shared uniquely online - a movie genre, fitness, cooking, unhinged memes, and so on. But now, the online persona has come to occupy a life-sized presence in our offline lives. How did this shift happen?

First came Stories. It felt as if all of internet went through an #AuthenticityWreckoning™ over (what felt like overnight but was really) the last few years. Everyone wanted to post their ‘full selves’ online. A parody of this is the influencer posting a make-up free selfie of her ‘natural’ skin which costs a monthly USD 1,000 to maintain. You can see different iterations of this in any content creator’s Instagram - they aren’t just fashion or fitness or cooking influencers. They must also share well-crafted snippets of the mundane parts of their life to be accepted by their audience. We need content about their friendships, love lives, political opinions, bad days, insecurities, and more. Everything is up for views as long but, please, be sure to get the aesthetic right.

Then, TikTok happened. And with that, every single second of our life got a soundtrack. You can now romanticize literally anything from making toast, taking a shower, wearing clothes, journaling, meditating, visiting a monument, drinking coffee, .. and, of course, driving in the car. Earlier, we reserved our phone cameras for a special moment. Now, every moment experienced is special because I’m romanticizing my life with help from easy-to-make-and-mimic reel formats. Our phone cameras and the stories follow us.. to every single moment. A flock of pigeons passed my window before sunset yesterday and, despite my hatred for these perpetually sex-ing birds, I thought, “How beautiful. Do they always find each other before flying out? Is it a common crew every day or anyone goes?” Before I could explore any of that, another instinctive thought followed - “Should’ve captured that and added some slow Rajasthani music to go with it for my Instagram”.⁴

Performativity itself isn’t new. For centuries, we have performed gender to be accepted into civil society and win favour with the powerful. We also perform when we are in front of our bosses at the workplace, on a first date we want to succeed, or a friend we want to win over. All performativity is not equal. Some is harmless - if not helpful - ‘fake it till you make it’ performance where you externally act as if you were the ideal person you desire to be. If you struggle to manage your temper, it’s okay to perform as a well-tempered person in social situations. A lot of performativity is harmful, such as when men are expected to perform toughness and only express their sorrow and grief in the form of anger. Some performativity is also (super) cringe, such as when aspirational allies to a movement go on to make ostentatious gestures to signal their support. Dominant culture has always delineated the performance it expects from desirable contestants. To win, you must conform.

What do we win when we perform well online? You spend some time on any social media platform; You get hooked to the cycle of finding worthy content (For You); you engage by sharing it with friends, posting your own content, and repeating that cycle a few billion times. This gives the platform insights about your - and your groups’ - buying preferences. But what does this give you? Us? I don’t mean that we are well connected, etc etc. We covered that above - it’s great. I mean, what does our performance get us? When I shave my body hair to look more feminine, diet myself into a smaller body and an eating disorder, restraint my feminism to fit likability moulds, etc. I do gain some thing - I gain favor and status within patriarchy. I can bitch about patriarchy all I want but, within its lose-lose nexus, the status it bestows on me for performing feminity is real. Marriage, for example, has offered social, economic and physical mobility to many women even as it has restrained them into a patriarchal bind of endless unpaid labour. What do I gain from having a “strong Instagram game” in concrete terms?

There’s a lot of talk about blending our authentic selves into our online persona; ‘brand image’ or something. But, can I really learn who I am when the internet has already decided for me? The nudge-to-buy content we consume (and are suggested) is constantly categorizing us into a (very) accurate consumer segment. To perform your authentic self online is challenging when you can simply choose from a premix of online personas that are close enough to your ‘vibe’ and help you ‘stay relevant’ in whatever sense that word appeals to your usage of the internet. All this reversion to the average (mean) on the internet is then coupled with the internets’ perpetual presence in our constantly-diminishing-offline lives. This leaves us unable to even imagine ourselves as separate from who the internet tells us we are. Because self-discovery requires pause, reflection and reckoning. This work rests on our ability to resist the urge to immediately numb the present discomfort with some scrolling⁵. It is saying something grand like, “This is uncomfortable and I have to sit in it long enough to see what lies under this feeling and beyond.” We need to do some offline work to find out who we are, what we want, who we desire, and what we make before we take it online. Otherwise, I fear what will remain of us are marketable personas with little space to accommodate and, more essentially, understand the fullness and the complexity of our real personhood.

