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Instagram was one of the first apps to fully exploit our relationship with our phones, compelling us to experience life through a camera for the reward of digital validation.
Inside and outside Facebook, the story of Instagram is ultimately about the intersection of capitalism and ego—about how far people will go to protect what they built and to appear successful.
At Instagram’s massive scale, that 0.00603 percent equates to more than 6 million Insta-celebrities, a majority of them rising to fame through the app itself. For a sense of scale, consider that millions of people and brands have more Instagram followers than the New York Times has subscribers. Marketing through these people, who are basically running personal media companies through tastemaking, storytelling, and entertaining, is now a multibillion-dollar industry.
They made a tool that was much simpler and faster to use than anyone else’s, taking up less of users’ time as they were out living the experiences Instagram wanted them to capture.
Beyond the product’s mechanics, the founders excelled in playing off the strengths of other people and other companies.
Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people feel. The filters made reality look like art. And then, in cataloging that art, people would start to think about their lives differently, and themselves differently, and their place in society differently.
But pretending things were going more smoothly than they actually were was part of the job of being a startup CEO. Everyone needed to think you were on the right track. His posturing was perhaps analogous to the modern pressure Instagram would introduce—the pressure to post only the best photos, making life seem more perfect than it actually was.
Despite efforts to market Instagram through its model users, the company still didn’t publicly approve of them accepting money to promote products.
As the Instagram user guidelines stated, in a tone as if talking to a child: “When you engage in self-promotional behavior of any kind on Instagram, it makes people who have shared that moment with you feel sad inside.… We ask that you keep your interactions on Instagram meaningful and genuine.”
National Geographic wrote about how Instagram was changing travel: visits to Trolltunga, a photogenic cliff in Norway, increased from 500 a year in 2009 to 40,000 a year in 2014. “What photos of this iconic vista don’t reveal is the long line of hikers weaving around the rocky terrain each morning, all waiting for their chance to capture their version of the Instagram-famous shot,” the magazine wrote.
“The more you give up who you are to be liked by other people, it’s a formula for chipping away at your soul. You become a product of what everyone else wants, and not who you’re supposed to be.”
