The founders of Instagram stepped down last week. They said they’re leaving to start the next new thing that inspires them that the world needs. It made me think…did the world NEED Instagram? Has it made the world better? Do we all need photos of each other’s every move? And spam hair weave pages?… I take time away from posting and people tell me I should post more. I feel disconnected from y’all even though I can go to your feeds at any time and see you, and what you’re wearing, and what you’re eating. Meanwhile real life gets dope, and riveting, and sometimes I just don’t want to sit still and scroll.

Now the algorithm penalizes you if you don’t post often enough. This is to condition us to always be posting. Because it’s “user-generated content”… and they know the content is the real product.

Here we have a whole $100-billion dollar platform where the billions of users who keep it stocked with content don’t get to share in any of its profits.

We work for Instagram. All of us. And we don’t have a say in how it works.

The content is created by us and we’ve made these already privileged guys richer than we can ever imagine—so rich that they can comfortably leave and start something new that’ll make them even richer. Probably something that’ll similarly feed our desire for attention while making us feel starved for it at the same damn time. Something they’ll make us think they did us a favor by creating. Or maybe it’ll be something to cure Instagram addiction.

But anyway, I’m rambing. Again. I can’t guarantee that I’ll post more, but good morning.