The sides..

Things I loved:

• The album 2030 by Gone Gone Beyond. I enjoyed this a bit more because it felt like having my friend, Ankita, loudly type on her laptop while simultaneously calming herself down by singing in my blue room. The first song, Canyons, is what she can sound like sometimes. Other times, she sounds drinking a spiced hot toddy by the fireside at a terrace in December Delhi.

• Par chanaa de by Noori and Shilpa Rao. I was listening to this song in the car with my mom when she told me that this is about Heer-Ranjha, the Punjabi folk lore about an inter-caste love affair that led to a deeply tragic honor killing of Heer. There are many versions to this folklore but here’s what I inherited. At night, she would swim through the river Chenab to meet her lover, Ranjha. Her parents protested against their affair given his caste but she persisted. Finally, they replaced her clay pot with one made of sand, which quickly dissolved when she took it in the river to assist with her swimming. She drowned. The lyrics to this song are beautifully descriptive and they made my eyes well up. ‘Adhiyal’ is a word often used for disobedient girls.

  Couple’s therapy: The premise is in the name - couples come in to weeks of therapy with each other and we get a glimpse into their sessions and a slight peep into their lives. It is so good. I’m two seasons in and I have written notes from this show. I am intrusively curious about how people fight. I want to know what you say to hurt someone; how your eyes roll when you listen to someone else’s narrative about an experience you both shared; whether you cry or throw a fit when you have to own up to your part of the fight.. i want to know everything from the sideline. In an episode, someone literally said that they withstood the afternoon heat without the AC so their relationship could be better. The show also feels to be in forever winter. It reminds me of how I’m always dressed to prevent myself from freezing during the winters but am never comfortable. Anyway, this show was made for me and I loved it so much.

• the Physicals vs the Virtuals. Lyons’s description of a thinking class that is always online vs a working class that builds the functional world felt important to me. The article discusses the culture backing the truckers moment in Canada and is worth a slow reading.

  The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.

  The second class is different.. This group is the “thinking classes”.. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents that can themselves act in the physical world – a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this, they build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it.

• John Lennon’s Love, whose lyrics are so simple, so soft, so perfect.

  Love is real, real is love. Love is feeling, feeling love. Love is wanting to be loved. Love is touch. Touch is love. Love is reaching, reaching love. Love is asking to be loved. Love is you, you and me. Love is knowing we can be. Love is free, free is love. Love is living, living love. Love is needing to be loved.

  

• A special shout down to Moving in With Malaika. Not to be a petty bitch but I could not bare it for longer than 20 minutes. It gave me no entertainment, no gossip and way too many ads.

  Things I am ??? about:

• What’s in season? Noting the irony - Is there an online guide to what fruits and vegetables are in season depending on the different parts of India? I’m confused as to when exactly we started growing strawberries/blueberries in India. I am also deeply confused by how papaya is still rampantly selling even though it’s supposed to be a summer fruit. I get it, everything is four seasons now but, still, some guidance, please. What fruits and veggies are in season and recommended to buy?

  Questionnable screenshots

• From my notes app: I mean this statement 80%. I would take out ‘never possible’ to instead say ‘rare and requires deliberate care and attention’

• Everyday on the internet i practice the art of realizing no thought or feeling i’ve ever experienced is original

• For when you need a reminder: Wait. Longer than that. even longer than that.

Thank you for making it this far. If you liked this, let me know. If you have ✨Thoughts✨, let me know. If it didn’t impress you, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.

~

Clasping a warm mug with both my hands,

Uno B.

1. May be, you don’t! You’re better than me! Great! Skip this ramble.

2. Even I don’t know why I did that.. it’s okay. I stayed long enough to receive some creepy messages and that was enough to leave for another eon. #VanvasVibes

3. Not a fan of that. Will men do anything except put in the effort to actually talk to you and make you feel special? Why do I need one more person sending me funny things? Do better, please.

4. Yes, I cringe at admitting it too.

5. or a cigarette, or cake..