I’ve been struggling for a while to find the right type of social media for my type of misanthropy. Facebook just seems like a big scam factory, X is full of blue-tick racists who really hate Meghan Markle, TikTok is for young people, and Bluesky seems OK for self-identified bleeding heart liberals but I think everyone there is probably sad at the moment. The only option then, for stalking people I worked with when I was 19, and watching videos of drunk people driving their golf carts into lakes, is Instagram. This is a shame because these days, Instagram is weird. Remember in 2012 when Instagram was still a teeny tiny baby app and users earnestly took pictures of coffees and restaurant food on their phones and then just as earnestly put a filter on their “art” and shared it with their friends? Well, these days the whole platform has become oddly, depressingly, professionalised. The latte art has been replaced by sharply dressed dudes harping on about their midlife ADHD diagnoses to sell cryptocurrency and MAGA-adjacent life coaches with high production value videos trying to sign people up to “inspired” courses (I guess you learn how to be a bad person in an “inspired” way?). All of that is pretty gross. But the thing that bugs me the most is that the amateur shots of yore have gone. In their place are professional photoshoots of ordinary people. That’s right. The app that was designed so that regular folk could make mundane pictures slightly prettier is now just a bunch of glossy, stylised, actually ridiculous professional photographs of people who are not famous. Remember, my Millennial friends, when getting a professional photograph taken was a special event? It would happen once, possibly twice, during the course of childhood. One second you and your siblings would be fused with the couch and watching your fifth straight episode of The Simpsons, and then suddenly you were deposited in front of some dark grey background, with alien-abduction lights blinding you and some guy calling you “girlie” and screaming at you to smile. The best of the resulting photographs would thereafter be the enduring record of your childhood – an image of you, gap-toothed and sugar-glazed – that would be framed and displayed not just at your house but also at both sets of grandparents’ homes, to remain there until you were surpassed in cuteness by the next generation.